AMERICAS CHANGING WORLD:

An Anthology of American Literature, History, and Culture

Dr. Don Adams
Professor of English, Florida Atlantic University
Visiting Fulbright Scholar, HCMC University of Education
Ms. Nguyen Thi Hieu Thien
Lecturer of English, HCMC University of Education
Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Vu
Lecturer of English, HCMC University of Education

Contents
General Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 4
Chapter 1: American Colonial Origins ..................................................................................................... 6
Native Americans ................................................................................................................................... 6
The Puritans and Jonathan Edwards ...................................................................................................... 6
The Quakers and Benjamin Franklin ..................................................................................................... 7
What is an American? and Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur ................................................ 7
The Brutal Expansion of the Frontier and Davy Crockett .................................................................... 7
JONATHAN EDWARDS (1703-1758) ................................................................................................. 9
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790) ............................................................................................... 11
MICHEL-GUILLAUME JEAN DE CREVECOEUR (1735-1813) .................................................... 13
DAVY CROCKETT (1786-1836) ........................................................................................................ 15
Chapter 2: The Founding of the Nation .................................................................................................. 18
The American Colonies ....................................................................................................................... 18
The Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War ......................................................... 18
The U. S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights ...................................................................................... 19
Benjamin Franklins Troubling Prophecy ........................................................................................... 19
George Washingtons Cautious Advice .............................................................................................. 19
Americas Early Democracy In Retrospect......................................................................................... 20
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (1776) ........................................................................ 21
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790) ................................................................................................ 23
THE BILL OF RIGHTS (1791) ............................................................................................................ 24
GEORGE WASHINGTON (1732-1799) ............................................................................................. 26
HENRY ADAMS (1838-1918) ............................................................................................................ 29
Chapter 3: Early Explorations Into American Identity and Culture ...................................................... 34
D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930) ......................................................................................................... 36
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882) ........................................................................................ 41
HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862) .......................................................................................... 43
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864) ........................................................................................ 46
HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891) ................................................................................................... 55
WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892) ......................................................................................................... 81
Chapter 4: The American Civil War and Its Aftermath ......................................................................... 88
Background of the American Civil War .............................................................................................. 88
ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-1865)................................................................................................... 91
MARY BOYKIN CHESTNUT (1823-1886) ....................................................................................... 95
WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892) ......................................................................................................... 97
Chapter 5: Loners, Prisoners, and Outsiders in American Literature and Culture ............................. 103
Post-Civil War American Culture and Society ................................................................................. 103
EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886) .................................................................................................... 106
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935) ............................................................................. 110
A Study in Temperament by Willa Cather ................................................................................... 127
SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876-1941) .......................................................................................... 139
THE STRENGTH OF GOD ........................................................................................................... 140
GEORGE SANTAYANA (1863-1952) ............................................................................................. 145
Chapter 6: America Comes of Age and Looks Backwards ................................................................. 148
America Enters the Modern World ................................................................................................... 148
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961) .............................................................................................. 150
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940) ............................................................................................. 158
WILLIAM FAULKNER (1879-1962) ............................................................................................... 167
T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965) ................................................................................................................... 175
ROBERT FROST (1874-1963) .......................................................................................................... 180
Chapter 7: Changing American Identities ............................................................................................ 183
Changes in the Nature of the American Individual .......................................................................... 183
PAUL BOWLES (1910- ) .................................................................................................................. 186
JAMES PURDY (1923- ) ................................................................................................................... 204
FLANNERY OCONNOR (1925-1964) ............................................................................................ 209
JANE BOWLES (1917-1973) ............................................................................................................ 229
Chapter 8: Multiculturalism and Social Change in America ............................................................... 239
Americas Present-Centered Society ................................................................................................ 239
JOHN STEINBECK (1902-1968) ...................................................................................................... 242
TONI MORRISON (1931- ) ............................................................................................................... 243
GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917-2000) ............................................................................................ 249
W. D. EHRHART (1948- ) ................................................................................................................. 252
GISH JEN (1955- ) ............................................................................................................................. 257
BERNARD MALAMUD (1914-1986) .............................................................................................. 266
BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1940- ) .................................................................................................... 283
Chapter 9: Challenges for the Future ................................................................................................... 290
America as a Test Society ................................................................................................................. 290
NEIL POSTMAN (1931-2003) .......................................................................................................... 292
RACHEL CARSON (1907-1964) ...................................................................................................... 303



General Introduction

The United States of America has become such a force in the world for both good and bad,
depending on ones point of view, and the issue at hand that it is easy to overlook, or to forget, its
strange and special history that which makes it a unique and crucial country and culture in the
modern world.

The founding of America as a nation was in many respects one of the culminating events of the
European Renaissance and Enlightenment, that remarkable flowering of science, learning, and art
that profoundly influenced and determined the modern world we live in today. If one had to sum up
the Enlightenment in one idea, it might be the freedom of the individual to pursue his creative
thought, unhindered by societal restriction and religious superstition. This focus on the freedom of
the individual in thought and art led inevitably to the idea of democracy in government, as enshrined
by Americas Founding Fathers in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

Perhaps no American writer has been so inspired by the democratic ideal as the 19th Century poet
Walt Whitman. In his utopian essay, Democratic Vistas, he gave a visionary rationale for a
democratic form of government:
It is not that democracy is of exhaustive account, in
itself. Perhaps, indeed, it is, (like Nature,) of no account
in itself. It is that, as we see, it is the best, perhaps only,
fit and full means, formulater, general caller-forth,
trainer, for the million, not for grand material
personalities only, but for immortal souls.
Even after 150 years, Whitmans idealistic optimism is infectious.

But America was also the destination of Europeans seeking to escape the new freedoms of thought
prompted and enabled by the Enlightenment, as English novelist and critic D. H. Lawrence explains
in his seminal essay on the American spirit of place. Americas original Puritan settlers, Lawrence
contends, left Europe in an act of revulsion against the growing liberties of culture and society, and
opted, instead, for the near tyranny of life in a narrow theocracy on the edge of a hostile wilderness.
The Puritans were thus the first in a long series of emigrant runaways to America:
Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the
reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom
till you find something you really positively want to be.
And people in America have always been shouting about
the things they are not.
American history, literature, culture, society, politics, and psychology are all enmeshed in these
opposing attitudes regarding freedom and democracy the one optimistic and utopian, and the other
skeptical and isolationist.

This ongoing dispute is often figured within the drama of the relationship between the individual and
society a theme with which American literature and culture is obsessed. No other modern society
has placed such primacy on the ideal of the autonomous individual which is famously encapsulated
in Ralph Waldo Emersons essay, Self-Reliance, in which he urges his readers to be non-
conformists in thought, religion, and society. In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau applied
Emersons non-conformist ideal to a particular practical relation the duty of the citizen to the
government. Thoreau concluded that all government is a form of insult to the dignity of the
individual, and that the more advanced a society is, the less its government will interfere in the lives
of its citizens. Many (if not most) candidates for high office in America today express a similar
sentiment.

For its part, American literature is full of individuals suffering from societal interference and
oppression. Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson were both masters of this theme. A related
thematic concern is the critique of marriage and the family as inhibitions to the freedom and growth
of the autonomous individual, as explored in Charlotte Perkins Gillmans early feminist story, The
Yellow Wall-Paper, and in Paul Bowles The Frozen Fields.

Whitman frankly predicted that, as individuals grew in completeness and inter-relatedness, the family
as a dominant societal structure would inevitably diminish in power and importance as would all
innately divisive tribal, ethnic, and even national allegiances. He thus foresaw the emerging
multicultural American identity endorsed by more recent writers like Gish Jen and Bharati
Mukherjee.

Whitman also predicted that the individual of the future would participate in an altered and improved
relationship with the natural world, which will no longer be seen as a hostile adversary to human
civilization and as a passive subject for human exploitation (this separate Nature, so unnatural), but
as an elaborate and complex living organism that includes ourselves. In this prediction, he
anticipated later writers concerned with re-envisioning the human relation to nature, such as the New
England poet Robert Frost, and Rachel Carson, a passionate spokesperson for the modern
environmental movement.

Lawrence predicted that the open road of Americas future would lead either to Whitmans
prophesied world of self-enhanced and mutually-esteeming individuals living in a humanized and
dignified natural environment, or else it would lead to yet another dead-end in the progress of history
which is a litany of such failures, punctuated by the occasional enlivening and redeeming success story.

Chapter 1: American Colonial Origins

Native Americans

The original inhabitants of America are believed to have arrived from Asia over an ice-bridge during
one of the periodic episodes of global climatic cool-down. There is wide disagreement as to the size
of the indigenous Native American, or Indian, population at the time of the arrival of the first
European settlers to gain a permanent foothold on the continent in the early 17
th
Century. What is
certain is that the indigenous population was rapidly and vastly depleted partially as a result of
continual warfare with, and extermination by, the fast-encroaching European settlers but largely
due to the illnesses brought by these settlers to which the Native Americans had little or no immune
defenses.

As a result, much of Native American culture and civilization had already disappeared by the time
that European settlers content in their presumed permanency began to express an interest in
exploring and preserving it. As Native American peoples had developed no written languages of
their own, and as they tended to live in mobile, improvised settlements which, when abandoned,
quickly reverted to wilderness (if not overbuilt by European arrivals), much of Native American
history and culture has been seemingly irretrievably lost.

Today much work is being conducted in attempting to find and salvage what is possible of pre-
European American civilization. For all intents and purposes, however, the history of America as a
modern-world place and nation begins with the English Virginia and Puritan settlements of the early
17
th
Century.


The Puritans and Jonathan Edwards

The Puritans were a religious sect from England who determined to live in an isolated environment in
which they could practice their severe and rigid religion unhindered by the government and
unaffected by the rapid social and intellectual changes that began in Europe with the Italian
Renaissance and Protestant Reformation, and were to lead eventually to the scientific revolution and
the modern world. The early Puritan settlers were both remarkably courageous and incredibly
narrow-minded. Their contradictory legacy of great practical achievement and advancement, in the
midst of an imaginative and intellectual impoverishment and intolerance, remains a troubling aspect
of American character and culture to this day.

At their best, the Puritans distrust of the outer world of liberal and advanced society and culture
resulted in a deep psychological introspection a relentless curiosity and analysis of the inner self, in
its motives and evasions which is evident in Jonathan Edwards Diary entries included in this
section.

The Quakers and Benjamin Franklin

Another English religious sect to settle early America was the Quakers of whom the best known
was to be Benjamin Franklin. The Quakers were less suspicious of society than the Puritans, and
more interested in providing a positive role-model for others in their practice of pacifism, tolerance,
and social improvement. Franklin himself was a remarkable figure who excelled equally as a
businessman, author, scientist, diplomat, and politician. He was the most famous of early Americans
later to be eclipsed in notoriety only by George Washington and he was in almost every respect
an accomplished man of the world.

The practical, common-sensical advice Franklin offered to the readers of his immensely popular Poor
Richards Almanac stands in sharp contrast to the inward-looking self-analysis of Edwards Diary.
Edwards and Franklin are often understood to be representatives and progenitors of opposing aspects
of American character and culture, which are explored in detail by later commentators included in
this anthology, such as Henry Adams, Walt Whitman, and George Santayana.

What is an American? and Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur

Not all of the early settlers to America were members of religious sects. As settlement increased, the
typical immigrant tended to come for the opportunities of social and economic improvement
available in the New World, as both North and South America were referred to in Europe. In his
popular book, Letters of an American Farmer, Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur gives a lively
sketch of these American settlers of the 17
th
and 18
th
Centuries, contrasting the broad and open social
and economic opportunities available to them in America with the typical lack of mobility and
opportunity for advancement in the rigid, class-bound, late-feudal societies of Europe.

The Brutal Expansion of the Frontier and Davy Crockett

Of course such mobility and room for advancement in the New World came at a cost, often in terms
of brutal clashes with the indigenous populations that were being displaced and destroyed. The
inherent violence of communal and psychic life in a society that was built upon the suppression and
extermination of a lands previous inhabitants is evident in the selection included from the
Autobiography of the famous frontiersman Davy Crockett. His jaunty, humorous prose style cannot
entirely eradicate the awfulness of his violent narrative.

American society and culture, which so often originated in violence and brutality, remains even today
remarkably violent and unsettled in comparison to wealthy societies elsewhere. It is one of the most
troubling aspects of Americas rich and troubled history, and a theme that will recur throughout many
of the selections in this anthology.



JONATHAN EDWARDS (1703-1758)

Introduction

Jonathan Edwards was the foremost Puritan minister of his day, and one of Americas most original
religious thinkers. Many religiously-inclined Americans traditionally have kept diaries in which they
record, analyze, and critique their behavior and emotions according to their religious beliefs. The
excerpt from the diary below written when Edwards was just 21-years-old indicates the serious,
earnest, and self-critical nature of his character.

Edwards reproof of his physical desires and appetites, his focus on being a good person, and his
concern with the state of his soul at the time of his death, are all typical of the Puritan brand of religion
and of Christianity in general, to some extent which places great emphasis on the afterlife. This
is the world, or state, that Christians believe the individual soul enters after death, in which one is
punished and rewarded according to ones behavior and beliefs when alive.

Most of Americas earliest European settlers, of whom Edwards was a descendent, were extremely
religious people. But even today, most Americans consider themselves to be religious far more
so, for example, than in most European countries. Although there are many religions practiced by
Americans, and the Constitution promises freedom of religion and prohibits the adoption of a
government-sponsored belief system, the vast majority of U. S. citizens identify themselves as
Christians and say that they believe in God and in an afterlife for the human soul. The culture and
society (and even the legal system to some extent) in many ways reflect these religious beliefs and
adherences.


From Jonathan Edwards Diary, 1924

Monday, Feb. 3. Let every thing have the value now which it will have on a sick bed: and frequently,
in my pursuits of whatever kind, let this question come into my mind, "How much shall I value this,
on my death-bed?"

Wednesday, Feb. 5. I have not, in times past, in my prayers, enough insisted on the glorifying of God
in the world, on the advancement of the kingdom of Christ, the-prosperity of the Church and the good
of man.

Thursday, Feb. 6. More convinced than ever, of the usefulness of free, religious conversation, I find
by conversing on Natural Philosophy [religion], that I gain knowledge abundantly faster, and see the
reasons of things much more clearly than in private study; wherefore, earnestly to seek, at all times,
for religious conversation; for those, with whom I can, at all times, with profit and delight, and with
freedom, so converse.

Saturday night, Feb, 15. I find that when eating, I cannot, be convinced in the time of it, that if I
should eat more, I should exceed the bounds of strict temperance, though I have had the experience
of two years of the like; and yet, as soon as I have done, in three minutes I am convinced of it. But
yet, when I eat again, and remember it, still, while eating, I am fully convinced that I have not eaten
what is but for nature, nor can I be convinced that my appetite and feeling is as it was before. It
seems to me that I shall be somewhat faint if I leave off then; but when I have finished, I am
convinced again, and so it is from time to! time.I have observed that more really seems to be truth,
when it makes for my interest, or is, in other respects, according to my inclination, than it seems, if it
be otherwise; and it seems to me, that the words in which I express it are more than the thing will
properly bear.

Tuesday, Feb. 18. Resolved, To act with sweetness and benevolence in all bodily dispositions,
sick or well, at ease or in pain, sleepy or watchful, and not to suffer discomposure of body to
discompose my mind.

Saturday, Feb. 22. I observe that there are some evil habits, which do increase and grow stronger,
even in some good people, as they grow older; habits that much obscure the beauty of Christianity.
By this means, old Christians are very commonly, in some respects, more unreasonable than those
who are young. I am afraid of contracting such habits, particularly of grudging to give, and to do, and
of procrastinating.

Sabbath, Feb. 23. If I act according to my resolution, I shall desire riches no otherwise, than as they
are helpful to religion.

Saturday night, June 6. This week has been a Very remarkable week with me, with respect to
despondencies, fears, perplexities, multitudes of cares, and distraction of mind. I have now,
abundant reason to be convinced, of the troublesomeness and vexation of the world, and that it never
will be another world.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790)

Introduction

Benjamin Franklin was an American original. He scientific experiments alone which included the
discovery and proof that lighting is a form of electricity would make him a remembered figure. But
he also was Revolutionary Americas foremost diplomat and a very successful printer and author.

For many years he wrote and published an annual Almanac, which is a book chiefly designed to
give farmers useful information regarding the cycles of weather to be expected in the coming year,
together with advice for the most opportune dates for planting various crops. But almanacs also
included information regarding the lunar cycles and stellar positions, as well as general-advice
sections and humorous and instructive stories and anecdotes.

Poor Richard, the pseudonym under which Franklin wrote and published his almanacs, was fond of
giving his readers common-sense advice regarding the best ways for achieving and maintaining
health, wealth, happiness, and wisdom. In the selection below, Franklin (as Poor Richard) recalls a
situation in which, while waiting with others for a market to open, he overheard a conversation in
which an old man responds to a question regarding the difficult payment of new government taxes by
quoting Poor Richards advice to the effect that we are all taxed far more by our laziness and waste
of time than by any government.

The general sentiment of the old mans speech, that our happiness is more dependent upon our
individual initiative than upon our general circumstances, is indicative both of the overall optimism of
early and later immigrants to America, and of the radical individualism of American character and
ideals. Belief in the primary freedom and self-responsibility of the individual, as opposed to the
collective welfare of the community, remains a major component of American character and culture
to this day, and is a theme that will recur in other selections in this anthology.


The way to wealth: Preface to Poor Richard Improved (1758)

Courteousous Reader:

I have heard that nothing gives an Author so great Pleasure, as to his Works respectfully quoted by
other learned Authors. This Pleasure I have seldom enjoyed; for though I have been, if I may say it
without Vanity, an eminent Author of Almanacs annually now a full Quarter of a Century, my
Brother Authors in the same Way, for what Reason I know not, have ever been very sparing in their
Applauses, and no other Author has taken the least Notice of me, so that did not my writings produce
me some solid Pudding [money], the great Deficiency of Praise would have quite discouraged me.

I concluded at length, that the People were the best Judges of my Merit; for they buy my Works; and
besides, in my Rambles, where I not personally known, I have frequently heard one or other of my
Adages repeated, with, as Poor Richard says, at the End of it; this gave me some Satisfaction, as it
showed not only that my Instructions were regarded, but discovered likewise some Respect for my
Authority; I own, that to encourage the Practice of remembering and repeating those wise Sentences,
I have sometimes quoted myself with great Gravity.

Judge, then how much I must have been gratified by an Incident I am going to relate to you. I stopped
my Horse lately where a great Number of People were collected at a Vendue of Merchant Goods [a
large market]. The Hour of Sale not being come, they were conversing on the Badness of the Times,
and one of the Company calld to a plain clean old Man, with white Locks, "Pray, Father Abraham,
what think you of the Times? Won't these heavy Taxes quite ruin the Country? How shall we be ever
able to pay them? What would you advise us to [do]?" Father Abraham stood up, and replied, "If
you'd have my Advice, I'll give it you in short, A Word to the Wise is enough, and many Words won't
fill a Bushel, as Poor Richard says." They joined in desiring him to speak his Mind, gathering round
him, he proceeded as follows;

"Friends," says he, and Neighbors, "the Taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the
Government were the only Ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have
many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our Idleness,
three times as much by our Pride, and four times as much by our Folly; and from these Taxes the
Commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an Abatement. However let us hearken to good
Advice, and something may be done for us; God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard
says, in his Almanac of 1733.

It would be thought a hard Government that should tax its People one-tenth Part of their Time, to be
employed in its Service. But Idleness taxes many of us much more, if we reckon all that is spent in
absolute Sloth, or doing of nothing, with that which is spent in idle Employment or Amusements, that
amount to nothing. Sloth, by bringing on Diseases, absolutely shortens Life. Sloth, like Rust,
consumes faster than Labor wears; while the used Key is always bright, as Poor Richard says. But
dost thou love Life, then do not squander Time, for that's the stuff Life is made of, as Poor Richard
says. How much more than is necessary to we spend in sleep, forgetting that The sleeping Fox
catches no Poultry, and that There will be sleeping enough in the Grave, as Poor Richard says.

Thus the old Gentleman ended his Harangue. The People heard it, approved the Doctrine, and
immediately practiced the contrary, as if it had been a common Sermon; for the Vendue opened, and
they began to buy extravagantly, notwithstanding, his Cautions and their Fear of Taxes. I found the
good Man had thoroughly studied my Almanacs, and digested all I had dropt on these Topics during
the Course of Five and twenty Years. The frequent Mention he made of me must have tired any one
else, but my Vanity was wonderfully delighted with it, though I was conscious that not a tenth Part of
the Wisdom was my own, which he ascribed to me, but rather the Gleanings I had made of the Sense
of all Ages and Nations. However, I resolved to be the better for the Echo of it; and though I had at
first determined to buy Stuff for a new Coat, I went away resolved to wear my old One a little longer.
Reader, if thou wilt do the same, thy Profit will be as great as mine.


MICHEL-GUILLAUME JEAN DE CREVECOEUR (1735-1813)

Introduction

Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur was a cultured French immigrant to America who wrote a
widely influential book, Letters from an American Farmer, in which he dramatized the ideal of the
American immigrant as a courageous and noble creator of a new and improved social order. In the
passage below, he favorably contrasts the average independent, self-determined, and land-owning
American citizen with his impoverished, servant-like, class-bound counterpart in Europe.


What is an American?, from Letters from an American Farmer (1782)

In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have by some means met together, and in
consequence of various causes; to what purpose should they ask one another what countrymen they
are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who wanders about, who works and
starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury; can that man call
England or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him, whose fields
procured him no harvest, who met with nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws,
with jails and punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet? No!
urged by a variety of motives, here they came. Every thing has tended to regenerate them; new laws,
a new mode of living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe they were as so
many useless plants, wanting vegetative mould, and refreshing showers; they withered, and were
mowed down by want, hunger, and war; but now by the power of transplantation, like all other plants
they have taken root and flourished! Formerly they were not numbered in any civil lists of their
country, except in those of the poor; here they rank as citizens. By what invisible power has this
surprising metamorphosis been performed? By that of the laws and that of their industry. The laws,
the indulgent laws, protect them as they arrive, stamping on them the symbol of adoption; they
receive ample rewards for their labours; these accumulated rewards procure them lands; those lands
confer on them the title of freemen, and to that title every benefit is affixed which men can possibly
require. This is the great operation daily performed by our laws. From whence proceed these laws?
From our government. Whence the government? It is derived from the original genius and strong
desire of the people.

What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country where he had nothing? The
knowledge of the language, the love of a few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that
tied him: his country is now that which gives him land, bread, protection, and consequence: Ubi panis
ibi patria [where there is bread, that is the homeland], is the motto of all emigrants. What then is the
American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that
strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family
whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman,
and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who,
leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of
life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an
American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations
are melted into a new race of men, whose labours arid posterity will one day cause great changes in
the world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of
arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the east; they will finish the great circle.
The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest
systems of population which has ever appeared, and which will hereafter become distinct by the
power of the different climates they inhabit. The American ought therefore to love this country much
better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry
follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-
interest; can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children, who before in vain demanded of him
a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fields whence
exuberant crops are to arise to feed and to clothe them all; without any part being claimed, either by
a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. Here religion demands but little of him The
American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and
form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he
has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.-This is an American.

DAVY CROCKETT (1786-1836)

Introduction

Davy Crockett is one of a long series of historically real, but culturally mythologized and idealized
American frontiersmen those who pushed their way Westward from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
blazing a trail for other immigrant settlers to follow. That trail was frequently littered with destroyed
and abandoned Native American towns and settlements, and dead bodies of both parties a fact that
the myth of American settlement often tends to ignore, or else to celebrate in a historically prejudiced
story in which the Native American Indians are figured as heartless murderers of the righteous
immigrant settlers.

In the account below of a settlers raid on an Indian town, Crockett mixes the bravado of the conquering
hero with the realistic description of the appalled observer of human brutality and misery.


from Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of West Tennessee (1834)

I was living ten miles below Winchester when the Creek war commenced; and as military men are
making so much fuss in the world at this time, I must give an account of the part I took in the defense
of the country.

The Creek Indians had commenced their open hostilities by a most bloody butchery at Fort Mimms.
There had been no war among us for so long, that but few, who were not too old to bear arms, knew
any thing about the business. I, for one, had often thought about war, and had often heard it
described; and I did verily believe in my own mind, that I couldn't fight in that way at all; but my after
experience convinced me that this was all a notion. For when I heard of the mischief which was done
at the fort, I instantly felt like going, and I had none of the dread of dying that I expected to feel. In a
few days a general meeting of the militia was called for the purpose of raising volunteers; and when
the day arrived for that meeting, my wife, who had heard me say I meant to go to the war, began to
beg me not to turn out. She said she was a stranger in the parts where we lived, had no connections
living near her, and that she and our little children would be left in a lonesome and unhappy situation
if I went away. It was mighty hard to go against such arguments as these; but my countrymen had
been murdered, and I knew that the next thing would be, that the Indians would be scalping the
women and the children all about there, if we didn't put a stop to it. I reasoned the case with her as
well as I could, and told her, that if every man would wait till his wife got willing for him to go to war,
there would be no fighting done, until we would all be killed in our own houses; that I was as able to
go as any man in the world; and that I believed it was a duty I owed to my country. Whether she was
satisfied with this reasoning or not, she did not tell me; but seeing I was bent on it, all she did was to
cry a little, and turn about to her work. The truth is, my dander was up, and nothing but war could
bring it right again....

About eight hundred of the volunteers, and of that number I was one, were now sent back, crossing
the Tennessee river, and on through Huntsville, so as to cross the river again at another place, and to
get on the Indians in another direction. After we passed Huntsville, we struck on the river at the
Muscle Shoals, and at a place on them called Melton's Bluff. This river is here about two miles wide,
and a rough bottom; so much so, indeed, in many places, as to be dangerous; and in fording it this
time, we left several of the horses belonging to our men, with their feet fast in the crevices of the
rocks. The men, whose horses were thus left, went ahead on foot. We pushed on till we got to what
was called the Black Warrior's town, which stood near the very spot where Tuscaloosa now stands,
which is the seat of government for the state of Alabama.

This Indian town was a large one; but when we arrived we found the Indians had all left it. There was
a large field of corn standing out, and a pretty good supply in some cribs. There was also a fine
quantity of dried beans, which were very acceptable to us; and without delay we secured them as
well as the corn, and then burned the town to ashes; after which we left the place....

We then marched to a place, which we called Camp Wills; and here it was that Captain Cannon was
promoted to a colonel, and Colonel Coffee to a general. We then marched to the Ten Islands, on the
Coosa river, where we established a fort; and our spy companies were sent out. They soon made
prisoners of Bob Catala and his warriors, and, in a few days afterwards, we heard of some Indians in
a town about eight miles off. So we mounted our horses, and put out for that town, under the direction
of two friendly Creeks we had taken for pilots. We had also a Cherokee colonel, Dick Brown, and
some of his men with us. When we got near the town we divided; one of our pilots going with each
division. And so we passed on each side of the town, keeping near to it, until our lines met on the far
side. We then closed up at both ends, so as to surround it completely; and then we sent Captain
Hammond's company of rangers to bring on the affray. He had advanced near the town, when the
Indians saw him, and they raised the yell, and came running at him like so many red devils. The main
army was now formed in a hollow square around the town, and they pursued Hammond till they came
in reach of us. We then gave them a fire, and they returned it, and then ran back into their town. We
began to close on the town by making our files closer and closer, and the Indians soon saw they were
our property. So most of them wanted us to take them prisoners; and their squaws and all would run
and take hold of any of us they could, and give themselves up.

We took them all prisoners that came out to us in this way; but I saw some warriors run into a house,
until I counted forty-six of them. We pursued them until we got near the house, when we saw a
squaw sitting in the door, and she placed her feet against the bow she had in her hand, and then took
an arrow, and, raising her feet, she drew with all her might, and let fly at us, and she killed a man,
whose name, I believe, was Moore. He was a lieutenant, and his death so enraged us all, that she was
fired on, and had at least twenty balls blown through her. This was the first man I ever saw killed with
a bow and arrow. We now shot them like dogs; and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with
the forty-six warriors in it. I recollect seeing a boy who was shot down near the house. His arm and
thigh was broken, and he was so near the burning house that the grease was stewing out of him. In
this situation he was still trying to crawl along; but not a murmur escaped him, though he was only
about twelve years old. So sullen is the Indian, when his dander is up, that he had sooner die than
make a noise, or ask for quarters.

The number that we took prisoners, being added to the number we killed, amounted one hundred and
eighty-six; though I don't remember the exact number of either. We had five of our men killed. We
then returned to our camp, at which our fort was erected, and known by the name of Fort Strother. No
provisions had yet reached us, and we had now been for several days on half rations. However we
went back to our Indian town on the next day, when many of the carcasses of the Indians were still to
be seen. They looked very awful, for the burning had not entirely consumed them, but given them a
very terrible appearance, at least what remained of them. It was, somehow or other, found out that
the house had a potato cellar under it, and an immediate examination was made, for we were all as
hungry as wolves. We found a fine chance of potatoes in it, and hunger compelled us to eat them,
though I had a little rather not; if I could have helped it, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on
the day before had run down on them, and they looked like they had been stewed with fat meat. We
then again returned to the army, and remained there for several days almost starving, as all our beef
was gone. We commenced eating the beef-hides, and continued to eat every scrap we could lay our
hands on.
Chapter 2: The Founding of the Nation

The American Colonies

The early American Atlantic-coast settlements were eventually gathered together into a series of
thirteen colonies under English control. The entire North and South American continents were
colonized by the major European powers in the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries, as parts of Asia and Africa (as
well as Australia and the South Pacific) were to be colonized then and later.

Although under British sovereignty, the American colonies were populated by immigrants from
throughout Europe, particularly from England, Scotland, the Netherlands, France, and Germany.
New York City, for instance, was originally settled by the Dutch and named New Amsterdam.

The English government considered the colonies to be English soil, but it did not afford the American
colonists the same rights that English citizens enjoyed in the home country, and the colonists naturally
resented their second-class status. They particularly took umbrage at a series of taxes levied on the
colonies in particular, together with the fact that they were not allowed to elect representatives to
parliament. The Revolutionary War rallying cry became no taxation without representation.

The colonists also perceived the obvious fact that the natural wealth and possibilities for expansion in
America were far greater than in the relatively small and already crowded British Isles, and they did
not appreciate the fact that the English ruling class was becoming immensely wealthy largely at their
expense.

Of course, the same legitimate complaint has been made by colonized peoples all over the globe.
The difference in the American colonists case is that the majority of the colonists considered
themselves to be English citizens, both by history and birth, and they felt entitled to the liberal rights
of English citizens that were won and confirmed by the English Revolution against a tyrannical
monarch one hundred years before.


The Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War

The intellectual leaders of the American Revolution, such as Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, were
hugely influenced by the political theory of English philosopher John Locke, who argued that all
governments are based upon a social contract between individuals who possess inalienable rights
rights that cannot be taken away from them, but can only be denied to them by an unjust
government. These ideas are reflected in the colonists Declaration of Independence, which was
largely written by Jefferson.

The American Revolutionary War was a protracted affair in which the American Army Commander
George Washington attempted to goad and avoid the superior English forces. The war was
eventually won with the aid of the French (Englands traditional foe), whom American diplomat
Benjamin Franklin, in a brilliant diplomatic coup, had persuaded to send their navy in support of
American troops.


The U. S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights

The first American government, which consisted of a loose assemblage of more or less sovereign
states (the original thirteen colonies), was too weak to govern effectively. Even those Revolutionary
leaders who were most suspicious of a strong central government eventually conceded that a change
of some sort was needed. And so, in 1787, representatives of all thirteen colonies met to frame a
new government.

The most important and far-reaching aspect of the constitution they agreed upon was a series of ten
amendments, added later as a compromise measure between the states, and designed to protect the
rights of private citizens against the powers of the public government. The amendments, which came
to be known as The Bill of Rights, are at the heart of the American legal system, and have a great
deal to do with what it means to be an American legally, culturally, and psychologically.


Benjamin Franklins Troubling Prophecy

The oldest participant at the Constitutional Convention was Benjamin Franklin. His long experience
with the rising and falling fortunes of government, and his expansive knowledge of human history,
are both reflected in his written response to the completed document, which concludes with a dire
prediction for the future of American democracy that has great poignancy today.


George Washingtons Cautious Advice

Americas first president was the larger-than-life Revolutionary War hero George Washington. His
administrations chief success was to solidify the power of the central government, while
demonstrating that American democracy could operate effectively without devolving into tyranny or
anarchy.

Washingtons farewell speech to the nation at the end of his two terms in office (a self-limiting
precedent his successors followed until 1940, and which was later made into law) is full of cautious
advice for the young nation, by which Washington demonstrated the combination of political realism
and virtuous idealism that led even his brilliant and accomplished contemporaries to regard him with
a deference that bordered on reverence.

Washingtons successor, John Adams, possessed a superior intellect, but had none of the natural
authority of his predecessor, and the government was soon divided into the factions that Washington
had foreseen and warned against.


Americas Early Democracy In Retrospect

Adams successor, Thomas Jefferson, the principle author of the Declaration of Independence, was a
more able politician, and perhaps the most idealistic of Americas founding fathers. He believed
fervently in the great possibilities that democracy provided for the development and maintenance of
human freedom and happiness. His 2-term administration (during which the nations territory was
more than doubled by a purchase of land from France), was an optimistic and idealistic period in
American politics and in the history of the nation.

In a nine-volume study of this period, Americas first great historian, Henry Adams (the great-
grandson of the Second President), analyzed in great depth the dangers and opportunities the country
faced as it began to develop into a great nation. His description of the typical American democratic
character, and his assessment of the nations prospects of success in history, are still pertinent today.




THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (1776)

Introduction

In The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, writing for the Thirteen Colonies, attempted to
defend the colonists decision and action to separate from Great Britain (England). The most far-
reaching claim the declaration makes is that all human beings are naturally equal, and that they have the
innate right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

European monarchical governments were based on the assumption and ideal that the King or Queen
had a natural, God-given right to rule over his or her subjects, who were understood to be innately
inferior. But Jeffersons Declaration admits of no innately superior or inferior human beings.

One issue the Declaration did not address is the practice of African-American slavery in the colonies,
and its implication that some people are more equal than others. Jefferson himself owned
numerous slaves, who were allowed hardly any legal rights under the American colonial system.
Later in his life, Jefferson became more and more obsessed with and depressed by the failure of the
Revolution to address the obvious contradiction of legal slavery in a country founded on the
presumed equality of all human beings.

The legal issue of slavery would be decided by the Civil War in the next century, but the social and
psychological ramifications of such a blatant contradiction between the Founding Fathers expressed
ideals and their actual practice (Washington and others of the Revolutionary leaders were also slave
owners) are still felt today in a country that remains racially divided and distressed.


The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America (1776)
(Excerpted)

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political
bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the
separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent
respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to
the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its
foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely
to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established
should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that
mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing
the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing
invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it
is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such
has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them
to alter their former Systems of Government.




BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790)

Introduction

Benjamin Franklin was the oldest and most experienced of the American Founding Fathers. His
fatalistic response to the original Constitution (before the addition of the Bill of Rights) is a
cautionary note that observers of American democracy in action today would do well to ponder.

Whether a liberal democracy can continue to operate in freedom while under the dual attack of
radical terrorists who despise its values, and those in domestic government and business who would
take advantage of the fear inspired by such attacks to concentrate power into their own hands,
undermining the constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights of American citizens, is a question that our
present history will answer.


Speech in the Constitutional convention At the Conclusion of Its Deliberations (1787)
(Excerpted)

Mr. President:

I confess, that I do not entirely approve of this constitution at present; but, Sir, I am not sure I shall
never approve it; for, having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by
better information or fuller consideration, to change my opinions even on important subjects, which I
once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am
to doubt my own judgment of others.

In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults if they are such; because I
think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a
blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well
administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it,
when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any
other.




THE BILL OF RIGHTS (1791)

Introduction

The Bill of Rights is at the heart of American government and society. It would be difficult to
overestimate the crucial importance of this brief document in regard to American history: past,
present, and future.

Some of the characteristics of American society that seem most strange and unsettling to observers
from other cultures, such as the open proliferation of pornography and the widespread possession of
firearms, are the results of the Bill of Rights, and of the court systems vigorous defense of them.
The right to produce and consume pornography, for instance (a right limited to legal adults those
who are 18-years-old and older), is granted by the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech
and of the press. Likewise the Second Amendment right of the people to keep and bear arms
protects gun-owners from most government regulations and interference.

Critics of American culture and government who feel that the court system has interpreted the Bill of
Rights too broadly argue that the result is an overly-permissive and dangerous society. On the
contrary side, defenders of the courts interpretations contend that it is the court system and not the
more democratic legislative branch of the government, whose laws are often ruled unconstitutional
by the courts, and so invalidated that is the true defender of liberal democracy in America.

Whatever ones opinions or beliefs in this regard, there is no denying that the Bill of Rights (unless
overturned by further amendments, or by a revolutionary restructuring of government) will continue
to exert its influence at the center of the American government and legal system.


The Bill of Rights (1791)
Amendments 1-10 of the Constitution

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to
keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in
time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be
searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment
or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia,
when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same
offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a
witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor
shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an
impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district
shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the
accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining
witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial
by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of
the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments
inflicted.

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage
others retained by the people.

Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states,
are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.




GEORGE WASHINGTON (1732-1799)

Introduction

Although a Revolutionary War leader, George Washington was in many respects a conservative and
cautious figure. His two-term administration as the first American president was as remarkable for
what he did not do his wariness in overstepping the legal bounds of the chief executive as for
what he did. His natural authority as n incorruptible revolutionary hero leant the young government
legitimacy. But he foresaw many dangers for Americas democratic system of government, several
of which he warned against in his Farewell Address to Congress.

1. Most of all, he distrusted the power of contending parties and factions that might work to prevent
the democratic government from operating effectively, thus leading to its overthrow.

2. He also warned against allowing any part of the government to gather too much power within its
constitutionally-restricted boundaries. Critics of the American Presidency and court system, alike,
have accused these branches of government of attempting to consolidate their own power at the
expense of the more innately democratic legislative branch.

3. Washington urged the country to expand its educational system so as to ensure that the popular
electorate would be thoughtful and well-informed, and he himself founded a university after stepping
down as President. Partially as the result of such urgings and reasoning, America was the first
country in the world to attempt universal education the education of all of its citizens.

4. Finally, Washington urged the young government and country to stay aloof from the controversies
of foreign governments and nations, and to focus, rather, on creating a model government and society
for other countries to emulate. Americas current involvement in countries and governments
throughout the world may be seen either as an aggressive reinterpretation of Washingtons advice in
pursuit of liberal democracy, or as a sad retrenchment from his wise caution against becoming
involved in others affairs, and his urging that the country concentrate on perfecting a democratic
society and culture within its national boundaries.


GEORGE WASHINGTONS FAREWELL ADDRESS
(Excerpted)

I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the
founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and
warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of
the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled,
or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their
worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to
party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is
itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The
disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in
the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more
able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own
elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.



It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those
entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres,
avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of
encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create,
whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and
proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of
this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and
distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against
invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our
country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them.



It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule,
indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere
friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?

Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge.
In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public
opinion should be enlightened.



Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all It will be
worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the
magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and
benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would
richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be that
Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue? The experiment, at
least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature





HENRY ADAMS (1838-1918)

Introduction

In his massive nine-volume history, Americas first great historian attempted to document the
transition of a country from an attractive ideal amid primitive conditions, to a thriving democratic
society and nation. In the selection below, he contrasts the practical situation and prospects of the
United States to that of Europe at the beginning of the 19
th
Century, pointing out that, although
American society appeared backwards and poor to visiting cultured Europeans, Americans were
actually in a far better condition to face the challenges of a world that was being rapidly transformed
by science and technology.

For one thing, the average American was better educated and more optimistic in ambition than his
European counterpart. He was also more free, and apt to move about the country. Even today,
Americans are remarkably mobile as a group in comparison to most populations. Early Americans
also were upwardly mobile in terms of social class, economic power, and educational achievement.

Adams remarked that both government and society during the countrys early years were focused on
economic improvement on agricultural, industrial, and capital development and shunned military
investments and engagements as a waste of time and money. Today, of course, Americans spend
billions of dollars annually on a vast military establishment that spreads over the globe. But as a
percentage of the national economy, American military spending is still below that of most of the
worlds nations. (Whether such spending at such levels is necessary or desirable is, of course,
another question.)

As a way of life, money-making may seem a vulgar and crass ambition. But Adams contended that
early Americans considered economic achievement as a means of refuting, and a method for
frustrating, the class system of Europe, together with the old-world superstitions and hierarchical
values which depended upon and supported it.

But the question remained unanswered in Early America (and is perhaps still not entirely answered
today) as to what substitute this new world of vast economic and technological power would have to
offer in place of the undeniable achievements in human culture and civilization produced by the old
world of class privilege and hierarchical social values. How is a society to translate economic
achievement into an overall achievement for human individuals and society and for world
civilization itself? In order to succeed at such a challenge, Adams believed that individual and
collective human nature itself must be improved and enhanced in all of its positive aspects.

In his History, Adams seems to suggest that such an improvement is possible. But in his later writing,
he voices a profound fear that human power in terms of technology and energy will prove itself
superior to human wisdom and end by consuming our civilization itself, as it already has consumed so
much of the worlds wealth, diversity, and resources.


History of the United States of America during the Administration of Thomas Jefferson; Volume 1,
Chapter 6, American Ideals (1889 to 1891)
(Excerpted)

Nearly every foreign traveler who visited the United States during these early years, carried away an
impression sober if not sad. A thousand miles of desolate and dreary forest, broken here and there by
settlements; along the sea-coast a few flourishing towns devoted to commerce; no arts, a provincial
literature, a cancerous disease of negro slavery, and differences of political theory fortified within
geographical lines what could be hoped for such a country except to repeat the story of violence and
brutality which the world already knew by heart, until repetition for thousands of years had wearied and
sickened mankind? Ages must probably pass before the interior could be thoroughly settled; even
Jefferson, usually a sanguine man, talked of a thousand years with acquiescence, and in his first
Inaugural Address, at a time when the Mississippi River formed the Western boundary, spoke of the
country as having "room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation." No
prudent person dared to act on the certainty that when settled, one government could comprehend the
whole; and when the day of separation should arrive, and America should have her Prussia, Austria, and
Italy, as she already had her England, France, and Spain, what else could follow but a return to the old
conditions of local jealousies, wars, and corruption which had made a slaughter-house of Europe?

The mass of Americans were sanguine and self-confident, partly by temperament, but partly also by
reason of ignorance; for they knew the of the difficulties which surrounded a complex society.

In matters which for the moment most concerned themselves Europe was a full century behind
America. If they were right in thinking that the next necessity of human progress was to lift the
average man upon an intellectual and social level with the most favored, they stood at least three
generations nearer than Europe to their common goal. The destinies of the United States were
certainly staked, without reserve or escape, on the soundness of this doubtful and even improbable
principle, ignoring or overthrowing the institutions of church, aristocracy, family, army, and political
intervention, which long experience had shown to be needed for the safety of society. Europe might
be right in thinking that without such safeguards society must come to an end; but even Europeans
must concede that there was a chance, if no greater than one in a thousand, that America might, at
least for a time, succeed. If this stake of temporal and eternal welfare stood on the winning card; if
man actually should become more virtuous and enlightened, by mere process of growth, without
church or paternal authority; if the average human being could accustom himself to reason with the
logical processes of Descartes and Newton! what then?

Then, no one could deny that the United States would win a stake such as defied mathematics. With
all the advantages of science and capital, Europe must be slower than America to reach the common
goal. American society might be both sober and sad, but except for negro slavery it was sound and
healthy in every part, Stripped for the hardest work, every muscle firm and elastic, every ounce of
brain ready for use, and not a trace of superfluous flesh on his nervous and supple body, the
American stood in the world a new order of man. From Maine to Florida, society was in this respect
the same, and was so organized as to use its human forces with more economy than any society of the
world elsewhere. Not only were artificial barriers carefully removed, but every influence that could
appeal to ordinary ambition was applied. No brain or appetite active enough to be conscious of
stimulants could fail to answer the intense incentive. Few human beings, however sluggish, could
long resist the temptation to acquire power; and the elements of power were to be had in America
almost for the asking. Reversing the old-world system, the American stimulant increased in energy as
it reached the lowest and most ignorant class, dragging and whirling them upward as in the blast of a
furnace. The penniless and homeless Scotch or Irish immigrant was caught and consumed by it; for
every stroke of the axe and the hoe made him a capitalist, and made gentlemen of his children.
Wealth was the strongest agent for moving the mass of mankind; but political power was hardly less
tempting to the more intelligent and better-educated swarms of American-born citizens, and the
instinct of activity, once created, seemed heritable and permanent in the race.

Compared with this lithe young figure, Europe was actually in decrepitude. Mere class distinctions,
the patois or dialect of the peasantry, the fixity of residence, the local costumes and habits marking a
history that lost itself in the renewal of identical generations, raised from birth barriers which
paralyzed half the population. Upon this mass of inert matter rested the Church and the State, holding
down activity of thought. Endless wars withdrew many hundred thousand men from production, and
changed them into agents of waste; huge debts, the evidence of past wars and bad government,
created interests to support the system and fix its burdens on the laboring class; courts, with habits of
extravagance that shamed common-sense, helped to consume private economics. All this might have
been borne; but behind this stood aristocracies, sucking their nourishment from industry, producing
nothing themselves, employing little or no active capital or intelligent labor, but pressing on the
energies and ambition of society with the weight of an incubus. Picturesque and entertaining as these
social anomalies were, they were better fitted for the theatre or for a museum of historical costumes
than for an active workshop preparing to compete with such machinery as America would soon
command.

Granting that the American people were about to risk their future on a new experiment, they naturally
wished to throw aside all burden of which they could rid themselves. Believing that in the long run
interest, not violence, would rule the world, and that the United States must depend for safety and
success on the interests they could create, they were tempted to look upon war and preparations for war
as the worst of blunders; for they were sure that every dollar capitalized in industry was a means of
overthrowing their enemies more effective than a thousand dollars spent on frigates or standing armies.
The success of the American system was, from this point of view, a question of economy If they could
relieve themselves from debts, taxes, armies, and government interference with industry, they must
succeed in outstripping Europe in economy of production; and Americans were even then partly aware
that if their machine were not so weakened by these economics as to break down in the working, it must
of necessity break down every rival. If their theory was sound, when the day of competition should
arrive, Europe might choose between American and Chinese institutions, but there would be no middle
path; she might become a confederated democracy, or a wreck.

The charge that Americans were too fond of money to win the confidence of Europeans was a
curious inconsistency; yet this was a common belief. If the American deluded himself and led others
to death by baseless speculations; if he buried those he loved in a gloomy forest where they quaked
and died while he persisted in seeing splendid, healthy, and well-built city, no one could deny that
he sacrificed wife and child to his greed for gain, that the dollar was his god, and a sordid avarice his
demon. Yet had this been the whole truth, no European capitalist would have hesitated to make
money out of his grave; for, avarice against avarice, no more sordid or meaner type existed in
America than could be shown on every [Stock] Exchange in Europe. With much more reason
Americans might have suspected that in America Englishmen found everywhere a silent influence,
which they found nowhere in Europe, and which had nothing to do with avarice or with the dollar,
but, on the contrary, seemed likely at any moment to sacrifice the dollar in a cause and for an object
so illusory that most Englishmen could not endure to hear it discussed. European travellers who
passed through America noticed that everywhere, in the White House at Washington and in log-
cabins beyond the Alleghanies, except for a few Federalists, every American, from Jefferson and
Gallatin down to the poorest squatter, seemed to nourish an idea that he was doing what he could to
overthrow the tyranny which the past had fastened on the human mind. Nothing was easier than to
laugh at the ludicrous expressions of this simple-minded conviction, or to cry out against its
coarseness, or grow angry with its prejudices; to see its nobler side, to feel the beatings of a heart
underneath the sordid surface of a gross humanity, was not so easy. Europeans seemed seldom or
never conscious that the sentiment could possess a noble side, but found only matter for complaint in
the remark that every American democrat believed himself to be working for the overthrow of
tyranny, aristocracy, hereditary privilege, and priesthood, wherever they existed. Even where the
American did not openly proclaim this conviction in words, he carried so dense an atmosphere of the
sentiment with him in his daily life as to give respectable Europeans an uneasy sense of
remoteness.

In the early days of colonization, every new settlement represented an idea and proclaimed a
mission. Virginia was founded by a great, liberal movement aiming at the spread of English liberty
and empire. The Pilgrims of Plymouth, the Puritans of Boston, the Quakers of Permsylvania, all
avowed a moral purpose, and began by making institutions that consciously reflected a moral idea.
No such character belonged to the colonization of 1800. From Lake Erie to Florida, in long, unbroken
line, pioneers were at work, cutting into the forests with the energy of so many beavers, and with no
more express moral purpose than the beavers they drove away. The civilization they carried with
them was rarely illumined by an idea; they sought room for no new truth, and aimed neither at
creating, like the Puritans, a government of saints, nor, like the Quakers, one of love and peace; they
left such experiments behind them, and wrestled only with the hardest problems of frontier life. No
wonder that foreign observers, and even the educated, well-to-do Americans of the sea-coast, could
seldom see anything to admire in the ignorance and brutality of frontiersmen, and should declare that
virtue and wisdom no longer guided the United States! What they saw was not encouraging. To a new
society, ignorant and semi-barbarous, a mass of demagogues insisted on applying every stimulant that
could inflame its worst appetites, while at the same instant taking away every influence that had
hitherto helped to restrain its passions. Greed for wealth, lust for power, yearning for the blank void
of savage freedom such as Indians and wolves delighted in, these were the fires that flamed under
the caldron of American society, in which, as conservatives believed, the old, well-proven,
conservative crust of religion, government, family, and even common respect for age, education, and
experience was rapidly melting away, and was indeed already broken into fragments, swept about by
the seething mass of scum ever rising in greater quantities to the surface.

Yet even then one part of the American social system was proving itself to be rich in results. The
average American was more intelligent than the average European, and was becoming every year
still more active-minded as the new movement of society caught him up and swept him through a life
of more varied experiences. On all sides the national mind responded to its stimulants.

There were in effect the problems that lay before American society: Could it transmute its social
power into the higher forms of thought? Could it provide for the moral and intellectual needs of
mankind? Could it take permanent political shape? Could it give new life to religion and art? Could it
create and maintain in the mass of mankind those habits of mind which had hitherto belonged to men
of science alone? Could it physically develop the convolutions of the human brain? Could it produce,
or was it compatible with the differentiation of a higher variety of the human race? Nothing less than
this was necessary for its complete success.
Chapter 3: Early Explorations Into American Identity and Culture

Introduction

D. H. Lawrence and the American Spirit of Place

In America, there has always been a great tension between intellectual ideals and material reality. A
country that was formed in an act of rebellion not only against a previous governmental power, but
against an entire history of thought and way of life, begins by being defined as much by what it is not
in actuality, as by what it has the potential to be in theory.

D. H. Lawrence focuses on the disparity between the early Americans professed ideals of freedom
and liberty and their repressive and narrow-minded society and culture. Writing in the early 20
th

Century, Lawrence concluded that America had yet to find or create a positive identity and way of
being to embody Americas great potential spirit of place. But he admired early American
writers for their efforts in that attempt.


Ralph Waldo Emersons Self-Reliance

Several early 19
th
Century American authors struggled to give shape and form to an improved
individual identity fitting for Americas land of opportunities none more so that Ralph Waldo
Emerson, who is considered the principle American thinker concerned with the changing identity of
the individual in this New World setting, and with his altered and evolving relationship to society and
nature. One major principle of Emersons thought is that the individual as a category of human
being, and in relation to society and culture is always primary. His primary duty and allegiance is
not to God and tradition, nor to family and country, but to himself alone as is indicated by the title
of Emersons essay excerpted here: Self-Reliance.


Henry David Thoreau and Civil Disobedience

Emersons contemporary and friend, Henry David Thoreau, applied Emersons philosophical and
theoretical thinking concerning the individual and his relation and responsibility to society and to
himself to the more practical topic of the duty of the citizen to the government. Writing at a time
when human slavery was still legal in America, Thoreau considered whether the citizens duty to his
own individual conscience might supercede his duty to be a law-abiding citizen of a government that
one considered to be immoral and unjust.


Nathaniel Hawthornes Allegories of Good and Evil

The early 19
th
Century novelist and short story writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was obsessed in his
fiction with the moral relations of individuals to and within society. Early American Puritan settlers,
including Hawthornes direct ancestors, had attempted to create an ultra-moral society that would
serve as a reproof of the more liberal and worldly societies of Europe. In their attempts at social
engineering, the Puritans were self-righteous radicals, and like all social idealists, they often found
themselves to be the unwitting victims of their good intentions. In his typical allegorical fiction,
Hawthorne presents a near-nightmare world in which the most seemingly upright and moral of
societys figures are potentially its most deluded and dangerous fanatics, inflicting harm upon
themselves and others.


Herman Melvilles Disturbing Prophecy

In Herman Melvilles fictional world, good and evil are more mixed less certain. As Hawthornes
fiction tends to look backwards towards Americas ultra-religious origins, Melvilles work seems to
prophecy a world to come in which all ethical and moral certainty is lost in the crush of a modern
machine-like society that is devoted to the amoral pursuit of business and profit at whatever cost to
the individual who cannot be made to feel at home in such an inhuman setting.


Walt Whitmans Epic of the Individual

Perhaps no American writer has felt more at home in the potential of the American democratic social
ideal (as opposed to actual material American reality) than Walt Whitman. In Song of Myself,
Whitman attempted to give shape to the New-World individual identity urged by Emerson in Self-
Reliance. Song of Myself is an extravagant, ecstatic hymn to the possibilities of the individual
self in the New World. Whitman self-published the poem in 1855 to critical acclaim (Emerson was
an admirer). But the poems optimistic appeal would soon be drowned out by the din of battle in the
most savagely destructive conflict of its time, the American Civil War.


D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930)

Introduction

D. H. Lawrence was a major English novelist, poet, and critic of the early 20
th
Century who spent
several years living in the American Southwest. He wrote a perceptive and influential book on
American literature and culture, the introduction to which is excerpted below. Lawrence believed
that America had the opportunity to lead Western culture and civilization out of the historical and
spiritual quagmire to which the feuding and class-rigid nations of Europe had brought it. He felt in
America a great possibility for the future, a new spirit of place that was just beginning to make
itself felt. But before this spirit of place could evolve into a positive future for Americans and the
world, Americans would have to move past their intellectual rebellion against old-world European
values and culture, reaching deep into their inmost spiritual selves for guidance.

Lawrence was a religious mystic who believed that the deepest sources of life are beyond human
knowledge and control. The best that we can do is to reach down to this source of life, which
Lawrence calls IT, and allow it to develop in and through us. If Americans lack the imagination
and courage for such positive development, Lawrence warns, then the future of humanity will move
on to another place, and the great spiritual and historical potential of America will remain unrealized.


from Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

There is a new feeling in the old American books. It is the shifting over from the old psyche to
something new, a displacement. And displacements hurt. This hurts. So we try to tie it up, like a cut
finger. Put a rag round it. It is a cut too. Cutting away the old emotions and consciousness. Don't ask
what is left.

Let us look at this American artist first. How did he get to America, to start with? Why isn't he a
European like his father before him?. He didn't come in search of freedom of worship. England had
more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had. Won by Englishmen who wanted
freedom, and so stayed at home and fought for it. And got it. Freedom of worship? Read the history of
New England during the first century of existence.

Freedom anyhow? The land of the free! This is the land the free! Why, if I say anything that
displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that's my freedom. Free? Why, I have never been in
any country where the individual has such abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say,
they are free to lynch the moment he shows he is not one of them.

Those Pilgrim Fathers and their successors never came here for freedom of worship. What did they
set up when they got here? Freedom, would you call it?

They didn't come for freedom. Or if they did, they sadly went back on themselves.

All right then, what did they come for? For lots of reasons. Perhaps least of all in search of freedom
of any sort: positive freedom, that is.

They came largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the
long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to
America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

`Henceforth be masterless.'

Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is
never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have
always been shouting about the things they are not.

And after all there is a positive side to the movement. All that vast flood of human life that has
flowed over the Atlantic in ships from Europe to America has not flowed over simply on a tide of
revulsion from Europe and from the confinements of the European ways of life. This revulsion was,
and still is, I believe, the prime motive in emigration. But there was some cause, even for the
revulsion.

It seems as if at times man had a frenzy for getting away from any control of any sort. In Europe the
old Christianity was the real master. The Church and the true aristocracy bore the responsibility for
the working out of the Christian ideals: a little irregularly, maybe, but responsible nevertheless.

Mastery, kingship, fatherhood had their power destroyed at the time of the Renaissance.

And it was precisely at this moment that the great drift over the Atlantic started. What were men
drifting away from? The old authority of Europe? Were they breaking the bonds of authority, and
escaping to a new more absolute unrestrainedness? Maybe. But there was more to it.

Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And men
either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the
master they wish to undermine. In America this frictional opposition has been the vital factor. It has
given the Yankee his kick. Only the continual influx of more servile Europeans has provided
America with an obedient laboring class. The true obedience never outlasting the first generation.

But there sits the old master, over in Europe. Like a parent. Somewhere deep in every American
heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe. Yet no American feels he has completely
escaped its mastery. Hence the slow, smoldering patience of American opposition. The slow,
smoldering corrosive obedience to the old master Europe, the unwilling subject, the unremitting
opposition. Whatever else you are, be masterless.

Get a new master, be a new man.

What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? Oh,
it was in a black spirit. A black revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe, from kings
and bishops and popes. And more. When you look into it, more. They were black, masterful men,
they wanted something else. No kings, no bishops maybe. Even no God Almighty. But also, no more
of this new `humanity' which followed the Renaissance. None of this new liberty which was to be so
pretty in Europe. Something grimmer, by no means free-and-easy.

America has never been easy, and is not easy today. Americans have always been at a certain
tension. Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension: a liberty of THOU SHALT NOT. And it
has been so from the first. The land of THOU SHALT NOT. Only the first commandment is: THOU
SHALT NOT PRESUME TO BE A MASTER. Hence democracy.

`We are the masterless.' That is what the American Eagle shrieks.

Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality,
which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence,
different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what
you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality. The Nile valley produced not only the corn, but the
terrific religions of Egypt. China produces the Chinese, and will go on doing so. The Chinese in San
Francisco will in time cease to be Chinese, for America is a great melting pot.

There was a tremendous polarity in Italy, in the city of Rome. And this seems to have died. For even
places die. The Island of Great Britain had a wonderful terrestrial magnetism or polarity of its own,
which made the British people. For the moment, this polarity seems to be breaking. Can England die?
And what if England dies?

Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far less free. The freest are perhaps least free.

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away.
Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from
within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling
some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The
most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of
freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like,
there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self
likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self. It takes some diving.

Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one
thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes,
and seek what IT wishes done.

But before you can do what IT likes, you must first break the spell of the old mastery, the old IT.

Perhaps at the Renaissance, when kingship and fatherhood fell, Europe drifted into a very dangerous
half-truth: of liberty and equality. Perhaps the men who went to America felt this, and so repudiated
the old world together. Went one better than Europe. Liberty in America has meant so far the
breaking away from all dominion. The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover IT, and
proceed possibly to fulfill IT. I T being the deepest whole self of man, the self in its wholeness, not
idealistic halfness.

That's why the Pilgrim Fathers came to America, then; and that's why we come. Driven by IT. We
cannot see that invisible winds carry us, as they carry swarms of locusts, that invisible magnetism
brings us as it brings the migrating birds to their unforeknown goal. But it is so. We are not the
marvellous choosers and deciders we think we are. IT chooses for us, and decides for us. Unless, of
course, we are just escaped slaves, vulgarly cocksure of our ready-made destiny. But if we are living
people, in touch with the source, IT drives us and decides us. We are free only so long as we obey.

And still, when the great day begins, when Americans have at last discovered America and their own
wholeness, still there will be the vast number of escaped slaves to reckon with, those who have no
cocksure, ready-made destinies.

Which will win in America, the escaped slaves, or the new whole men?

The real American day hasn't begun yet. Or at least, not yet sunrise. So far it has been the false
dawn. That is, in the progressive American consciousness there has been the one dominant desire, to
do away with the old thing. Do away with masters, exalt the will of the people. The will of the people
being nothing but a figment, the exalting doesn't count for much. So, in the name of the will of the
people, get rid of masters. When you have got rid of masters, you are left with this mere phrase of the
will of the people. Then you pause and bethink yourself, and try to recover your own wholeness.

So much for the conscious American motive, and for democracy over here. Democracy in America is
just the tool with which the old master of Europe, the European spirit, is undermined. Europe
destroyed, potentially, American democracy will evaporate. America will begin.

American consciousness has so far been a false dawn. The negative ideal of democracy. But
underneath, and contrary to this open ideal, the first hints and revelations of IT. IT, the American
whole soul.

You have got to pull the democratic and idealistic clothes off American utterance, and see what you
can of the dusky body of IT underneath.

`Henceforth be masterless.'

Henceforth be mastered.


RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)

Introduction

Ralph Waldo Emerson is early Americas foremost thinker and envisioner regarding the relationship
of the individual to society in the New World. Emerson believed that Americas New-World setting
required a New-World individual, one who would answer to no authority but himself. Although
Emerson led an outwardly conventional life, he urged his readers to question all convention
together with all inherited authorities and to rely, rather, on the dictates of their conscience, and the
guide of their unique personality and temperament.

It has been argued that Emerson is Americas foremost literary and philosophical figure. In his
religious thinking, Emerson was greatly influenced by Eastern religious thinkers and philosophies
particularly Buddhism and Hinduism and he in his turn exerted a profound influence on later
American and European thinkers and writers, thus serving as a conduit between the historical
thought-systems of East and West.

In Emersons social theory of self-reliance, however, he displays a conspicuously non-Eastern (or
at least non-Confucian) criticism of, and even contempt for, the traditional authorities of family and
society in regards to the individual. He writes, No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.
Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my
constitution; the only wrong what is against it. It is doubtless impossible to live ones life in a
transcendent opposition to and isolation from the expectations of society and convention. But such is
the goal of Emersons ideal of self-reliance an ideal with seemingly endless appeal to the
American psyche and culture, which has historically idolized the outcast and rebel Emersons non-
conformist.

Of course, there is an inherent instability and innate insecurity in a society in which every individual
imagines himself to be a law unto himself. In such a society, explicit rules and regulations regarding
social behavior and individual rights take precedence over implicit conventions of behavior and
assumptions of shared values. There is thus a natural and self-perpetuating contradiction in
American culture and society between an idealization of the outlaw and rebel, and a strict adherence
to a vast array of minute rules and regulations. Emerson embodied such a contradiction in his
conventional life and radical thought.


from Self-Reliance (1841)

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all
menthat is genius. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes
across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he
dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

There is a time in every mans education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance;
that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion The power
which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does
he know until he has tried.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has
found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always
done so.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He must not be hindered by the name of
goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own
mind.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily
transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is
against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and
ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large
societies and dead institutions.

It is easy in the world to live after the worlds opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but
the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of
solitude.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say I think, I am, but quotes
some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under
my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they
exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every
moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower
there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all
moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted
eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the
future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.


HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862)

Introduction

Henry David Thoreau was Emersons younger contemporary and friend. In his life and writing,
Thoreau attempted to put into practice Emersons theories regarding the dignity, autonomy, and
liberty of the individual in relation to society.

In the excerpt below from his crucial essay Civil Disobedience, Thoreau considers in practical
detail the obligation of the individual to government. In the ideal world of the future, Thoreau
contends, there will be no government at all. But the citizen of today finds himself in a necessary
relationship with the governing social order. But what if the government supports a social order that
one finds to be immoral and unjust as Thoreau thought of the state-supported human slavery in
America in his day? Then might the individuals duty to his private conscience take precedence over
his duty to the governing social order? In other words, might one be ethically obligated to disobey
such a government?

Thoreaus rationally passionate discussion of the individuals moral obligation to himself, as opposed
to society and government, had a great influence on later social reformers, such as Tolstoy in Russia,
Gandhi in India, and King in America. These reformers employed Thoreaus theories regarding
passive civil disobedience, as opposed to active rebellion, in their practical attempts to make their
societies more moral and just.


from Civil Disobedience (1849)

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it
acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I
believe That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that
will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but
most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

The American government what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit
itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and
force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask
for, not at once no government but at once a better government. Let every man make known what
kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men
understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and
wrong, but conscience? in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of
expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his
conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men
first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the
right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right.

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he
cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political
organization as my government which is the slave's government also.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the
government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that
such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of '75. If one were to
tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its
ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All
machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any
rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and
oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other
words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are
slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to
military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey
them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?.

A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not
necessary that he should do something wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or
the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; if they should not hear my petition, what
should I do them?

I know that most men think differently from myself; but those whose lives are by profession devoted
to the study of these or kindred subjects content me as little as any. Statesmen and legislators,
standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of
moving society, but have no resting-place without it. They may be men of a certain experience and
discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we
sincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. They are
wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the
individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are
derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to
be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it
inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor
embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow men. A State which bore this kind
of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect
and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)

Introduction

Nathaniel Hawthornes ancestors were among the early Puritan settlers in the New World. In much
of his best fiction, Hawthorne looks backwards to this period and dramatizes the Puritans obsession
with right and wrong, and good and evil.

Young Goodman Brown is one of Hawthornes most famous stories. Goodman and Goody
were social titles used by the Puritans rather in the manner that English speakers today use Mr. and
Ms. But Hawthornes use of these titles implies meaning beyond social convention. For the entire
story is concerned with the identification and definition of a good man.

Young Goodman Brown is a type of allegorical fiction. Traditionally, allegory is concerned with
making fictional characters represent abstract virtues and vices, such as good and evil, faith and
doubt. But Hawthorne complicates the allegory by making it uncertain whether the virtues the pious
townspeople seem to represent are merely disguises hiding secret vices. Is young Goodman Brown
secretly a bad man? Is his wife Faith actually unfaithful to him and to their marriage? And, more
basically, does the narrative of the story relate an actual journey into the forest to join forces with
other supposedly good but actually evil townspeople or does it all take place in young Goodman
Browns head, as a dream-nightmare or morbid fantasy?

By refusing to answer these questions decisively, Hawthorne would seem to be suggesting that the
world we live in is not as simple as it seems and neither are we. He implicitly contends that the
distinction between our mind and the world, and between ourselves and others, is never finally
certain, and that reality is more mysterious that we typically know or imagine.

Finally, Young Goodman Brown is a cautionary tale a fictional story that is meant to serve as a
warning to the reader, and as a moral lesson. The lesson of this story is that the categories of good
and evil, when applied too firmly, simply, and certainly to the mysteries of human existence, are
destructive to the human spirit, and to the capacity for life itself.


Young Goodman Brown (1835)


Young Goodman Brown came forth, at sunset, into the street of Salem village, but put his head back,
after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was
aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of her
cap, while she called to Goodman Brown.
Dearest heart, whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear, pr'y thee,
put off your journey until sunrise, and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with
such dreams and such thoughts, that she's afeard of herself, sometimes. Pray, tarry with me this night,
dear husband, of all nights in the year!
My love and my Faith, replied young Goodman Brown, of all nights in the year, this one night must
I tarry away from thee. My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be done 'twixt
now and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, cost thou doubt me already, and we but three months
married!
Then, God bless you! said Faith, with the pink ribbons, and may you find all well, when you come
back.
Amen! cried Goodman Brown. Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will
come to thee.
So they parted; and the young man pursued his way, until, being about to turn the corner by the
meeting-house, he looked back, and saw the head of Faith still peeping after him, with a melancholy air,
in spite of her pink ribbons.
Poor little Faith! thought he, for his heart smote him. What a wretch am I, to leave her on such an
errand! She talks of dreams, too. Methought, as she spoke, there was trouble in her face, as if a dream
had warned her what work is to be done to-night. But, no, no! 'twould kill her to think it. Well; she's a
blessed angel on earth; and after this one night, I'll cling to her skirts and follow her to Heaven.
With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste
on his present evil purpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest,
which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind. It was all
as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who
may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that, with lonely
footsteps, he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude.
There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree, said Goodman Brown, to himself; and he glanced
fearfully behind him, as he added, What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!
His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and looking forward again, beheld the figure
of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose, at Goodman Browns
approach, and walked onward, side by side with him.
You are late, Goodman Brown, said he. The clock of the Old South was striking as I came through
Boston; and that is full fifteen minutes agone.
Faith kept me back awhile, replied the young man, with a tremor in his voice, caused by the sudden
appearance of his companion, though not wholly unexpected.

It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part of it where these two were journeying. As
nearly as could be discerned, the second traveller was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank
of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps more in
expression than features. Still, they might have been taken for father and son. And yet, though the elder
person was as simply clad as the younger, and as simple in manner too, he had an indescribable air of
one who knew the world, and would not have felt abashed at the governor's dinner-table, or in King
William's court, were it possible that his affairs should call him thither. But the only thing about him,
that could be fixed upon as remarkable, was his staff, which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so
curiously wrought, that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself, like a living serpent. This, of
course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light.
Come, Goodman Brown! cried his fellow-traveller, this is a dull pace for the beginning of a journey.
Take my staff, if you are so soon weary.
Friend, said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop, having kept covenant by meeting
thee here, it is my purpose now to return whence I came. I have scruples, touching the matter thou wot'st
of.
Sayest thou so? replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. Let us walk on, nevertheless, reasoning as
we go, and if I convince thee not, thou shalt turn back. We are but a little way in the forest, yet.
Too far, too far! exclaimed the goodman unconsciously resuming his walk. My father never went
into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him. We have been a race of honest men and
good Christians, since the days of the martyrs. And shall I be the first of the name of Brown, that ever
took this path, and kept
Such company, thou wouldst say, observed the elder person, interpreting his pause. Well said,
Goodman Brown! I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the
Puritans; and that's no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker
woman so smartly through the streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot,
kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's war. They were my good
friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after
midnight. I would fain be friends with you, for their sake.
If it be as thou sayest, replied Goodman Brown, I marvel they never spoke of these matters. Or,
verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of the sort would have driven them from New-England.
We are a people of prayer, and good works, to boot, and abide no such wickedness.
Wickedness or not, said the. traveller with the twisted staff, I have a very general acquaintance here
in New-England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me; the
selectmen, of divers towns, make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are
firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, toobut these are state-secrets.
Can this be so! cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement at his undisturbed companion.
Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor and council; they have their own ways, and are no
rule for a simple husbandman, like me. But, were I to go on with thee, how should I meet the eye of that
good old man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh, his voice would make me tremble, both Sabbath-day
and lecture-day!
Thus far, the elder traveller had listened with due gravity, but now burst into a fit of irrepressible mirth,
shaking himself so violently, that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy.
Ha! ha! ha! shouted he, again and again; then composing himself, Well, go on, Goodman Brown, go
on; but pr'y thee, don't kill me with laughing!
Well, then, to end the matter at once, said Goodman Brown, considerably nettled, there is my wife,
Faith. It would break her dear little heart; and I'd rather break my own!
Nay, if that be the case, answered the other, e'en go thy ways, Goodman Brown. I would not, for
twenty old women like the one hobbling before us, that Faith should come to any harm.
As he spoke, he pointed his staff at a female figure on the path, in whom Goodman Brown recognized a
very pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism, in youth, and was still his moral
and spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin.
A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness, at night-fall! said he. But,
with your leave, friend, I shall take a cut through the woods, until we have left this Christian woman
behind. Bring a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was consorting with, and whither I was going.
Be it so, said his fellow-traveller. Betake you to the woods, and let me keep the path.
Accordingly, the young man turned aside, but took care to watch his companion, who advanced softly
along the road, until he had come within a staff's length of the old dame. She, meanwhile, was making
the best of her way, with singular speed for so aged a woman, and mumbling some indistinct words, a
prayer, doubtless, as she went. The traveller put forth his staff, and touched her withered neck with what
seemed the serpent's tail.
The devil! screamed the pious old lady.
Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend? observed the traveller, confronting her, and leaning on his
writhing stick.
Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship, indeed? cried the good dame. Yea, truly is it, and in the very
image of my odd gossip, Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is. Butwould
your worship believe it?my broomstick hath strangely disappeared, stolen, as I suspect, by that
unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I was all anointed with the juice of smallage and
cinque-foil and wolf's-bane
Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe, said the shape of old Goodman Brown.

Ah, your worship knows the receipt, cried the old lady, cackling aloud. So, as I was saying, being all
ready for the meeting, and no horse to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they tell me, there is a
nice young man to be taken into communion to-night. But now your good worship will lend me your
arm, and we shall be there in a twinkling.
That can hardly be, answered her friend. I may not spare you my arm, Goody Cloyse, but here is my
staff, if you will.
So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life, being one of the rods which its
owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian Magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown could not take
cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and looking down again, beheld neither Goody
Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his fellow-traveller alone, who waited for him as calmly as if
nothing had happened.
That old woman taught me my catechism! said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in
this simple comment.
They continued to walk onward, while the elder traveller exhorted his companion to make good speed
and persevere in the path, discoursing so aptly, that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the
bosom of his auditor, than to be suggested by himself. As they went, he plucked a branch of maple, to
serve for a walking-stick, and began to strip it of the twigs and little boughs, which were wet with
evening dew. The moment his fingers touched them, they became strangely withered and dried up, as
with a week's sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good free pace, until suddenly, in a gloomy hollow
of the road, Goodman Brown sat himself down on the stump of a tree, and refused to go any farther.
Friend, said he, stubbornly, my mind is made up. Not another step will I budge on this errand. What
if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the devil, when I thought she was going to Heaven! Is that
any reason why I should quit my dear Faith, and go after her?

You will think better of this, by-and-by, said his acquaintance, composedly. Sit here and rest
yourself awhile; and when you feel like moving again, there is my staff to help you along.
Without more words, he threw his companion the maple stick, and was as speedily out of sight, as if he
had vanished into the deepening gloom. The young man sat a few moments, by the road-side,
applauding himself greatly, and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the minister, in his
morning-walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin. And what calm sleep would be his,
that very night, which was to have been spent so wickedly, but purely and sweetly now, in the arms of
Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations, Goodman Brown heard the tramp of horses
along the road, and deemed it advisable to conceal himself within the verge of the forest, conscious of
the guilty purpose that had brought him thither, though now so happily turned from it.
On came the hoof-tramps and the voices of the riders, two grave old voices, conversing soberly as they
drew near. These mingled sounds appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of the young
man's hiding-place; but owing, doubtless, to the depth of the gloom, at that particular spot, neither the
travellers nor their steeds were visible. Though their figures brushed the small boughs by the way-side,
it could not be seen that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam from the strip of bright
sky, athwart which they must have passed. Goodman Brown alternately crouched and stood on tip-toe,
pulling aside the branches, and thrusting forth his head as far as he durst, without discerning so much as
a shadow. It vexed him the more, because he could have sworn, were such a thing possible, that he
recognized the voices of the minister and Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were wont to
do, when bound to some ordination or ecclesiastical council. While yet within hearing, one of the riders
stopped to pluck a switch.
Of the two, reverend Sir, said the voice like the deacon's, I had rather miss an ordination-dinner than
to-night's meeting. They tell me that some of our community are to be here from Falmouth and beyond,
and others from Connecticut and Rhode-Island; besides several of the Indian powows, who, after their
fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the best of us. Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to
be taken into communion.
Mighty well, Deacon Gookin! replied the solemn old tones of the minister. Spur up, or we shall be
late. Nothing can be done, you know, until I get on the ground.
The hoofs clattered again, and the voices, talking so strangely in the empty air, passed on through the
forest, where no church had ever been gathered, nor solitary Christian prayed. Whither, then, could
these holy men be journeying, so deep into the heathen wilderness? Young Goodman Brown caught
hold of a tree, for support, being ready to sink down on the ground, faint and overburthened with the
heavy sickness of his heart. He looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a Heaven above
him. Yet, there was the blue arch, and the stars brightening in it.
With Heaven above, and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil! cried Goodman Brown.
While he still gazed upward, into the deep arch of the firmament, and had lifted his hands to pray, a
cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith, and hid the brightening stars. The blue sky
was still visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was sweeping swiftly
northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of
voices. Once, the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of town's-people of his own, men
and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion-table, and had seen
others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he had
heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a wind. Then came a stronger swell of
those familiar tones, heard daily in the sunshine, at Salem village, but never, until now, from a cloud of
night. There was one voice, of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and
entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain. And all the unseen multitude,
both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.

Faith! shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the forest
mocked him, cryingFaith! Faith! as if bewildered wretches were seeking her, all through the
wilderness.
The cry of grief, rage, and terror, was yet piercing the night, when the unhappy husband held his breath
for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-
off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent sky above Goodman Brown. But
something fluttered lightly down through the air, and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man
seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.
My Faith is gone! cried he, after one stupefied moment. There is no good on earth; and sin is but a
name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given.
And maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and
set forth again, at such a rate, that he seemed to fly along the forest-path, rather than to walk or run. The
road grew wilder and drearier, and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart
of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward, with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole
forest was peopled with frightful sounds; the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the
yell of Indians; while, sometimes, the wind tolled like a distant church-bell, and sometimes gave a broad
roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief
horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.
Ha! ha! ha! roared Goodman Brown, when the wind laughed at him. Let us hear which will laugh
loudest! Think not to frighten me with your deviltry! Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powow,
come devil himself! and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you!

In truth, all through the haunted forest, there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of
Goodman Brown. On he flew, among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now
giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such laughter, as set all the
echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his own shape is less hideous, than
when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the
trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set
on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight. He paused, in a lull of the
tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from
a distance, with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the
village meeting-house. The verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human
voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness, pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman
Brown cried out; and his cry was lost to his own ear, by its unison with the cry of the desert.
In the interval of silence, he stole forward, until the light glared full upon his eyes. At one extremity of
an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural
resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their
stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage, that had overgrown the
summit of the rock, was all on fire, blazing high into the night, and fitfully illuminating the whole field.
Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous
congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and again grew, as it were, out of the
darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods at once.
A grave and dark-clad company! quoth Goodman Brown.
In truth, they were such. Among them, quivering to-and-fro, between gloom and splendor, appeared
faces that would be seen, next day, at the council-board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after
Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the holiest pulpits
in the land. Some affirm, that the lady of the governor was there. At least, there were high dames well
known to her, and wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient maidens, all
of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled, lest their mothers should espy them. Either the
sudden gleams of light, flashing over the obscure field, bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a
score of the churchmembers of Salem village, famous for their especial sanctity. Good old Deacon
Gookin had arrived, and waited at the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But, irreverently
consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames
and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to
all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see, that the good shrank
not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered, also, among their pale-faced
enemies, were the Indian priests, or powows, who had often scared their native forest with more hideous
incantations than any known to English witchcraft.
But, where is Faith? thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into his heart, he trembled.
Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as the pious love, but joined to words
which expressed all that our nature can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more. Unfathomable to
mere mortals is the lore of fiends verse after verse was sung, and still the chorus of the desert swelled
between, like the deepest tone of a mighty organ. And, with the final peal of that dreadful anthem, there
came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts, and every other voice of
the unconverted wilderness, were mingling and according with the voice of guilty man, in homage to
the prince of all. The four blazing pines threw up a loftier flame, and obscurely discovered shapes and
visages of horror on the smoke-wreaths, above the impious assembly. At the same moment, the fire on
the rock shot redly forth, and formed a glowing arch above its base, where now appeared a figure. With
reverence be it spoken, the figure bore no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave
divine of the New-England churches.
Bring forth the converts! cried a voice, that echoed through the field and rolled into the forest.
At the word, Goodman Brown steps forth from the shadow of the trees, and approached the
congregation, with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood, by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his
heart. He could have well nigh sworn, that the shape of his own dead father beckoned him to advance,
looking downward from a smoke-wreath, while a woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her
hand to warn him back. Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step, nor to resist, even in
thought, when the minister and good old Deacon Gookin seized his arms, and led him to the blazing
rock. Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female, led between Goody Cloyse, that pious
teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had received the devil's promise to be queen of hell.
A rampant hag was she! And there stood the proselytes, beneath the canopy of fire.
Welcome, my children, said the dark figure, to the communion of your race! Ye have found, thus
young, your nature and your destiny. My children, look behind you!
They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the fiend-worshippers were seen; the
smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage.
There, resumed the sable form, are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them holier
than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness, and
prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet, here are they all, in my worshipping assembly! This night it shall
be granted you to know their secret deeds; how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered
wanton words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widow's weeds,
has given her husband a drink at bedtime, and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless
youths have made haste to inherit their fathers' wealth; and how fair damselsblush not, sweet ones!
have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest, to an infant's funeral. By the
sympathy of your human hearts for sin, ye shall scent out all the placeswhether in church, bed-
chamber, street, field, or forestwhere crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole
earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood-spot. Far more than this! It shall be yours to penetrate, in
every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies
more evil impulses than human powerthan my power, at its utmost!can make manifest in deeds.
And now, my children, look upon each other.
They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the wretched man beheld his Faith, and the
wife her husband, trembling before that unhallowed altar.
Lo! there ye stand, my children, said the figure, in a deep and solemn torte, almost sad, with its
despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. Depending
upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped, that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived!
Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome, again, my children, to the
communion of your race!
Welcome! repeated the fiend-worshippers, in one cry of despair and triumph.
And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet hesitating on the verge of wickedness, in
this dark world. A basin was hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water, reddened by the lurid
light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame? Herein did the Shape of Evil dip his hand, and
prepare to lay the mark of baptism upon their foreheads, that they might be partakers of the mystery of
sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and thought, than they could now be of
their own. The husband cast one look at his pale wife, and Faith at him. What polluted wretches would
the next glance shew them to each other, shuddering alike at what they disclosed and what they saw!

Faith! Faith! cried the husband. Look up to Heaven, and resist the Wicked One!
Whether Faith obeyed, he knew not. Hardly had he spoken, when he found himself amid calm night and
solitude, listening to a roar of the wind, which died heavily away through the forest. He staggered
against the rock and felt it chill and damp, while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled
his cheek with the coldest dew.
The next morning, young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of Salem village, staring around
him like a bewildered man. The good old minister was taking a walk along the grave-yard, to get an
appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed, on Goodman
Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint, as if to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at
domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window. What God
cloth the wizard pray to? quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian, stood in
the early sunshine, at her own lattice, catechising a little girl, who had brought her a pint of morning's
milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child, as from the grasp of the fiend himself. Turning the
corner by the meetinghouse, he spied the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth,
and bursting into such joy at sight of him, that she skips along the street, and almost kissed her husband
before the whole village. But, Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on
without a greeting.
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?

Be it so, if you will. But, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a
darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become, from the night of that fearful
dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen,
because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear, and drowned all the blessed strain. When the
minister spoke from the pulpit, with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open Bible,
of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or
misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading, lest the roof should thunder down
upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awakening suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the
bosom of Faith, and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled, and
muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and
was borne to his grave, a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grand-
children, a goodly procession, besides neighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his
tomb-stone; for his dying hour was gloom.



HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)

Introduction

Herman Melville was Nathaniel Hawthornes younger contemporary and friend, and, like
Hawthorne, Melville was concerned with what one might call Americas moral landscape. But
Melville was less concerned than Hawthorne with abstract moral conceptions of good and evil, and
their effects upon us as individuals and as a community, and more concerned with our actual behavior
in terms of right and wrong, satisfaction and frustration, and success and failure. In the non-
allegorical world of reality, no abstract definition will suffice to guide us. Rather, we proceed by
instinct and habit, guided by social conventions and tradition, as we attempt to live with ourselves and
others in some sort of satisfactory manner.

Bartleby the Scrivener is a story about a successful, self-satisfied Wall-Street lawyer the storys
unnamed narrator who is surprised and unsettled in his routine and complacent existence by a
relationship with a young clerk, which calls into question his assumptions of right and wrong, and
success and failure. Bartleby seems at the outset the most conventional of clerks. He has none of the
unsettling idiosyncrasies of his two fellow scriveners, and works almost like a machine at his job.
Gradually, however, his individual nature begins to assert itself in a series of refusals to work. What
most unsettles his employer is that he does not refuse outright to perform the tasks assigned to him,
which would be clear insubordination and cause for immediate dismissal; rather he says that he
would prefer not to do them.

Bartlebys most personal and un-machine-like of refusals befuddles his employer, who is a creature
of convention and habit, unaccustomed to questioning the assumed categories by which he lives his
life. The narrator wishes to respond to Bartleby in the manner of a good man and kind employer,
which is how he prefers to think of himself, but Bartlebys staunch refusals to be reasoned with and to
negotiate his private preferences prompts the narrator to near-despair. Eventually, he abandons
Bartleby to the impersonal forces of the community and of the state, in whose inhuman grasp
Bartleby continuing to insist upon his individual preference in living his life gradually, inevitably,
declines and dies.

Melvilles uncanny story, which is both funny and haunting, is subtitled A Story of Wall Street. It
serves as an indictment of the modern worlds enslavement to business and financial interests to
impersonal, inhuman profit. Living in such a world, how is one to maintain ones human individuality
and moral dignity? As with all truly profound literature, Melvilles challenging and disturbing story
raises more questions than it presumes to answer.


Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853)

I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into
more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of
whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:--I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I
have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers
histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive
the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener the
strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby
nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of
this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is
ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own
astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will
appear in the sequel.
Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me, it is fit I make some mention of myself, my
employes, my business, my chambers, and general surroundings; because some such description is
indispensable to an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be presented.
Imprimis: I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the
easiest way of life is the best. Hence, though I belong to a profession proverbially energetic and
nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet nothing of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace. I
am one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public
applause; but in the cool tranquillity of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men's bonds and
mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob
Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand
point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was
not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat,
for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. I will freely add, that I was
not insensible to the late John Jacob Astor's good opinion.
Some time prior to the period at which this little history begins, my avocations had been largely
increased. The good old office, now extinct in the State of New-York, of a Master in Chancery, had
been conferred upon me. It was not a very arduous office, but very pleasantly remunerative. I seldom
lose my temper; much more seldom indulge in dangerous indignation at wrongs and outrages; but I
must be permitted to be rash here and declare, that I consider the sudden and violent abrogation of the
office of Master of Chancery, by the new Constitution, as a ---- premature act; inasmuch as I had
counted upon a life-lease of the profits, whereas I only received those of a few short years. But this is by
the way.
My chambers were up stairs at No. -- Wall-street. At one end they looked upon the white wall of the
interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom. This view might have
been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in what landscape painters call "life." But if so,
the view from the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. In that
direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and
everlasting shade; which wall required no spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but for the benefit
of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my window panes. Owing to the great
height of the surrounding buildings, and my chambers being on the second floor, the interval between
this wall and mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern.
At the period just preceding the advent of Bartleby, I had two persons as copyists in my employment,
and a promising lad as an office-boy. First, Turkey; second, Nippers; third, Ginger Nut. These may
seem names, the like of which are not usually found in the Directory. In truth they were nicknames,
mutually conferred upon each other by my three clerks, and were deemed expressive of their respective
persons or characters. Turkey was a short, pursy Englishman of about my own age, that is, somewhere
not far from sixty. In the morning, one might say, his face was of a fine florid hue, but after twelve
o'clock, meridian--his dinner hour--it blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazing--
but, as it were, with a gradual wane--till 6 o'clock, P. M. or thereabouts, after which I saw no more of
the proprietor of the face, which gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed to set with it, to rise,
culminate, and decline the following day, with the like regularity and undiminished glory. There are
many singular coincidences I have known in the course of my life, not the least among which was the
fact, that exactly when Turkey displayed his fullest beams from his red and radiant countenance, just
then, too, at that critical moment, began the daily period when I considered his business capacities as
seriously disturbed for the remainder of the twenty-four hours. Not that he was absolutely idle, or averse
to business then; far from it. The difficulty was, he was apt to be altogether too energetic. There was a
strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity about him. He would be incautious in dipping
his pen into his inkstand. All his blots upon my documents, were dropped there after twelve o'clock,
meridian. Indeed, not only would he be reckless and sadly given to making blots in the afternoon, but
some days he went further, and was rather noisy. At such times, too, his face flamed with augmented
blazonry, as if cannel coal had been heaped on anthracite. He made an unpleasant racket with his chair;
spilled his sand-box; in mending his pens, impatiently split them all to pieces, and threw them on the
floor in a sudden passion; stood up and leaned over his table, boxing his papers about in a most
indecorous manner, very sad to behold in an elderly man like him. Nevertheless, as he was in many
ways a most valuable person to me, and all the time before twelve o'clock, meridian, was the quickest,
steadiest creature too, accomplishing a great deal of work in a style not easy to be matched--for these
reasons, I was willing to overlook his eccentricities, though indeed, occasionally, I remonstrated with
him. I did this very gently, however, because, though the civilest, nay, the blandest and most reverential
of men in the morning, yet in the afternoon he was disposed, upon provocation, to be slightly rash with
his tongue, in fact, insolent. Now, valuing his morning services as I did, and resolved not to lose them;
yet, at the same time made uncomfortable by his inflamed ways after twelve o'clock; and being a man of
peace, unwilling by my admonitions to call forth unseemly retorts from him; I took upon me, one
Saturday noon (he was always worse on Saturdays), to hint to him, very kindly, that perhaps now that
he was growing old, it might be well to abridge his labors; in short, he need not come to my chambers
after twelve o'clock, but, dinner over, had best go home to his lodgings and rest himself till tea-time. But
no; he insisted upon his afternoon devotions. His countenance became intolerably fervid, as he
oratorically assured me--gesticulating with a long ruler at the other end of the room--that if his services
in the morning were useful, how indispensible, then, in the afternoon?
"With submission, sir," said Turkey on this occasion, "I consider myself your right-hand man. In the
morning I but marshal and deploy my columns; but in the afternoon I put myself at their head, and
gallantly charge the foe, thus!"--and he made a violent thrust with the ruler.
"But the blots, Turkey," intimated I.
"True,--but, with submission, sir, behold these hairs! I am getting old. Surely, sir, a blot or two of a
warm afternoon is not to be severely urged against gray hairs. Old age--even if it blot the page--is
honorable. With submission, sir, we both are getting old."
This appeal to my fellow-feeling was hardly to be resisted. At all events, I saw that go he would not. So
I made up my mind to let him stay, resolving, nevertheless, to see to it, that during the afternoon he had
to do with my less important papers.
Nippers, the second on my list, was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole, rather piratical-looking
young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers--ambition and
indigestion. The ambition was evinced by a certain impatience of the duties of a mere copyist, an
unwarrantable usurpation of strictly professional affairs, such as the original drawing up of legal
documents. The indigestion seemed betokened in an occasional nervous testiness and grinning
irritability, causing the teeth to audibly grind together over mistakes committed in copying; unnecessary
maledictions, hissed, rather than spoken, in the heat of business; and especially by a continual
discontent with the height of the table where he worked. Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn,
Nippers could never get this table to suit him. He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of
pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment by final pieces of folded
blotting-paper. But no invention would answer. If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table
lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch
house for his desk:--then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered the
table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back. In short,
the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted. Or, if he wanted any thing, it was to be
rid of a scrivener's table altogether. Among the manifestations of his diseased ambition was a fondness
he had for receiving visits from certain ambiguous-looking fellows in seedy coats, whom he called his
clients. Indeed I was aware that not only was he, at times, considerable of a ward-politician, but he
occasionally did a little business at the Justices' courts, and was not unknown on the steps of the Tombs.
I have good reason to believe, however, that one individual who called upon him at my chambers, and
who, with a grand air, he insisted was his client, was no other than a dun, and the alleged title-deed, a
bill. But with all his failings, and the annoyances he caused me, Nippers, like his compatriot Turkey,
was a very useful man to me; wrote a neat, swift hand; and, when he chose, was not deficient in a
gentlemanly sort of deportment. Added to this, he always dressed in a gentlemanly sort of way; and so,
incidentally, reflected credit upon my chambers. Whereas with respect to Turkey, I had much ado to
keep him from being a reproach to me. His clothes were apt to look oily and smell of eating-houses. He
wore his pantaloons very loose and baggy in summer. His coats were execrable; his hat not be to
handled. But while the hat was a thing of indifference to me, inasmuch as his natural civility and
deference, as a dependent Englishman, always led him to doff it the moment he entered the room, yet
his coat was another matter. Concerning his coats, I reasoned with him; but with no effect. The truth
was, I suppose, that a man with so small an income, could not afford to sport such a lustrous face and a
lustrous coat at one and the same time. As Nippers once observed, Turkey's money went chiefly for red
ink. One winter day I presented Turkey with a highly-respectable looking coat of my own, a padded
gray coat, of a most comfortable warmth, and which buttoned straight up from the knee to the neck. I
thought Turkey would appreciate the favor, and abate his rashness and obstreperousness of afternoons.
But no. I verily believe that buttoning himself up in so downy and blanket-like a coat had a pernicious
effect upon him; upon the same principle that too much oats are bad for horses. In fact, precisely as a
rash, restive horse is said to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his coat. It made him insolent. He was a man
whom prosperity harmed.
Though concerning the self-indulgent habits of Turkey I had my own private surmises, yet touching
Nippers I was well persuaded that whatever might be his faults in other respects, he was, at least, a
temperate young man. But indeed, nature herself seemed to have been his vintner, and at his birth
charged him so thoroughly with an irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were
needless. When I consider how, amid the stillness of my chambers, Nippers would sometimes
impatiently rise from his seat, and stooping over his table, spread his arms wide apart, seize the whole
desk, and move it, and jerk it, with a grim, grinding motion on the floor, as if the table were a perverse
voluntary agent, intent on thwarting and vexing him; I plainly perceive that for Nippers, brandy and
water were altogether superfluous.
It was fortunate for me that, owing to its peculiar cause--indigestion--the irritability and consequent
nervousness of Nippers, were mainly observable in the morning, while in the afternoon he was
comparatively mild. So that Turkey's paroxysms only coming on about twelve o'clock, I never had to do
with their eccentricities at one time. Their fits relieved each other like guards. When Nippers' was on,
Turkey's was off; and vice versa. This was a good natural arrangement under the circumstances.
Ginger Nut, the third on my list, was a lad some twelve years old. His father was a carman, ambitious of
seeing his son on the bench instead of a cart, before he died. So he sent him to my office as student at
law, errand boy, and cleaner and sweeper, at the rate of one dollar a week. He had a little desk to
himself, but he did not use it much. Upon inspection, the drawer exhibited a great array of the shells of
various sorts of nuts. Indeed, to this quick-witted youth the whole noble science of the law was
contained in a nut-shell. Not the least among the employments of Ginger Nut, as well as one which he
discharged with the most alacrity, was his duty as cake and apple purveyor for Turkey and Nippers.
Copying law papers being proverbially a dry, husky sort of business, my two scriveners were fain to
moisten their mouths very often with Spitzenbergs to be had at the numerous stalls nigh the Custom
House and Post Office. Also, they sent Ginger Nut very frequently for that peculiar cake--small, flat,
round, and very spicy--after which he had been named by them. Of a cold morning when business was
but dull, Turkey would gobble up scores of these cakes, as if they were mere wafers--indeed they sell
them at the rate of six or eight for a penny--the scrape of his pen blending with the crunching of the
crisp particles in his mouth. Of all the fiery afternoon blunders and flurried rashnesses of Turkey, was
his once moistening a ginger-cake between his lips, and clapping it on to a mortgage for a seal. I came
within an ace of dismissing him then. But he mollified me by making an oriental bow, and saying--
"With submission, sir, it was generous of me to find you in stationery on my own account."
Now my original business--that of a conveyancer and title hunter, and drawer-up of recondite
documents of all sorts--was considerably increased by receiving the master's office. There was now
great work for scriveners. Not only must I push the clerks already with me, but I must have additional
help. In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning, stood upon my office
threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now--pallidly neat, pitiably
respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby.
After a few words touching his qualifications, I engaged him, glad to have among my corps of copyists
a man of so singularly sedate an aspect, which I thought might operate beneficially upon the flighty
temper of Turkey, and the fiery one of Nippers.
I should have stated before that ground glass folding-doors divided my premises into two parts, one of
which was occupied by my scriveners, the other by myself. According to my humor I threw open these
doors, or closed them. I resolved to assign Bartleby a corner by the folding-doors, but on my side of
them, so as to have this quiet man within easy call, in case any trifling thing was to be done. I placed his
desk close up to a small side-window in that part of the room, a window which originally had afforded a
lateral view of certain grimy back-yards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections,
commanded at present no view at all, though it gave some light. Within three feet of the panes was a
wall, and the light came down from far above, between two lofty buildings, as from a very small
opening in a dome. Still further to a satisfactory arrangement, I procured a high green folding screen,
which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice. And thus,
in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined.
At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy,
he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night
line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application,
had be been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.
It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener's business to verify the accuracy of his copy, word
by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination,
one reading from the copy, the other holding the original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic
affair. I can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable. For
example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet Byron would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby
to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand.
Now and then, in the haste of business, it had been my habit to assist in comparing some brief document
myself, calling Turkey or Nippers for this purpose. One object I had in placing Bartleby so handy to me
behind the screen, was to avail myself of his services on such trivial occasions. It was on the third day, I
think, of his being with me, and before any necessity had arisen for having his own writing examined,
that, being much hurried to complete a small affair I had in hand, I abruptly called to Bartleby. In my
haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance, I sat with my head bent over the original on my
desk, and my right hand sideways, and somewhat nervously extended with the copy, so that
immediately upon emerging from his retreat, Bartleby might snatch it and proceed to business without
the least delay.
In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do--
namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without
moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, "I would prefer not to."
I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears
had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the
clearest tone I could assume. But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, "I would prefer not to."
"Prefer not to," echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with a stride. "What do you
mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to help me compare this sheet here--take it," and I thrust it
towards him.
"I would prefer not to," said he.
I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed; his gray eye dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of
agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his
manner; in other words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have
violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my
pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors. I stood gazing at him awhile, as he went on with his
own writing, and then reseated myself at my desk. This is very strange, thought I. What had one best
do? But my business hurried me. I concluded to forget the matter for the present, reserving it for my
future leisure. So calling Nippers from the other room, the paper was speedily examined.
A few days after this, Bartleby concluded four lengthy documents, being quadruplicates of a week's
testimony taken before me in my High Court of Chancery. It became necessary to examine them. It was
an important suit, and great accuracy was imperative. Having all things arranged I called Turkey,
Nippers and Ginger Nut from the next room, meaning to place the four copies in the hands of my four
clerks, while I should read from the original. Accordingly Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut had taken
their seats in a row, each with his document in hand, when I called to Bartleby to join this interesting
group.
"Bartleby! quick, I am waiting."
I heard a slow scrape of his chair legs on the uncarpeted floor, and soon he appeared standing at the
entrance of his hermitage.
"What is wanted?" said he mildly.
"The copies, the copies," said I hurriedly. "We are going to examine them. There"--and I held towards
him the fourth quadruplicate.
"I would prefer not to," he said, and gently disappeared behind the screen.
For a few moments I was turned into a pillar of salt, standing at the head of my seated column of clerks.
Recovering myself, I advanced towards the screen, and demanded the reason for such extraordinary
conduct.
"Why do you refuse?"
"I would prefer not to."
With any other man I should have flown outright into a dreadful passion, scorned all further words, and
thrust him ignominiously from my presence. But there was something about Bartleby that not only
strangely disarmed me, but in a wonderful manner touched and disconcerted me. I began to reason with
him.
"These are your own copies we are about to examine. It is labor saving to you, because one examination
will answer for your four papers. It is common usage. Every copyist is bound to help examine his copy.
Is it not so? Will you not speak? Answer!"
"I prefer not to," he replied in a flute-like tone. It seemed to me that while I had been addressing him, he
carefully revolved every statement that I made; fully comprehended the meaning; could not gainsay the
irresistible conclusion; but, at the same time, some paramount consideration prevailed with him to reply
as he did.
"You are decided, then, not to comply with my request--a request made according to common usage and
common sense?"
He briefly gave me to understand that on that point my judgment was sound. Yes: his decision was
irreversible.
It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently
unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to
surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side. Accordingly,
if any disinterested persons are present, he turns to them for some reinforcement for his own faltering
mind.
"Turkey," said I, "what do you think of this? Am I not right?"
"With submission, sir," said Turkey, with his blandest tone, "I think that you are."
"Nippers," said I, "what do you think of it?"
"I think I should kick him out of the office."
(The reader of nice perceptions will here perceive that, it being morning, Turkey's answer is couched in
polite and tranquil terms, but Nippers replies in ill-tempered ones. Or, to repeat a previous sentence,
Nippers's ugly mood was on duty, and Turkey's off.)
"Ginger Nut," said I, willing to enlist the smallest suffrage in my behalf, "what do you think of it?"
"I think, sir, he's a little luny," replied Ginger Nut, with a grin.
"You hear what they say," said I, turning towards the screen, "come forth and do your duty."
But he vouchsafed no reply. I pondered a moment in sore perplexity. But once more business hurried
me. I determined again to postpone the consideration of this dilemma to my future leisure. With a little
trouble we made out to examine the papers without Bartleby, though at every page or two, Turkey
deferentially dropped his opinion that this proceeding was quite out of the common; while Nippers,
twitching in his chair with a dyspeptic nervousness, ground out between his set teeth occasional hissing
maledictions against the stubborn oaf behind the screen. And for his (Nippers's) part, this was the first
and the last time he would do another man's business without pay.
Meanwhile Bartleby sat in his hermitage, oblivious to every thing but his own peculiar business there.
Some days passed, the scrivener being employed upon another lengthy work. His late remarkable
conduct led me to regard his ways narrowly. I observed that he never went to dinner; indeed that he
never went any where. As yet I had never of my personal knowledge known him to be outside of my
office. He was a perpetual sentry in the corner. At about eleven o'clock though, in the morning, I noticed
that Ginger Nut would advance toward the opening in Bartleby's screen, as if silently beckoned thither
by a gesture invisible to me where I sat. The boy would then leave the office jingling a few pence, and
reappear with a handful of ginger-nuts which he delivered in the hermitage, receiving two of the cakes
for his trouble.
He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian
then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in
reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts.
Ginger-nuts are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final
flavoring one. Now what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all.
Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none.
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the individual so resisted be of a not
inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity; then, in the better moods of
the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be
solved by his judgment. Even so, for the most part, I regarded Bartleby and his ways. Poor fellow!
thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that
his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him. If I turn him away, the
chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and
perhaps driven forth miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To
befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up
in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience. But this mood was not
invariable with me. The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to
encounter him in new opposition, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own. But
indeed I might as well have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap. But
one afternoon the evil impulse in me mastered me, and the following little scene ensued:
"Bartleby," said I, "when those papers are all copied, I will compare them with you."
"I would prefer not to."
"How? Surely you do not mean to persist in that mulish vagary?"
No answer.
I threw open the folding-doors near by, and turning upon Turkey and Nippers, exclaimed in an excited
manner--
"He says, a second time, he won't examine his papers. What do you think of it, Turkey?"
It was afternoon, be it remembered. Turkey sat glowing like a brass boiler, his bald head steaming, his
hands reeling among his blotted papers.
"Think of it?" roared Turkey; "I think I'll just step behind his screen, and black his eyes for him!"
So saying, Turkey rose to his feet and threw his arms into a pugilistic position. He was hurrying away to
make good his promise, when I detained him, alarmed at the effect of incautiously rousing Turkey's
combativeness after dinner.
"Sit down, Turkey," said I, "and hear what Nippers has to say. What do you think of it, Nippers? Would
I not be justified in immediately dismissing Bartleby?"
"Excuse me, that is for you to decide, sir. I think his conduct quite unusual, and indeed unjust, as
regards Turkey and myself. But it may only be a passing whim."
"Ah," exclaimed I, "you have strangely changed your mind then--you speak very gently of him now."
"All beer," cried Turkey; "gentleness is effects of beer--Nippers and I dined together to-day. You see
how gentle I am, sir. Shall I go and black his eyes?"
"You refer to Bartleby, I suppose. No, not to-day, Turkey," I replied; "pray, put up your fists."
I closed the doors, and again advanced towards Bartleby. I felt additional incentives tempting me to my
fate. I burned to be rebelled against again. I remembered that Bartleby never left the office.
"Bartleby," said I, "Ginger Nut is away; just step round to the Post Office, won't you? (it was but a three
minutes walk,) and see if there is any thing for me."
"I would prefer not to."
"You will not?"
"I prefer not."
I staggered to my desk, and sat there in a deep study. My blind inveteracy returned. Was there any other
thing in which I could procure myself to be ignominiously repulsed by this lean, penniless wight?--my
hired clerk? What added thing is there, perfectly reasonable, that he will be sure to refuse to do?
"Bartleby!"
No answer.
"Bartleby," in a louder tone.
No answer.
"Bartleby," I roared.
Like a very ghost, agreeably to the laws of magical invocation, at the third summons, he appeared at the
entrance of his hermitage.
"Go to the next room, and tell Nippers to come to me."
"I prefer not to," he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared.
"Very good, Bartleby," said I, in a quiet sort of serenely severe self-possessed tone, intimating the
unalterable purpose of some terrible retribution very close at hand. At the moment I half intended
something of the kind. But upon the whole, as it was drawing towards my dinner-hour, I thought it best
to put on my hat and walk home for the day, suffering much from perplexity and distress of mind.
Shall I acknowledge it? The conclusion of this whole business was, that it soon became a fixed fact of
my chambers, that a pale young scrivener, by the name of Bartleby, had a desk there; that he copied for
me at the usual rate of four cents a folio (one hundred words); but he was permanently exempt from
examining the work done by him, that duty being transferred to Turkey and Nippers, one of compliment
doubtless to their superior acuteness; moreover, said Bartleby was never on any account to be
dispatched on the most trivial errand of any sort; and that even if entreated to take upon him such a
matter, it was generally understood that he would prefer not to--in other words, that he would refuse
point-blank.
As days passed on, I became considerably reconciled to Bartleby. His steadiness, his freedom from all
dissipation, his incessant industry (except when he chose to throw himself into a standing revery behind
his screen), his great stillness, his unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances, made him a
valuable acquisition. One prime thing was this,--he was always there;--first in the morning, continually
through the day, and the last at night. I had a singular confidence in his honesty. I felt my most precious
papers perfectly safe in his hands. Sometimes to be sure I could not, for the very soul of me, avoid
falling into sudden spasmodic passions with him. For it was exceeding difficult to bear in mind all the
time those strange peculiarities, privileges, and unheard of exemptions, forming the tacit stipulations on
Bartleby's part under which he remained in my office. Now and then, in the eagerness of dispatching
pressing business, I would inadvertently summon Bartleby, in a short, rapid tone, to put his finger, say,
on the incipient tie of a bit of red tape with which I was about compressing some papers. Of course,
from behind the screen the usual answer, "I prefer not to," was sure to come; and then, how could a
human creature with the common infirmities of our nature, refrain from bitterly exclaiming upon such
perverseness--such unreasonableness. However, every added repulse of this sort which I received only
tended to lessen the probability of my repeating the inadvertence.
Here is must be said, that according to the custom of most legal gentlemen occupying chambers in
densely-populated law buildings, there were several keys to my door. One was kept by a woman
residing in the attic, which person weekly scrubbed and daily swept and dusted my apartments. Another
was kept by Turkey for convenience sake. The third I sometimes carried in my own pocket. The fourth I
knew not who had.
Now, one Sunday morning I happened to go to Trinity Church, to hear a celebrated preacher, and
finding myself rather early on the ground, I thought I would walk round to my chambers for a while.
Luckily I had my key with me; but upon applying it to the lock, I found it resisted by something inserted
from the inside. Quite surprised, I called out; when to my consternation a key was turned from within;
and thrusting his lean visage at me, and holding the door ajar, the apparition of Bartleby appeared, in his
shirt sleeves, and otherwise in a strangely tattered dishabille, saying quietly that he was sorry, but he
was deeply engaged just then, and--preferred not admitting me at present. In a brief word or two, he
moreover added, that perhaps I had better walk round the block two or three times, and by that time he
would probably have concluded his affairs.
Now, the utterly unsurmised appearance of Bartleby, tenanting my law-chambers of a Sunday morning,
with his cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance, yet withal firm and self-possessed, had such a strange
effect upon me, that incontinently I slunk away from my own door, and did as desired. But not without
sundry twinges of impotent rebellion against the mild effrontery of this unaccountable scrivener.
Indeed, it was his wonderful mildness chiefly, which not only disarmed me, but unmanned me, as it
were. For I consider that one, for the time, is a sort of unmanned when he tranquilly permits his hired
clerk to dictate to him, and order him away from his own premises. Furthermore, I was full of
uneasiness as to what Bartleby could possibly be doing in my office in his shirt sleeves, and in an
otherwise dismantled condition of a Sunday morning. Was any thing amiss going on? Nay, that was out
of the question. It was not to be thought of for a moment that Bartleby was an immoral person. But what
could he be doing there?--copying? Nay again, whatever might be his eccentricities, Bartleby was an
eminently decorous person. He would be the last man to sit down to his desk in any state approaching to
nudity. Besides, it was Sunday; and there was something about Bartleby that forbade the supposition
that we would by any secular occupation violate the proprieties of the day.
Nevertheless, my mind was not pacified; and full of a restless curiosity, at last I returned to the door.
Without hindrance I inserted my key, opened it, and entered. Bartleby was not to be seen. I looked
round anxiously, peeped behind his screen; but it was very plain that he was gone. Upon more closely
examining the place, I surmised that for an indefinite period Bartleby must have ate, dressed, and slept
in my office, and that too without plate, mirror, or bed. The cushioned seat of a ricketty old sofa in one
corner bore the faint impress of a lean, reclining form. Rolled away under his desk, I found a blanket;
under the empty grate, a blacking box and brush; on a chair, a tin basin, with soap and a ragged towel;
in a newspaper a few crumbs of ginger-nuts and a morsel of cheese. Yet, thought I, it is evident enough
that Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelor's hall all by himself. Immediately then
the thought came sweeping across me, What miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed!
His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as
Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building too, which of week-days hums with
industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here
Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous--a sort of innocent
and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!
For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had
never experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me
irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I
remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down
the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah,
happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery
there is none. These sad fancyings--chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly brain--led on to other and
more special thoughts, concerning the eccentricities of Bartleby. Presentiments of strange discoveries
hovered round me. The scrivener's pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its
shivering winding sheet.
Suddenly I was attracted by Bartleby's closed desk, the key in open sight left in the lock.
I mean no mischief, seek the gratification of no heartless curiosity, thought I; besides, the desk is mine,
and its contents too, so I will make bold to look within. Every thing was methodically arranged, the
papers smoothly placed. The pigeon holes were deep, and removing the files of documents, I groped
into their recesses. Presently I felt something there, and dragged it out. It was an old bandanna
handkerchief, heavy and knotted. I opened it, and saw it was a savings' bank.
I now recalled all the quiet mysteries which I had noted in the man. I remembered that he never spoke
but to answer; that though at intervals he had considerable time to himself, yet I had never seen him
reading--no, not even a newspaper; that for long periods he would stand looking out, at his pale window
behind the screen, upon the dead brick wall; I was quite sure he never visited any refectory or eating
house; while his pale face clearly indicated that he never drank beer like Turkey, or tea and coffee even,
like other men; that he never went any where in particular that I could learn; never went out for a walk,
unless indeed that was the case at present; that he had declined telling who he was, or whence he came,
or whether he had any relatives in the world; that though so thin and pale, he never complained of ill
health. And more than all, I remembered a certain unconscious air of pallid--how shall I call it?--of
pallid haughtiness, say, or rather an austere reserve about him, which had positively awed me into my
tame compliance with his eccentricities, when I had feared to ask him to do the slightest incidental thing
for me, even though I might know, from his long-continued motionlessness, that behind his screen he
must be standing in one of those dead-wall reveries of his.
Revolving all these things, and coupling them with the recently discovered fact that he made my office
his constant abiding place and home, and not forgetful of his morbid moodiness; revolving all these
things, a prudential feeling began to steal over me. My first emotions had been those of pure
melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my
imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so
terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in
certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is
owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of
remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is
perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it. What I
saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I
might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I
could not reach.
I did not accomplish the purpose of going to Trinity Church that morning. Somehow, the things I had
seen disqualified me for the time from church-going. I walked homeward, thinking what I would do
with Bartleby. Finally, I resolved upon this;--I would put certain calm questions to him the next
morning, touching his history, &c., and if he declined to answer then openly and reservedly (and I
supposed he would prefer not), then to give him a twenty dollar bill over and above whatever I might
owe him, and tell him his services were no longer required; but that if in any other way I could assist
him, I would be happy to do so, especially if he desired to return to his native place, wherever that
might be, I would willingly help to defray the expenses. Moreover, if, after reaching home, he found
himself at any time in want of aid, a letter from him would be sure of a reply.
The next morning came.
"Bartleby," said I, gently calling to him behind his screen.
No reply.
"Bartleby," said I, in a still gentler tone, "come here; I am not going to ask you to do any thing you
would prefer not to do--I simply wish to speak to you."
Upon this he noiselessly slid into view.
"Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?"
"I would prefer not to."
"Will you tell me any thing about yourself?"
"I would prefer not to."
"But what reasonable objection can you have to speak to me? I feel friendly towards you."
He did not look at me while I spoke, but kept his glance fixed upon my bust of Cicero, which as I then
sat, was directly behind me, some six inches above my head.
"What is your answer, Bartleby?" said I, after waiting a considerable time for a reply, during which his
countenance remained immovable, only there was the faintest conceivable tremor of the white
attenuated mouth.
"At present I prefer to give no answer," he said, and retired into his hermitage.
It was rather weak in me I confess, but his manner on this occasion nettled me. Not only did there seem
to lurk in it a certain disdain, but his perverseness seemed ungrateful, considering the undeniable good
usage and indulgence he had received from me.
Again I sat ruminating what I should do. Mortified as I was at his behavior, and resolved as I had been
to dismiss him when I entered my office, nevertheless I strangely felt something superstitious knocking
at my heart, and forbidding me to carry out my purpose, and denouncing me for a villain if I dared to
breathe one bitter word against this forlornest of mankind. At last, familiarly drawing my chair behind
his screen, I sat down and said: "Bartleby, never mind then about revealing your history; but let me
entreat you, as a friend, to comply as far as may be with the usages of this office. Say now you will help
to examine papers to-morrow or next day: in short, say now that in a day or two you will begin to be a
little reasonable:--say so, Bartleby."
"At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable," was his mildly cadaverous reply.
Just then the folding-doors opened, and Nippers approached. He seemed suffering from an unusually
bad night's rest, induced by severer indigestion than common. He overheard those final words of
Bartleby.
"Prefer not, eh?" gritted Nippers--"I'd prefer him, if I were you, sir," addressing me--"I'd prefer him; I'd
give him preferences, the stubborn mule! What is it, sir, pray, that he prefers not to do now?"
Bartleby moved not a limb.
"Mr. Nippers," said I, "I'd prefer that you would withdraw for the present."
Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word "prefer" upon all sorts of not
exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already and
seriously affected me in a mental way. And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce?
This apprehension had not been without efficacy in determining me to summary means.
As Nippers, looking very sour and sulky, was departing, Turkey blandly and deferentially approached.
"With submission, sir," said he, "yesterday I was thinking about Bartleby here, and I think that if he
would but prefer to take a quart of good ale every day, it would do much towards mending him, and
enabling him to assist in examining his papers."
"So you have got the word too," said I, slightly excited.
"With submission, what word, sir," asked Turkey, respectfully crowding himself into the contracted
space behind the screen, and by so doing, making me jostle the scrivener. "What word, sir?"
"I would prefer to be left alone here," said Bartleby, as if offended at being mobbed in his privacy.
"That's the word, Turkey," said I--"that's it."
"Oh, prefer? oh yes--queer word. I never use it myself. But, sir, as I was saying, if he would but prefer--
"
"Turkey," interrupted I, "you will please withdraw."
"Oh, certainly, sir, if you prefer that I should."
As he opened the folding-door to retire, Nippers at his desk caught a glimpse of me, and asked whether
I would prefer to have a certain paper copied on blue paper or white. He did not in the least roguishly
accent the word prefer. It was plain that it involuntarily rolled from his tongue. I thought to myself,
surely I must get rid of a demented man, who already has in some degree turned the tongues, if not the
heads of myself and clerks. But I thought it prudent not to break the dismission at once.
The next day I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall revery. Upon
asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing.
"Why, how now? what next?" exclaimed I, "do no more writing?"
"No more."
"And what is the reason?"
"Do you not see the reason for yourself," he indifferently replied.
I looked steadfastly at him, and perceived that his eyes looked dull and glazed. Instantly it occurred to
me, that his unexampled diligence in copying by his dim window for the first few weeks of his stay with
me might have temporarily impaired his vision.
I was touched. I said something in condolence with him. I hinted that of course he did wisely in
abstaining from writing for a while; and urged him to embrace that opportunity of taking wholesome
exercise in the open air. This, however, he did not do. A few days after this, my other clerks being
absent, and being in a great hurry to dispatch certain letters by the mail, I thought that, having nothing
else earthly to do, Bartleby would surely be less inflexible than usual, and carry these letters to the post-
office. But he blankly declined. So, much to my inconvenience, I went myself.
Still added days went by. Whether Bartleby's eyes improved or not, I could not say. To all appearance, I
thought they did. But when I asked him if they did, he vouchsafed no answer. At all events, he would do
no copying. At last, in reply to my urgings, he informed me that he had permanently given up copying.
"What!" exclaimed I; "suppose your eyes should get entirely well--better than ever before--would you
not copy then?"
"I have given up copying," he answered, and slid aside.
He remained as ever, a fixture in my chamber. Nay--if that were possible--he became still more of a
fixture than before. What was to be done? He would do nothing in the office: why should he stay there?
In plain fact, he had now become a millstone to me, not only useless as a necklace, but afflictive to bear.
Yet I was sorry for him. I speak less than truth when I say that, on his own account, he occasioned me
uneasiness. If he would but have named a single relative or friend, I would instantly have written, and
urged their taking the poor fellow away to some convenient retreat. But he seemed alone, absolutely
alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic. At length, necessities connected with my
business tyrannized over all other considerations. Decently as I could, I told Bartleby that in six days'
time he must unconditionally leave the office. I warned him to take measures, in the interval, for
procuring some other abode. I offered to assist him in this endeavor, if he himself would but take the
first step towards a removal. "And when you finally quit me, Bartleby," added I, "I shall see that you go
not away entirely unprovided. Six days from this hour, remember."
At the expiration of that period, I peeped behind the screen, and lo! Bartleby was there.
I buttoned up my coat, balanced myself; advanced slowly towards him, touched his shoulder, and said,
"The time has come; you must quit this place; I am sorry for you; here is money; but you must go."
"I would prefer not," he replied, with his back still towards me.
"You must."
He remained silent.
Now I had an unbounded confidence in this man's common honesty. He had frequently restored to me
sixpences and shillings carelessly dropped upon the floor, for I am apt to be very reckless in such shirt-
button affairs. The proceeding then which followed will not be deemed extraordinary.
"Bartleby," said I, "I owe you twelve dollars on account; here are thirty-two; the odd twenty are yours.--
Will you take it?" and I handed the bills towards him.
But he made no motion.
"I will leave them here then," putting them under a weight on the table. Then taking my hat and cane
and going to the door I tranquilly turned and added--"After you have removed your things from these
offices, Bartleby, you will of course lock the door--since every one is now gone for the day but you--
and if you please, slip your key underneath the mat, so that I may have it in the morning. I shall not see
you again; so good-bye to you. If hereafter in your new place of abode I can be of any service to you, do
not fail to advise me by letter. Good-bye, Bartleby, and fare you well."
But he answered not a word; like the last column of some ruined temple, he remained standing mute and
solitary in the middle of the otherwise deserted room.
As I walked home in a pensive mood, my vanity got the better of my pity. I could not but highly plume
myself on my masterly management in getting rid of Bartleby. Masterly I call it, and such it must appear
to any dispassionate thinker. The beauty of my procedure seemed to consist in its perfect quietness.
There was no vulgar bullying, no bravado of any sort, no choleric hectoring, and striding to and fro
across the apartment, jerking out vehement commands for Bartleby to bundle himself off with his
beggarly traps. Nothing of the kind. Without loudly bidding Bartleby depart--as an inferior genius might
have done--I assumed the ground that depart he must; and upon the assumption built all I had to say.
The more I thought over my procedure, the more I was charmed with it. Nevertheless, next morning,
upon awakening, I had my doubts,--I had somehow slept off the fumes of vanity. One of the coolest and
wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning. My procedure seemed as sagacious as
ever,--but only in theory. How it would prove in practice--there was the rub. It was truly a beautiful
thought to have assumed Bartleby's departure; but, after all, that assumption was simply my own, and
none of Bartleby's. The great point was, not whether I had assumed that he would quit me, but whether
he would prefer so to do. He was more a man of preferences than assumptions.
AFTER breakfast, I walked down town, arguing the probabilities pro and con. One moment I thought it
would prove a miserable failure, and Bartleby would be found all alive at my office as usual; the next
moment it seemed certain that I should see his chair empty. And so I kept veering about. At the corner
of Broadway and Canal-street, I saw quite an excited group of people standing in earnest conversation.
"I'll take odds he doesn't," said a voice as I passed.
"Doesn't go?--done!" said I, "put up your money."
I was instinctively putting my hand in my pocket to produce my own, when I remembered that this was
an election day. The words I had overheard bore no reference to Bartleby, but to the success or non-
success of some candidate for the mayoralty. In my intent frame of mind, I had, as it were, imagined
that all Broadway shared in my excitement, and were debating the same question with me. I passed on,
very thankful that the uproar of the street screened my momentary absent-mindedness.
As I had intended, I was earlier than usual at my office door. I stood listening for a moment. All was
still. He must be gone. I tried the knob. The door was locked. Yes, my procedure had worked to a
charm; he indeed must be vanished. Yet a certain melancholy mixed with this: I was almost sorry for
my brilliant success. I was fumbling under the door mat for the key, which Bartleby was to have left
there for me, when accidentally my knee knocked against a panel, producing a summoning sound, and
in response a voice came to me from within--"Not yet; I am occupied."
It was Bartleby.
I was thunderstruck. For an instant I stood like the man who, pipe in mouth, was killed one cloudless
afternoon long ago in Virginia, by summer lightning; at his own warm open window he was killed, and
remained leaning out there upon the dreamy afternoon, till some one touched him, when he fell.
"Not gone!" I murmured at last. But again obeying that wondrous ascendancy which the inscrutable
scrivener had over me, and from which ascendency, for all my chafing, I could not completely escape, I
slowly went down stairs and out into the street, and while walking round the block, considered what I
should next do in this unheard-of perplexity. Turn the man out by an actual thrusting I could not; to
drive him away by calling him hard names would not do; calling in the police was an unpleasant idea;
and yet, permit him to enjoy his cadaverous triumph over me,--this too I could not think of. What was to
be done? or, if nothing could be done, was there any thing further that I could assume in the matter?
Yes, as before I had prospectively assumed that Bartleby would depart, so now I might retrospectively
assume that departed he was. In the legitimate carrying out of this assumption, I might enter my office
in a great hurry, and pretending not to see Bartleby at all, walk straight against him as if he were air.
Such a proceeding would in a singular degree have the appearance of a home-thrust. It was hardly
possible that Bartleby could withstand such an application of the doctrine of assumptions. But upon
second thoughts the success of the plan seemed rather dubious. I resolved to argue the matter over with
him again.
"Bartleby," said I, entering the office, with a quietly severe expression, "I am seriously displeased. I am
pained, Bartleby. I had thought better of you. I had imagined you of such a gentlemanly organization,
that in any delicate dilemma a slight hint would suffice--in short, an assumption. But it appears I am
deceived. Why," I added, unaffectedly starting, "you have not even touched the money yet," pointing to
it, just where I had left it the evening previous.
He answered nothing.
"Will you, or will you not, quit me?" I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him.
"I would prefer not to quit you," he replied, gently emphasizing the not.
"What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any rent? Do you pay my taxes? Or is this
property yours?"
He answered nothing.
"Are you ready to go on and write now? Are your eyes recovered? Could you copy a small paper for me
this morning? or help examine a few lines? or step round to the post-office? In a word, will you do any
thing at all, to give a coloring to your refusal to depart the premises?"
He silently retired into his hermitage.
I was now in such a state of nervous resentment that I thought it but prudent to check myself at present
from further demonstrations. Bartleby and I were alone. I remembered the tragedy of the unfortunate
Adams and the still more unfortunate Colt in the solitary office of the latter; and how poor Colt, being
dreadfully incensed by Adams, and imprudently permitting himself to get wildly excited, was at
unawares hurried into his fatal act--an act which certainly no man could possibly deplore more than the
actor himself. Often it had occurred to me in my ponderings upon the subject, that had that altercation
taken place in the public street, or at a private residence, it would not have terminated as it did. It was
the circumstance of being alone in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by
humanizing domestic associations--an uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty, haggard sort of
appearance;--this it must have been, which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the
hapless Colt.
But when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and tempted me concerning Bartleby, I grappled him
and threw him. How? Why, simply by recalling the divine injunction: "A new commandment give I
unto you, that ye love one another." Yes, this it was that saved me. Aside from higher considerations,
charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle--a great safeguard to its possessor. Men
have committed murder for jealousy's sake, and anger's sake, and hatred's sake, and selfishness' sake,
and spiritual pride's sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet
charity's sake. Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with high-
tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy. At any rate, upon the occasion in
question, I strove to drown my exasperated feelings towards the scrivener by benevolently construing
his conduct. Poor fellow, poor fellow! thought I, he don't mean any thing; and besides, he has seen hard
times, and ought to be indulged.
I endeavored also immediately to occupy myself, and at the same time to comfort my despondency. I
tried to fancy that in the course of the morning, at such time as might prove agreeable to him, Bartleby,
of his own free accord, would emerge from his hermitage, and take up some decided line of march in
the direction of the door. But no. Half-past twelve o'clock came; Turkey began to glow in the face,
overturn his inkstand, and become generally obstreperous; Nippers abated down into quietude and
courtesy; Ginger Nut munched his noon apple; and Bartleby remained standing at his window in one of
his profoundest dead-wall reveries. Will it be credited? Ought I to acknowledge it? That afternoon I left
the office without saying one further word to him.
Some days now passed, during which, at leisure intervals I looked a little into "Edwards on the Will,"
and "Priestley on Necessity." Under the circumstances, those books induced a salutary feeling.
Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine touching the scrivener, had been all
predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-
wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom. Yes, Bartleby, stay there behind
your screen, thought I; I shall persecute you no more; you are harmless and noiseless as any of these old
chairs; in short, I never feel so private as when I know you are here. At least I see it, I feel it; I penetrate
to the predestinated purpose of my life. I am content. Others may have loftier parts to enact; but my
mission in this world, Bartleby, is to furnish you with office-room for such period as you may see fit to
remain.
I believe that this wise and blessed frame of mind would have continued with me, had it not been for the
unsolicited and uncharitable remarks obtruded upon me by my professional friends who visited the
rooms. But thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves
of the more generous. Though to be sure, when I reflected upon it, it was not strange that people
entering my office should be struck by the peculiar aspect of the unaccountable Bartleby, and so be
tempted to throw out some sinister observations concerning him. Sometimes an attorney having
business with me, and calling at my office, and finding no one but the scrivener there, would undertake
to obtain some sort of precise information from him touching my whereabouts; but without heeding his
idle talk, Bartleby would remain standing immovable in the middle of the room. So after contemplating
him in that position for a time, the attorney would depart, no wiser than he came.
Also, when a Reference was going on, and the room full of lawyers and witnesses and business was
driving fast; some deeply occupied legal gentleman present, seeing Bartleby wholly unemployed, would
request him to run round to his (the legal gentleman's) office and fetch some papers for him. Thereupon,
Bartleby would tranquilly decline, and yet remain idle as before. Then the lawyer would give a great
stare, and turn to me. And what could I say? At last I was made aware that all through the circle of my
professional acquaintance, a whisper of wonder was running round, having reference to the strange
creature I kept at my office. This worried me very much. And as the idea came upon me of his possibly
turning out a long-lived man, and keep occupying my chambers, and denying my authority; and
perplexing my visitors; and scandalizing my professional reputation; and casting a general gloom over
the premises; keeping soul and body together to the last upon his savings (for doubtless he spent but half
a dime a day), and in the end perhaps outlive me, and claim possession of my office by right of his
perpetual occupancy: as all these dark anticipations crowded upon me more and more, and my friends
continually intruded their relentless remarks upon the apparition in my room; a great change was
wrought in me. I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and for ever rid me of this intolerable
incubus.
Ere revolving any complicated project, however, adapted to this end, I first simply suggested to
Bartleby the propriety of his permanent departure. In a calm and serious tone, I commended the idea to
his careful and mature consideration. But having taken three days to meditate upon it, he apprised me
that his original determination remained the same; in short, that he still preferred to abide with me.
What shall I do? I now said to myself, buttoning up my coat to the last button. What shall I do? what
ought I to do? what does conscience say I should do with this man, or rather ghost. Rid myself of him, I
must; go, he shall. But how? You will not thrust him, the poor, pale, passive mortal,--you will not thrust
such a helpless creature out of your door? you will not dishonor yourself by such cruelty? No, I will not,
I cannot do that. Rather would I let him live and die here, and then mason up his remains in the wall.
What then will you do? For all your coaxing, he will not budge. Bribes he leaves under your own
paperweight on your table; in short, it is quite plain that he prefers to cling to you.
Then something severe, something unusual must be done. What! surely you will not have him collared
by a constable, and commit his innocent pallor to the common jail? And upon what ground could you
procure such a thing to be done?--a vagrant, is he? What! he a vagrant, a wanderer, who refuses to
budge? It is because he will not be a vagrant, then, that you seek to count him as a vagrant. That is too
absurd. No visible means of support: there I have him. Wrong again: for indubitably he does support
himself, and that is the only unanswerable proof that any man can show of his possessing the means so
to do. No more then. Since he will not quit me, I must quit him. I will change my offices; I will move
elsewhere; and give him fair notice, that if I find him on my new premises I will then proceed against
him as a common trespasser.
Acting accordingly, next day I thus addressed him: "I find these chambers too far from the City Hall;
the air is unwholesome. In a word, I propose to remove my offices next week, and shall no longer
require your services. I tell you this now, in order that you may seek another place."
He made no reply, and nothing more was said.
On the appointed day I engaged carts and men, proceeded to my chambers, and having but little
furniture, every thing was removed in a few hours. Throughout, the scrivener remained standing behind
the screen, which I directed to be removed the last thing. It was withdrawn; and being folded up like a
huge folio, left him the motionless occupant of a naked room. I stood in the entry watching him a
moment, while something from within me upbraided me.
I re-entered, with my hand in my pocket--and--and my heart in my mouth.
"Good-bye, Bartleby; I am going--good-bye, and God some way bless you; and take that," slipping
something in his hand. But it dropped upon the floor, and then,--strange to say--I tore myself from him
whom I had so longed to be rid of.
Established in my new quarters, for a day or two I kept the door locked, and started at every footfall in
the passages. When I returned to my rooms after any little absence, I would pause at the threshold for an
instant, and attentively listen, ere applying my key. But these fears were needless. Bartleby never came
nigh me.
I thought all was going well, when a perturbed looking stranger visited me, inquiring whether I was the
person who had recently occupied rooms at No. -- Wall-street.
Full of forebodings, I replied that I was.
"Then sir," said the stranger, who proved a lawyer, "you are responsible for the man you left there. He
refuses to do any copying; he refuses to do any thing; he says he prefers not to; and he refuses to quit
the premises."
"I am very sorry, sir," said I, with assumed tranquillity, but an inward tremor, "but, really, the man you
allude to is nothing to me--he is no relation or apprentice of mine, that you should hold me responsible
for him."
"In mercy's name, who is he?"
"I certainly cannot inform you. I know nothing about him. Formerly I employed him as a copyist; but he
has done nothing for me now for some time past."
"I shall settle him then,--good morning, sir."
Several days passed, and I heard nothing more; and though I often felt a charitable prompting to call at
the place and see poor Bartleby, yet a certain squeamishness of I know not what withheld me.
All is over with him, by this time, thought I at last, when through another week no further intelligence
reached me. But coming to my room the day after, I found several persons waiting at my door in a high
state of nervous excitement.
"That's the man--here he comes," cried the foremost one, whom I recognized as the lawyer who had
previously called upon me alone.
"You must take him away, sir, at once," cried a portly person among them, advancing upon me, and
whom I knew to be the landlord of No. -- Wall-street. "These gentlemen, my tenants, cannot stand it any
longer; Mr. B----" pointing to the lawyer, "has turned him out of his room, and he now persists in
haunting the building generally, sitting upon the banisters of the stairs by day, and sleeping in the entry
by night. Every body is concerned; clients are leaving the offices; some fears are entertained of a mob;
something you must do, and that without delay."
Aghast at this torrent, I fell back before it, and would fain have locked myself in my new quarters. In
vain I persisted that Bartleby was nothing to me--no more than to any one else. In vain:--I was the last
person known to have any thing to do with him, and they held me to the terrible account. Fearful then of
being exposed in the papers (as one person present obscurely threatened) I considered the matter, and at
length said, that if the lawyer would give me a confidential interview with the scrivener, in his (the
lawyer's) own room, I would that afternoon strive my best to rid them of the nuisance they complained
of.
Going up stairs to my old haunt, there was Bartleby silently sitting upon the banister at the landing.
"What are you doing here, Bartleby?" said I.
"Sitting upon the banister," he mildly replied.
I motioned him into the lawyer's room, who then left us.
"Bartleby," said I, "are you aware that you are the cause of great tribulation to me, by persisting in
occupying the entry after being dismissed from the office?"
No answer.
"Now one of two things must take place. Either you must do something, or something must be done to
you. Now what sort of business would you like to engage in? Would you like to re-engage in copying
for some one?"
"No; I would prefer not to make any change."
"Would you like a clerkship in a dry-goods store?"
"There is too much confinement about that. No, I would not like a clerkship; but I am not particular."
"Too much confinement," I cried, "why you keep yourself confined all the time!"
"I would prefer not to take a clerkship," he rejoined, as if to settle that little item at once.
"How would a bar-tender's business suit you? There is no trying of the eyesight in that."
"I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular."
His unwonted wordiness inspirited me. I returned to the charge.
"Well then, would you like to travel through the country collecting bills for the merchants? That would
improve your health."
"No, I would prefer to be doing something else."
"How then would going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some young gentleman with your
conversation,--how would that suit you?"
"Not at all. It does not strike me that there is any thing definite about that. I like to be stationary. But I
am not particular."
"Stationary you shall be then," I cried, now losing all patience, and for the first time in all my
exasperating connection with him fairly flying into a passion. "If you do not go away from these
premises before night, I shall feel bound--indeed I am bound--to--to--to quit the premises myself!" I
rather absurdly concluded, knowing not with what possible threat to try to frighten his immobility into
compliance. Despairing of all further efforts, I was precipitately leaving him, when a final thought
occurred to me--one which had not been wholly unindulged before.
"Bartleby," said I, in the kindest tone I could assume under such exciting circumstances, "will you go
home with me now--not to my office, but my dwelling--and remain there till we can conclude upon
some convenient arrangement for you at our leisure? Come, let us start now, right away."
"No: at present I would prefer not to make any change at all."
I answered nothing; but effectually dodging every one by the suddenness and rapidity of my flight,
rushed from the building, ran up Wall-street towards Broadway, and jumping into the first omnibus was
soon removed from pursuit. As soon as tranquillity returned I distinctly perceived that I had now done
all that I possibly could, both in respect to the demands of the landlord and his tenants, and with regard
to my own desire and sense of duty, to benefit Bartleby, and shield him from rude persecution. I now
strove to be entirely care-free and quiescent; and my conscience justified me in the attempt; though
indeed it was not so successful as I could have wished. So fearful was I of being again hunted out by the
incensed landlord and his exasperated tenants, that, surrendering my business to Nippers, for a few days
I drove about the upper part of the town and through the suburbs, in my rockaway; crossed over to
Jersey City and Hoboken, and paid fugitive visits to Manhattanville and Astoria. In fact I almost lived in
my rockaway for the time.
When again I entered my office, lo, a note from the landlord lay upon the desk. I opened it with
trembling hands. It informed me that the writer had sent to the police, and had Bartleby removed to the
Tombs as a vagrant. Moreover, since I knew more about him than any one else, he wished me to appear
at that place, and make a suitable statement of the facts. These tidings had a conflicting effect upon me.
At first I was indignant; but at last almost approved. The landlord's energetic, summary disposition had
led him to adopt a procedure which I do not think I would have decided upon myself; and yet as a last
resort, under such peculiar circumstances, it seemed the only plan.
As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered
not the slightest obstacle, but in his pale unmoving way, silently acquiesced.
Some of the compassionate and curious bystanders joined the party; and headed by one of the
constables arm in arm with Bartleby, the silent procession filed its way through all the noise, and heat,
and joy of the roaring thoroughfares at noon.
The same day I received the note I went to the Tombs, or to speak more properly, the Halls of Justice.
Seeking the right officer, I stated the purpose of my call, and was informed that the individual I
described was indeed within. I then assured the functionary that Bartleby was a perfectly honest man,
and greatly to be compassionated, however unaccountably eccentric. I narrated all I knew, and closed by
suggesting the idea of letting him remain in as indulgent confinement as possible till something less
harsh might be done--though indeed I hardly knew what. At all events, if nothing else could be decided
upon, the alms-house must receive him. I then begged to have an interview.
Being under no disgraceful charge, and quite serene and harmless in all his ways, they had permitted
him freely to wander about the prison, and especially in the inclosed grass-platted yards thereof. And so
I found him there, standing all alone in the quietest of the yards, his face towards a high wall, while all
around, from the narrow slits of the jail windows, I thought I saw peering out upon him the eyes of
murderers and thieves.
"Bartleby!"
"I know you," he said, without looking round,--"and I want nothing to say to you."
"It was not I that brought you here, Bartleby," said I, keenly pained at his implied suspicion. "And to
you, this should not be so vile a place. Nothing reproachful attaches to you by being here. And see, it is
not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass."
"I know where I am," he replied, but would say nothing more, and so I left him.
As I entered the corridor again, a broad meat-like man, in an apron, accosted me, and jerking his thumb
over his shoulder said--"Is that your friend?"
"Yes."
"Does he want to starve? If he does, let him live on the prison fare, that's all."
"Who are you?" asked I, not knowing what to make of such an unofficially speaking person in such a
place.
"I am the grub-man. Such gentlemen as have friends here, hire me to provide them with something good
to eat."
"Is this so?" said I, turning to the turnkey.
He said it was.
"Well then," said I, slipping some silver into the grub-man's hands (for so they called him). "I want you
to give particular attention to my friend there; let him have the best dinner you can get. And you must
be as polite to him as possible."
"Introduce me, will you?" said the grub-man, looking at me with an expression which seem to say he
was all impatience for an opportunity to give a specimen of his breeding.
Thinking it would prove of benefit to the scrivener, I acquiesced; and asking the grub-man his name,
went up with him to Bartleby.
"Bartleby, this is Mr. Cutlets; you will find him very useful to you."
"Your sarvant, sir, your sarvant," said the grub-man, making a low salutation behind his apron. "Hope
you find it pleasant here, sir;--spacious grounds--cool apartments, sir--hope you'll stay with us some
time--try to make it agreeable. May Mrs. Cutlets and I have the pleasure of your company to dinner, sir,
in Mrs. Cutlets' private room?"
"I prefer not to dine to-day," said Bartleby, turning away. "It would disagree with me; I am unused to
dinners." So saying he slowly moved to the other side of the inclosure, and took up a position fronting
the dead-wall.
"How's this?" said the grub-man, addressing me with a stare of astonishment. "He's odd, aint he?"
"I think he is a little deranged," said I, sadly.
"Deranged? deranged is it? Well now, upon my word, I thought that friend of yourn was a gentleman
forger; they are always pale and genteel-like, them forgers. I can't help pity 'em--can't help it, sir. Did
you know Monroe Edwards?" he added touchingly, and paused. Then, laying his hand pityingly on my
shoulder, sighed, "he died of consumption at Sing-Sing. So you weren't acquainted with Monroe?"
"No, I was never socially acquainted with any forgers. But I cannot stop longer. Look to my friend
yonder. You will not lose by it. I will see you again."
Some few days after this, I again obtained admission to the Tombs, and went through the corridors in
quest of Bartleby; but without finding him.
"I saw him coming from his cell not long ago," said a turnkey, "may be he's gone to loiter in the yards."
So I went in that direction.
"Are you looking for the silent man?" said another turnkey passing me. "Yonder he lies--sleeping in the
yard there. 'Tis not twenty minutes since I saw him lie down."
The yard was entirely quiet. It was not accessible to the common prisoners. The surrounding walls, of
amazing thickness, kept off all sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed
upon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it
seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung.
Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side, his head touching
the cold stones, I saw the wasted Bartleby. But nothing stirred. I paused; then went close up to him;
stooped over, and saw that his dim eyes were open; otherwise he seemed profoundly sleeping.
Something prompted me to touch him. I felt his hand, when a tingling shiver ran up my arm and down
my spine to my feet.
The round face of the grub-man peered upon me now. "His dinner is ready. Won't he dine to-day,
either? Or does he live without dining?"
"Lives without dining," said I, and closed the eyes.
"Eh!--He's asleep, aint he?"
"With kings and counsellors," murmured I.
* *
* * * * * *
There would seem little need for proceeding further in this history. Imagination will readily supply the
meagre recital of poor Bartleby's interment. But ere parting with the reader, let me say, that if this little
narrative has sufficiently interested him, to awaken curiosity as to who Bartleby was, and what manner
of life he led prior to the present narrator's making his acquaintance, I can only reply, that in such
curiosity I fully share, but am wholly unable to gratify it. Yet here I hardly know whether I should
divulge one little item of rumor, which came to my ear a few months after the scrivener's decease. Upon
what basis it rested, I could never ascertain; and hence, how true it is I cannot now tell. But inasmuch as
this vague report has not been without a certain strange suggestive interest to me, however sad, it may
prove the same with some others; and so I will briefly mention it. The report was this: that Bartleby had
been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly
removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express
the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature
and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that
of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they
are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:--the finger it was
meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:--he whom it would
relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died
unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these
letters speed to death.
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!


WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

Introduction

No major American author has been a more forceful and fervid believer in, and exponent of, the
possibilities of the individual in the New World than Walt Whitman. In his wholly original epic of the
individual, Song of Myself, Whitman propounds the dignity, integrity, and centrality of the
individual self. Tradition, family, custom, religion, nation, and community are all of secondary
importance in regard to the freedom and dignity of the individual, according to Whitman.

American democracy itself is primarily important, he argued, because it provides an environment for
the growth and maturity of the individual soul. The success of humanitys future depends upon this
maturation, which necessarily will involve the sloughing off of social and intellectual impediments
inherited from other cultures and places, such as rigid class structures and superstitious religious
beliefs.

In the first six sections of Song of Myself printed below (there are 52 sections in all), Whitman
attempts to impress upon the reader his vision of an individual self that has been enabled to expand
beyond its traditional boundaries. This self is very complex and has a dual nature. One aspect of the
self is involved with the world, and is in fact indistinguishable from it; it is the world. But a second
nature of the self is apart from the pulling and hauling of the world, and stands watching and
wondering at it. This separate self is the peculiarly American ideal of the free and isolated
individual without ties to family, community, or other. It cannot be argued with and refuses to
negotiate. It is rather like a disembodied spirit or ghost.

In general, however, Whitmans self as portrayed in the poem is invested in the world and is
thoroughly material intimately related to the grass and earth, as to the animals and other human
beings. This self is involved in the progress of life, which includes death. From Whitmans point of
view, death is merely another stage of life. It is not so much an ending as it is a transformation or
translation. As Whitman writes, All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses / And to die is
different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

In Song of Myself, Whitman attempted to replace the negative, judgmental religious morality of
early American community and culture with a positive morality of relatedness between the self and
other, and between all living creatures. Whitmans powerful vision of relatedness retains its
attraction today for those imaginative readers who remain open to such an appeal.


from Song of Myself (1855)

1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

2
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with
perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and
vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing
of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies of
the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields
and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising
from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the
earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

3
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and
increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of
life.
To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well
entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not
my soul.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they
discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty
and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be
less familiar than the rest.

I am satisfied - I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the
night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy
tread,
Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with
their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my
eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is
ahead?

4
Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and
city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old
and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss
or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news,
the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with
linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

5
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to
you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue
to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my
feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and
poke-weed.

6
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out
of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for
nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and
women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Chapter 4: The American Civil War and Its Aftermath

Background of the American Civil War

As the American Revolutionary War marked the beginning of the nation, as a group of diverse
colonies banded together to oppose the ruling English colonial powers, so the American Civil War
marked the unification of that nation (and of the former colonies now states along with many
others) under the supreme power of the Federal government.

There were many reasons for the war. The Southern states, where human slavery was still legal, and
whose agricultural economy was based upon the slave-labor system, resented the Federal
governments interference in their affairs, and claimed the right of self-governance, except in a few
specific areas, such as national defense, that are outlined in the Constitution. In the Northern non-
slave or free states, there was a large and popular social-political movement calling for the
abolition of slavery from all U. S. territory in the interest of humanity. Hostilities between the
Northern and Southern states were exacerbated by the admittance of new, Western-territory states
into the Federal government, which altered the fragile balance of power in the U. S. Congress
between Northern and Southern representatives and sympathizers.

The Southern states recognized that they would soon be a minority in the Federal government and
would be subject to the Northern majoritys laws and sentiments, which were becoming increasingly
anti-slavery and anti-Southern. Rather than be ruled by the will of others from outside their territory
with a significantly different economy, culture, and history, the Southern states decided to secede
from the union of American states and begin their own nation and government.


President Abraham Lincoln and the Devastating War to Save the Union

However, the Federal government was unwilling to let the Southern states leave the union without a
fight. The new president, Abraham Lincoln, had been elected in 1860 on a promise to save the
Union, and he was willing to take the country to war rather than to let it dissolve into two nations.
Lincolns war speeches are classics of political oratory, brief but powerful in argument, and generous
in sympathy.

The American Civil War (1861-1865) was far longer than anyone expected and much more
destructive than anyone considered possible. It has been called the first modern war a war in
which was utilized the tremendous powers of machinery enabled by industrialization. Unfortunately,
the medical science of the day was not as advanced as the war weaponry, and many thousands of
young soldiers died from minor wounds that developed into fatal infections.


Diarist Mary Chestnut and the Souths Bitter Defeat

The South, which was far less populous and industrialized than the North, and where most of the war
was actually fought, suffered the most throughout the conflict, as Southerner Mary Chestnut accounts
in her moving war diary, excerpted in this chapter. By the time of Lincolns reelection in 1864, it was
clear that the superior resources of the North would result in an eventual victory for the Union
forces, but the cost of saving the nation had been staggering.


Walt Whitman as War Poet

As a medical volunteer, Walt Whitman saw the effects of the war first-hand. Whitman was an ardent
supporter of the Norths war effort and of the abolition of slavery, and some of his poems seem
almost cheerful in their survey of the huge Northern armies preparing for battle. In other moods and
poems, however, Whitman movingly recounts the awful human losses that are the inevitable result of
any warfare.


Walt Whitmans Survey of American Democracy in Democratic Vistas

Writing a few years later in the extended essay, Democratic Vistas, Whitman considered the
challenges facing and opportunities awaiting the citizens of the worlds first modern democracy. The
rebirth of the American union that resulted from the Norths military victory seemed to promise a
revitalization of American democracy. But the war had in many ways worked to contradict and
curtail the idealistic principles of liberty and equality that guided the Revolutions most visionary
leaders.

President Lincoln, for example, while espousing the cause of the union and of freedom, assumed
emergency powers that far exceeded those proscribed by the Constitution. More fundamentally,
there is nothing in the U. S. Constitution that prohibits the secession from the Union attempted by the
Southern states. On the contrary, the spirit of the Constitution, and of the Declaration of
Independence, would seem to support the right of secession.

Whatever the justness of the Norths winning cause, in practical terms, the rapid and massive
spending and industrialization in the North required to support the war effort led to corruption in both
business and government on a scale unseen in American before. At the wars end, American
business appeared to have amassed more power and influence than the Federal or state governments,
leading to a period in American history continuing in many ways to this day in which business
interests would seem to be the central power-holders in American society and politics.

Finally, the destitution of the Southern states wrought by the war would have long-term
consequences, as would the traumatic manner in which the slaves were freed. These various
tragedies are reflected in the writing of Southern and African-American writers included in this
anthology, such as William Faulkner and Gwendolyn Brooks.



ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-1865)

Introduction

President Abraham Lincoln, who guided the Norths war efforts during the American Civil War,
made several short, powerful speeches that are considered models of their kind.

In the Gettsyburg Address, delivered at a memorial service near a battlefield that was the site of
tremendous carnage, where thousands of soldiers from both sides died during a protracted battle that
helped to ensure the Norths eventual victory, Lincoln established a clear linkage between the ideals of
freedom and liberty and the just cause of the Norths war efforts. A vital task of any war leader is to
convince the populace of the rightness of their cause in the conflict, and of the consequent necessity of
enduring the inevitable hardships and traumas caused by war.

Lincolns strategy in this speech is to claim that freedom itself was at stake in the conflict, together
with the very ideal of democratic government. Implicit in the speech is the obvious fact that the
Southern states practice of slavery goes against the nations founders ideals of liberty and equality.
Lincoln wisely avoids reference to the fact that it was the nations founders who first legalized the
practice of slavery in a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.


Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863)

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived
in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated. . . can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their
lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to
add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never
forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here
have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they
gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government
of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth.



ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-1865)

Introduction

In his Second Inaugural Address, excerpted below, Lincoln based the rightness of the Norths war
efforts on the case of the freeing of the slaves in the South. Previous to this speech, Lincoln is on
record as saying that his primary goal in fighting the war was to save the Union of states, and that
he would have been willing to allow slavery to continue if such a policy would have contributed to
this end. (The committed opposition to slavery in the populace in the North made such a policy
politically unfeasible.) In this later speech, however, given at a time when the Norths victory and
the preservation of the Union was nearly assured, Lincoln chose to consider the war from the
strongest moral and ethical viewpoint.

Lincolns reference to the righteous judgments of the Lord has the effect of placing the entire
war effort on a religious plane, beyond human control. The implication is that to question the
rightness of the war at this point in its progress would be sacrilegious (to question God). But he
follows this stern admonition with a plea for charity and tolerance, and a prayer for peace.

It might be added that Lincoln had prepared a plan for reconstructing the South at the wars end
that was both generous and ambitious. Unfortunately, Lincolns assassination soon after making the
speech below precluded the adoption of his plan, and the President who succeeded him (Andrew
Johnson) was determined to punish the South rather than to reconstruct it. Johnsons punitive policies
contributed to decades of continued bitter enmity between the North and South, which Lincolns
constructive policies would have worked to prevent.


from the Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865)

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an
impending civil war. All dreaded it-- all sought to avert it.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union,
but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All
knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained.
Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same
Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that
any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other
men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered--
that of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be
that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that
American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but
which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to
both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we
discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always
ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may
speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two
hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the
lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it
must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the
right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who
shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish
a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.


MARY BOYKIN CHESTNUT (1823-1886)

Introduction

Mary Chestnut was from a prominent Southern slave-owning and cotton-farming family, and was the
wife of a high-ranking Southern army officer. She kept a diary throughout the war between the
states.

Her diary is remarkable for its honesty and thoughtfulness. She admits to hating the slave-system upon
which the Souths agricultural economy depended, and she asserts that slavery would soon have been
abolished in the South, with or without a war. She also points out that the wealthy Northern mill and
factory owners who produced cloth and clothing from Southern-grown cotton were just as supportive of
and invested in the slave-labor system as were the Southern plantation owners on whose farms the
slaves worked.

Chestnuts diary makes it clear that, from the Souths point of view, the war was not about slavery,
but was about the right of the individual states to govern themselves, and to be free of the economic
domination and political oppression of other states, and of the federal government. Like many
Southerners, Chestnut believed that slavery was a convenient political excuse for continued
economic exploitation of the South by the North, and a self-serving rationale for the federal
government as it sought to effect political dominance over the states.

Chestnuts diary is perhaps most valuable, however, as a detailed, personal, and passionate record of
the devastating effect of the war on Southern society which was predominantly rural, religious, and
family-based. In that sense, her diary is a moving document of human emotion, beyond any political
argument or factional sentiment.


from A Diary From Dixie (1904, 1949)

November 28
th
,

(1861)
I hate slavery. I even hate the harsh authority I see parents think it their duty to exercise toward their
children. But what good does it do to write all that? I have before me a letter I wrote to Mr. Chestnut
while he was on our plantation in Mississippi in 1842. It is the most fervid abolition document I have
ever read. I came across it while burning letters the other day, but that letter I did not burn.

June 9th, (1862)
Bratten, who married Miss Mann, is taken prisoner; Beverly Mann killed; his mother-in-law a few
days ago found stone dead in her bed. Misfortunes enough for one family surely. When we read of
the battles in India, in Italy, in the Crimea, what did we care? It was only an interesting topic, like any
other, to look for in the paper. Now, you hear of a battle with a thrill and a shudder. It has come home
to us. Half the people that we know in the world are under the enemy's guns. A telegram comes to
you and you leave it on your lap. You are pale with fright. You handle it, or dread to touch it, as you
would a rattlesnake, or worse; for a snake could only strike you. How many, many of your friends or
loved ones this scrap of paper may tell you have gone to their death.
When you meet people, sad and sorrowful is the greeting. They press your hand, and tears stand in
their eyes or roll down their cheeks as they happen to have more or less self-control. They have
brothers, fathers, or sons as the case may be in the battle; and this thing now seems never to stop. We
have no breathing time given us. It cannot be so at the North, for the papers say gentlemen do not go
in the ranks there. They are officers, or clerks of departments. That is why we see so many foreign
regiments represented among our prisoners; Germans, Irish, Scotch. But with us, every company in
the field is filled with our nearest and dearest as rank and file, common soldiers.

July 8th, 1862
Our table talk today: this war was undertaken by us to shake off the yoke of foreign invaders, so we
consider our cause righteous. The Yankees, since the war began, have discovered it is to free the
slaves they are fighting, so their cause is noble. They also expect to make the war pay. Yankees do
not undertake anything that does not pay. They think we belong to them. We have been good milk
cows, milked by the tariff-or skimmed. We let them have all of our hard earnings. We bore the ban of
slavery; they got the money. Cotton pays everybody who handles it, sells it, manufactures it; but it
rarely pays the men who make it. Second-hand, the Yankees received the wages of slavery. They
grew rich; we grew poor. The receiver of stolen goods is as bad as the thief. That applies to us too.
We received the savages they stole from Africa and brought to us in their slave ships.

July 21st, 1862
I have letters from Harriet Grant and from Mary DeSaussure: The one pitifully asks that my husband
try to get some news of Mrs. Brown-field's son, who is reported dead, but whom Mrs. Brownfield still
hopes may be alive; the other thanks me for my letter of sympathy and tells me how to send Mr.
DeSaussure's watch. Recalling all the ties it dis-solves, all the blood it commands to flow, all the
healthy industry it arrests, all the mad men it arms, all the victims that it creates, I ques-tion whether
one man really honest, pure, and humane who has gone through such an ordeal could ever hazard it
again unless he is assured victory is secure; yes, and that the object for which he fights will not be
wrested from his hands amidst the uproar of the elements that the battle has released.

September 1st, (1864)
The battle is raging at Atlanta, our fate hanging in the balance.

September 2nd
Atlanta is gone. Well that agony is over. Like David, when the child was dead, I will get up from my
knees, will wash my face and comb my hair. There is no hope, but we will try to have no fear.

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

Introduction

Walt Whitmans war poems express a strange mixture of emotions. In An Army Corps on the
March, he seems to be genuinely excited by the energy and movement called forth by the war
effort. War, as described in this poem, seems almost like a grand and exciting sporting event.

In Bivouac on a Mountain Side, by contrast, the camping army seems peaceful and serene a part
of nature in combination with the orchards of summer and the eternal stars.

In Come Up from the Fields Father, however, Whitman depicts a more disturbing view of the war,
which, for the grieving mother, is an intensely personal trauma and tragedy one that will only end with
her own death.

Whitmans own personal war experience with grief and loss is the subject of Vigil Strange I Kept on
the Field One Night, which depicts the death in the even-contested battled of a young soldier he
calls his son and comrade. The poem is overtly erotic, serving to emphasize that this soldier (like
so many others) was compelled to meet his death in the bloom of his youth.

Whitmans war poems are direct and forceful in emotion, narration, and description. They are
written in the free verse style that Whitman pioneered a style that avoids the mannerisms of
rhyme and repetition common in older English-language poetry. Whitman designed his poetry to
speak to the common person. He desired to be a voice for democracy. Although many of his
democratic ideals have yet to be achieved, the force of Whitmans vigorous and direct poetic style
has worked to change the nature of American poetry, which has been dominated in the last fifty years
especially by poets writing in the free verse style Whitman favored.



An Army Corps on the March

WITH its cloud of skirmishers in advance,
With now the sound of a single shot snapping like a whip, and now an irregular volley,
The swarming ranks press on and on, the dense brigades press on,
Glittering dimly, toiling under the sun-the dust-cover'd men,
In columns rise and fall to the undulations of the ground,
With artillery interspers'd the wheels rumble, the horses sweat,
As the army corps advances.


Bivouac on a Mountain Side

I SEE before me now a traveling army halting,
Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,
Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,
The numerous camp-fires scatter 'd near and far, some away up on the mountain,
The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-sized, flickering,
Andover all the sky the sky! far, far out of reach, studded, breaking out, the eternal stars.


Come Up from the Fields Father

COME up from the fields father, here's a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here's a letter from thv dear son.

Lo, 'tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio's villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis'd vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,
Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well,
But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter's call,
And cone to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,
She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly,
O this is not our son's writing, yet his name is sign'd,
O a strange hand writes for our dear son, 0 stricken mother's soul!
All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,
Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,
Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint, By the jamb of a door leans.

Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,
The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay'd,)
See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)
While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,
She with thin form presently drest in black,
By day her meals untouch'd, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.


Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

VIGIL strange I kept on the field one night;
When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,
One look I but gave which your dear eyes return'd with a look I shall never forget,
One touch of your hand to mine 0 boy, reach'd up as you lay on the ground,
Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,
Till late in the night reliev'd to the place at last again I made my way,
Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on
earth responding,)
Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-wind,
Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,
Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,
But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,
Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,
Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade not a tear, not a word,
Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,
As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,
Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,
I faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)
Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear 'd,
My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop'd well his form,
Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,
And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I
deposited,
Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten'd,
I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,
And buried him where he fell.

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

Introduction

Walt Whitmans essay about the future of American democracy, Democratic Vistas, was published
five years after the end of the Civil War. In this essay, Whitman considers the opportunities awaiting
and challenges facing Americas recently reinforced democratic union.

The essay is both optimistic and troubled. Whitman foresaw that, as America grew into a world
political and economic power, the democratic ideals of liberty and brotherhood that were so crucial to
its founding were in grave danger of being undermined and negated by greedy business interests and
selfish consumerism. He feared that, even as he was writing, democratic individualism was being
perverted and distorted into an excuse for an anarchic power-grab.

Whitman claimed that American democracy needed to develop a culture and aesthetic to support its
socio-economic and philosophic-political ideals. He worried that almost nothing had been attempted
or achieved in terms of creating a democratic art, philosophy, and religion to replace the old schools
of culture, thought, and faith inherited from feudal Europe.

The European feudal system was based upon a rigid class system, with the monarch at the top and
everyone else owing obedience to those above them. In such a system, the only free individual
was the monarch. Everyone else was a servant of someone other than himself. Whitman understood
that the potential for the development of the individual in such a society was extremely limited, and
he argue that the true promise of American democracy lay in its fitness as a breeding-ground for
improved and enhanced individuals.

Whitman further contended that, hand in hand with this enhanced individuality, democracy needed to
foster and develop a universal brotherhood between all individuals of society, regardless of gender,
class, race, and creed. Such brotherhood would be based not only upon liberty and toleration, but
upon mutual love and respect. Whitman predicted that familial, tribal and even national bonds would
decrease as individualism and universal brotherhood developed.

The democratic world society that Whitman prophesied in Democratic Vistas would be implicitly just
and moral indeed, a kind of Utopia and Whitman asserted that it was Americas opportunity and
duty to lead the way toward such a better future. But the dangers besetting and preventing the
development of such a world and society were (and are) many and various. Whitman concluded that the
democratic world of enhanced individuals and universal brotherhood would need newer, larger,
stronger, keener compensations and compellers in order to come into its own.


from Democratic Vistas (1870)

The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove
the most tremendous failure of time.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own
forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere
in the past, under opposite influences.

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some
deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and her in the
United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not
honestly believed in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings), nor is humanity
itself believed in. What penetrating eye does not see through the mask? the spectacle is appalling.
We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout.

I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their
sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial popular
intellectuality is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious,
moral, literary, and esthetic results.

Underneath the fluctuations of the expressions of society, as well as the movements of the politics of
the leading nations of the world, we see steadily pressing ahead and strengthening itself, even in the
midst of immense tendencies and aggregation, the image of completeness in separatism, of individual
personal dignity, of a single person, either male or female, characterized in the main, not from
extrinsic acquirements or position, but in the pride of himself or herself alone.

It is not that democracy is of exhaustive account, in itself. Perhaps, indeed, it is, (like Nature,) of no
account in itself. It is that, as we see, it is the best, perhaps only, fit and full means, formulater,
general caller-forth, trainer, for the million, not for grand material personalities only, but for immortal
souls.

And, topping democracy, this most alluring record, that it alone can bind, and ever seeks to bind, all
nations, all men, of however various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family. It is the old, yet
ever-modern dream of earth, out of her eldest and her youngest, her fond philosophers and poets.
Not that half only, individualism, which isolates. There is another half, which is adhesiveness or love,
that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all.

The climax of this loftiest range of civilization, rising above all the gorgeous shows and results of
wealth, intellect, power, and art, as suchabove even theology and religious fervoris to be its
development, from the eternal bases, and the fit expression, of absolute Conscience, moral
soundness, Justice.

Shift and turn the combinations of the statement as we may, the problem of the future of America is
in certain respects as dark as it is vast. Pride, competition, segregation, vicious willfulness, and
license beyond example, brood already upon us. It is useless to deny it: Democracy grows rankly
up the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all brings worse and worse invaders
needs newer, larger, stronger, keener compensations and compellers.
Chapter 5: Loners, Prisoners, and Outsiders in American Literature and
Culture

Post-Civil War American Culture and Society

The decades following the American Civil War and up into the early part of the 20
th
Century
witnessed the transformation of the United States from an isolated European post-colonial outpost
into a major world political, military, and economic power. American society and culture were also
transformed, as the country began to take a definite shape of its own, apart from and in some ways
opposed to its European origins.

American society of the later 19
th
and early 20
th
Centuries was characterized by contradiction. While
it congratulated itself on the unprecedented political and economic freedom allowed to the American
individual in theory, American culture was in many respects ultra-conservative and stifling of the
individual in social practice. Educated, talented, and ambitious women of the time were made to feel
this social restrictiveness keenly, as contemporary law and social prejudice worked to prevent them
from competing with men in the political realm and in the economic marketplace, as well as in the
cultural and intellectual marketplace of art and ideas.


Emily Dickinson

The 19
th
Century New England poet Emily Dickinson was a case in point. A writer of remarkable
talent and startling originality, she was frustrated in her attempts to find an audience by the narrow-
minded critical standards of the time, and by a more general prejudice against women artists, as well
as by her own ambivalence as to the value of offering her work to an uncomprehending and
unappreciative readership. It was not until several decades after her death that her poetry received
the public acclaim and critical attention that it merits.


Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In The Yellow Wallpaper, a narrative that is humorous and haunting by turns, the self-proclaimed
feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman tells the story of a young mother, wife, and writer whose
fairly conventional case of post-birth depression is exacerbated into a perhaps chronic insanity by the
well-intentioned but in effect cruel and ignorant treatment prescribed for her by her husband-
physician.

The writing of Dickinson and Gilmore is symptomatic of a crisis within the American female psyche,
and a critique of the treatment and position of women within the American society and family
structure. For many years American women were legally (and often socially and economically)
second-class citizens. It was not until 1920 that women were allowed to vote in political elections
and to hold most political offices, and it was not until the last forty years that women as a large group
have entered the workplace. Even today, women remain under-represented and under-compensated
in American business and politics, and it has become a truism that American working women must
struggle to balance the demands of work and home.

Women writers as a group also have had to struggle to find an audience and to fashion a voice of
their own, distinct from the male-dominated literary tradition and critical establishment. Dickinson
and Gilmore both write in an intensely intimate voice that is deceptively casual. They both talk to
themselves in their work, implying the felt lack of a sympathetic audience. And they seek to
neutralize a hostile response by anticipating and responding to imagined rebukes and counter-
arguments.


Willa Cather

Willa Cathers writing style is more lucid and direct, but no less subtle and canny in anticipating and
negating hostile response. In the story Pauls Case, Cather tells the story of a young man born into
a middle-class family in the Midwest region of turn-of-the-century America. Paul has the misfortune
of possessing an artistic temperament and an active imagination. The world in which he is raised is
not only ugly and inartistic, but also ignorant and intolerant. Pauls failure to fit into his environment
is viewed by others as a personal failure almost an illness (hence the title Pauls Case as though
he had a case of the flu or pneumonia). Like the narrator of Gilmans story, or the figure in several
of Dickinsons poems, Paul is compelled to consider the world he lives in as a type of prison, and he
dreams only of escape at whatever cost. His eventual self-destruction is a kind of revenge.


Sherwood Anderson

The minister in Sherwood Andersons story The Strength of God is also a prisoner but of himself,
and of his honorable and public position within a narrow and prudish society. His lack of freedom
comes as a revelation to him. Although he is not actively discriminated against, like Gilmans
narrator or Cathers Paul, the minister seems to be living what Thoreau described as a life of quiet
desperation. He is enduring rather than living a life that seems to him a weary burden. Andersons
story quietly but certainly questions and critiques the constricting social roles and rules implicit in
small-town American life at the beginning of the 20
th
Century.


George Santayana

The European-American philosopher George Santayana remarked upon Americas social
conservatism and cultural narrowness in his essay, Materialism and Idealism in American Life.
The essay is an outwardly positive discussion of American characteristics and attributes. But implicit
in this survey is a probing appraisal of the failures and limitations of American culture and society.
Santayana implicitly expressed a fear that haunted George Washington and Henry David Thoreau,
among others, before him the fear that the unprecedented liberty of the citizenry in America to
voice their opinion and to make it count in public life would result not in a nation of thoughtful and
tolerant individuals engaged in reasonable discussion, but in a population of ignorant bullies
collectively coercing every remarkable and distinctive individual downwards toward the lowest
common denominator.

The poems and stories in this chapter represent the point of view of those talented and distinctive
individuals who became (and become) the brutalized victims of their uncomprehending
peers, and of the group-inherited-and-inspired repression within themselves.
EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)

Introduction

Emily Dickinson was a profound and idiosyncratic thinker and poet whose work was far ahead of its
time and was in fact unpublished during her lifetime. She and her contemporary fellow-poet Walt
Whitman are now generally considered to be the first great American poets and the founders of an
original and distinctive American school of poetry.

In many respects, their poetry could hardly be more different. Whitmans poetry is expansive, open,
and inclusive, reveling in the vast variety of American life. For long passages, he is content merely
to describe the world about him in long lists of details and facts. Dickinsons poetry, by contrast, is
condensed, intense, and inward-looking; and the world it describes and inhabits is generally closely
bounded by walls and rooms, and by contradictory, paradoxical arguments and thoughts.

What Whitman and Dickinson share, however, is a profound interest in and attentiveness to their
unique individuality and to the ramifying spiritual-psychological depth and breadth of casual
everyday experience. Of the two, Dickinson is more innately suspicious and fearful of the encircling,
encroaching world which is perhaps only to be expected, given her marginal status as a single
woman without the social support and shield of a family or public career in an inherently sexist and
often misogynistic society.

Her defensiveness (and aggressiveness) in regards to the human community in which she lives is
reflected in poems 288, 303, and 435 below. These poems implicitly question the possibility and cost
of living a life as a self-reliant non-comformist as urged by Emerson, the New England sage who
was a major influence on Dickinson, as on most thoughtful American writers of the mid to late 19
th

Century. To be self-reliant and non-conforming to societys standards and structures is also often to
be lonely to live cut off from human sympathy and support. It is perhaps even to be spiritually
buried alive with ones thoughts, as Dickinson implies at the conclusion of poem 303.

That we are all ultimately alone in the world as living and dying beings is emphasized in the haunting
imagined death poem, 465, which is one of Dickinsons most famous. In other poems, however, the
lone human figure ventures out to interact with the world at large in a sort of giddy surrender to the
possibility of being affected by ones environment, as in poem 520. In this strange, dream-like
journey poem, the world (in the anthropomorphized form of the ocean tide) responds in earnest to the
human figures advances, nearly overwhelming her before she is startled out of her reverie and turns
once again toward the comforting (if potentially smothering) refuge of home.

This poem, and much of Dickinsons writing in general, is concerned with the complex theme of
domesticity, which is one of the major obsessions of American writing, particularly by women. As
individual identities, gender roles, and family structures have altered and changed, the American
home has become a focus of anxiety and nostalgia which is only natural in a nation that is
comprised of individuals who, for whatever reason, left their homes abroad in order to move
elsewhere and to start again from the beginning.

Among other concerns, Dickinsons poetry ponders the psychological, social, and spiritual cost of
such group and individual uprootedness. Americas original settlers, and its continuing wave of
immigrants, generally chose (and choose) to come to the country, and they are willing to pay the
price for such a choice. But their children are given no choice. And many sensitive American
individuals feel stranded in a society and place that they sense is neither here nor there, and which
speaks neither for nor to them. Dickinsons poetry has attracted generations of such spiritual exiles,
who are not so much homesick (for where?), as sick of their home.



Poem # 288 (written in 1861, published in 1891)

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are youNobodyToo?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertiseyou know!

How drearyto beSomebody!
How publiclike a Frog
To tell one's namethe livelong June
To an admiring Bog!



Poem # 303 (written in 1860, published in 1890)

The Soul selects her own Society
Thenshuts the Door
To her divine Majority
Present no more

Unmovedshe notes the Chariotspausing
At her low Gate
Unmovedan Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat

I've known herfrom an ample nation
Choose One
Thenclose the Valves of her attention
Like Stone



Poem # 435 (written in 1862, published in 1914)

Much Madness is divinest Sense
To a discerning Eye
Much Sensethe starkest Madness
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail
Assentand you are sane
Demuryou're straightway dangerous
And handled with a Chain



Poem # 465 (written in 1862, published in 1896)

I heard a Fly buzzwhen I died
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air
Between the Heaves of Storm

The Eyes aroundhad wrung them dry
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onsetwhen the King
Be witnessedin the Room

I willed my KeepsakesSigned away
What portion of me be
Assignableand then it was
There interposed a Fly

With Blueuncertain stumbling Buzz
Between the lightand me
And then the Windows failedand then
I could not see to see



Poem # 520 (written in 1862, published in 1891)

I started EarlyTook my Dog
And visited the Sea
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me

And Frigatesin the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands
Presuming Me to be a Mouse
Agroundupon the Sands

But no Man moved Metill the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe
And past my Apronand my Belt
And past my Bodicetoo

And made as He would eat me up
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion's Sleeve
And thenI startedtoo

And HeHe followedclose behind
I felt his Silver Heel
Upon my AnkleThen my Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl

Until We met the Solid Town
No One He seemed to know
And bowingwith a Might look
At meThe Sea withdrew

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935)

Introduction

Charlotte Perkins Gilmans story The Yellow Wallpaper is an early and famous feminist text.
Written in the form of a diary, the story details the descent of the narrator from depression into
insanity. The diary form is particularly meaningful because it implies the absence of a public
audience. A diary is a secretive form of communication, written mainly to and for oneself, and
perhaps to an imagined, sympathetic reader. As readers of the diary, we become complicit in the
narrators secret life. We know what her sister-in-law and husband do not concerning the narrators
thoughts and misgivings. This allows us to be sympathetic, as they are not. It also enables us to
perceive the husband-physicians ignorant cruelty towards his wife and patient.

Gilmans story is an implicit critique of the medicalization of human emotions that accompanied the
rise of psychology and psychiatry in the 19
th
Century. As religion became less intrinsically important
in Americans lives, their faith in the supernatural gradually was transformed into a faith in science.
The medical doctor was likewise transformed from a mere mechanic of the body into a source of
authority in all areas regarding individual human existence emotional and mental, as well as
physical.

This was a potentially tragic development for doctors patients. For the typical 19
th
Century medical
doctor was trained to be focused in a narrow-minded fashion on the purely physical aspects of his
patients health. Firm believers in the reality of the material world, doctors habitually dismissed all
human emotion as fundamentally unstable, and they were trained to treat particularly strong emotions
as innate threats to the instinctive animal health of the body. Women in particular were considered to
be prone to hysterical emotionalism, which the medical establishment both misunderstood and
discounted in terms of ones overall health sometimes with disastrous effects.

It was standard medical practice in the 19
th
Century to confine a woman suffering from excessive
nervousness for her own good. Gilman was herself so confined to a rest cure when she suffered
a post-birth depression, and she later claimed that this cure nearly drove her to the point of insanity.
This story is obviously based in large part upon that personal experience. (Gilmans real-life husband
was an artist, however, rather than a doctor, which perhaps helps to account for her eventual
recovery!)

Particularly difficult and unruly female nervous patients were sometimes forcibly confined in effect
imprisoned often in out-of-the-way rooms, such as in a houses attic. (The madwoman in the attic
was a conventional figure in 19
th
Century fiction, and also, sadly, an occasional reality of 19
th
Century
life.) There are many hints in Gilmans story that the attic room in which the narrator is staying was
once occupied by another nervous woman who was forcibly confined there. The heavy bed is
nailed to the floor, there are devices on the wall to which ropes or chains might be attached, and the
windows are barred. These are all indications that a previous inhabitant was perhaps imprisoned in
the room.

The narrator herself seems not to recognize or to comprehend the implications of these clues, or
perhaps she is pretending not to. For one of the most disturbing aspects of the story is the narrators
persistence in hiding and repressing her emotions, even in writing to herself in her secret diary. In
some ways, this tendency of the narrators such as her insistence on trying to comprehend her
illness from her husbands narrow-minded medical perspective results in a sort of black humor,
which both undercuts and underscores the tragic nature of the story. At the storys conclusion, for
example, there is the innate humor caused by the incongruity of the narrators seemingly reasonable
question as to why her husband has fainted, contrasted with her shockingly unconscious behavior as
she creeps around the perimeter of the room like a hunted animal.

Gilman pointedly leaves it to the readers imagination to consider whether the storys narrator
eventually gets well or sinks further and permanently into madness. In any case, the narrators story
passes beyond telling, as she herself passes into the incommunicative state of unconscious insanity
no longer possessing the capacity to distinguish between private fantasy and shared reality.


The Yellow Wallpaper (1899)

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic
felicitybut that would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he
scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.

John is a physician, and perhaps(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper
and a great relief to my mind)perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really
nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depressiona slight hysterical tendencywhat is
one to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.
So I take phosphates or phosphiteswhichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and
am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good dealhaving to be so sly about it,
or else meet with heavy opposition.
I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulusbut
John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me
feel bad.
So I will let it alone and talk about the house.
The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the
village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and
gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.
There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a gardenlarge and shady, full of box-bordered paths,
and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.
There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now.
There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and co-heirs; anyhow, the place has
been empty for years.
That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't carethere is something strange about the houseI
can feel it.
I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut the
window.
I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due
to this nervous condition.
But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myselfbefore
him, at least, and that makes me very tired.
I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the
window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.
He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took
another.
He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.
I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely
ungrateful not to value it more.
He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get.
"Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear," said he, "and your food somewhat on your appetite;
but air you can absorb all the time." So we took the nursery at the top of the house.
It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine
galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are
barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.
The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped offthe paperin great patches
all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the
room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke
study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit
suicideplunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-
turning sunlight.
It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.
No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.
There comes John, and I must put this away,he hates to have me write a word.
* * * * * *
We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day.
I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing
as much as I please, save lack of strength.
John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.
I am glad my case is not serious!
But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.
John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies
him.
Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!

I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden
already!
Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able,to dress and entertain, and order
things.
It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!
And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.
I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall-paper!
At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me,
and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.
He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred
windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.
"You know the place is doing you good," he said, "and really, dear, I don't care to renovate the house
just for a three months' rental."
"Then do let us go downstairs," I said, "there are such pretty rooms there."
Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down cellar, if I
wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.
But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.
It is an airy and comfortable room as any one need wish, and, of course, I would not be so silly as to
make him uncomfortable just for a whim.
I'm really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.
Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deep-shaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned
flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a
beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these
numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that
with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to
all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I
try.
I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and
rest me.
But I find I get pretty tired when I try.

It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. When I get really well,
John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put
fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.
I wish I could get well faster.
But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!
There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you
upside down.
I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways
they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths
didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.
I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression
they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and
plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.
I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair
that always seemed like a strong friend.
I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be
safe.
The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for we had to bring it all from
downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery things out, and no
wonder! I never saw such ravages as the children have made here.
The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brotherthey must
have had perseverance as well as hatred.

Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and
this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.
But I don't mind it a bitonly the paper.
There comes John's sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me
writing.
She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she
thinks it is the writing which made me sick!
But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows.
There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and one that just looks off over the
country. A lovely country, too, full of great elms and velvet meadows.
This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can
only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.
But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just soI can see a strange, provoking,
formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.
There's sister on the stairs!
* * * * * *

Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are all gone and I am tired out. John thought it might do me
good to see a little company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week.
Of course I didn't do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now.
But it tired me all the same.
John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.

But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like
John and my brother, only more so!
Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.
I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting dreadfully fretful
and querulous.
I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.
Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.
And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases, and Jennie is
good and lets me alone when I want her to.
So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses, and lie down
up here a good deal.
I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.
It dwells in my mind so!
I lie here on this great immovable bedit is nailed down, I believeand follow that pattern about by
the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner
over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that
pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.
I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of
radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.
It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.
Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishesa kind of "debased
Romanesque with delirium tremensgo waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.
But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting
waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.
The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish
the order of its going in that direction.
They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.
There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low
sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,the interminable grotesques seem to
form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.
It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess.
* * * * * *
I don't know why I should write this.
I don't want to.
I don't feel able.
And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some wayit is such a
relief!
But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.
Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.
John says I mustn't lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say
nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.
Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable
talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin
Henry and Julia.
But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good
case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.
It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.
And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat
by me and read to me till it tired my head.
He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake,
and keep well.
He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any
silly fancies run away with me.
There's one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the
horrid wallpaper.
If we had not used it, that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn't have a
child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.
I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I can stand it so much easier
than a baby, you see.
Of course I never mention it to them any moreI am too wise,but I keep watch of it all the same.
There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.
It is always the same shape, only very numerous.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I
wonderI begin to thinkI wish John would take me away from here!
* * * * * *

It is so hard to talk to John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.
But I tried it last night.
It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.
I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another.
John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating
wallpaper till I felt creepy.
The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.
I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move, and when I came back John was awake.
"What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking about like that you'll get cold."
I thought it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not gaining here, and that I wished he
would take me away.
"Why, darling!" said he, "our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can't see how to leave before.
"The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course if you were in
any danger, I could and would, but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a
doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better, I feel really much
easier about you."
"I don't weigh a bit more," said I, "nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening when you
are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away!"
"Bless her little heart!" said he with a big hug, "she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let's
improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!"
"And you won't go away?" I asked gloomily.
"Why, how can I, dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days
while Jennie is getting the house ready. Really dear you are better!"
"Better in body perhaps" I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such
a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.
"My darling," said he, "I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that
you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so
fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a
physician when I tell you so?"
So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long. He thought I was asleep
first, but I wasn't, and lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern
really did move together or separately.
* * * * * *
On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant
irritant to a normal mind.
The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.
You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-
somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is
like a bad dream.
The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in
joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutionswhy, that is
something like it.
That is, sometimes!
There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is
that it changes as the light changes.
When the sun shoots in through the east windowI always watch for that first long, straight rayit
changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it.
That is why I watch it always.
By moonlightthe moon shines in all night when there is a moonI wouldn't know it was the same
paper.
At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it
becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.
I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I
am quite sure it is a woman.
By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It
keeps me quiet by the hour.
I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can.
Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.
It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see I don't sleep.
And that cultivates deceit, for I don't tell them I'm awakeO no!
The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.
He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look.
It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis,that perhaps it is the paper!
I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly on the most
innocent excuses, and I've caught him several times looking at the paper! And Jennie too. I caught
Jennie with her hand on it once.
She didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most
restrained manner possible, what she was doing with the papershe turned around as if she had been
caught stealing, and looked quite angryasked me why I should frighten her so!
Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all
my clothes and John's, and she wished we would be more careful!
Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that
nobody shall find it out but myself!
* * * * * *
Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to
look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.
John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be
flourishing in spite of my wall-paper.
I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wall-paperhe would
make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.
I don't want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and I think that will be
enough.
* * * * * *

I'm feeling ever so much better! I don't sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch
developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime.
In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing.
There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count of
them, though I have tried conscientiously.
It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever sawnot
beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.
But there is something else about that paperthe smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room,
but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the
windows are open or not, the smell is here.
It creeps all over the house.
I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on
the stairs.
It gets into my hair.
Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise itthere is that smell!
Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like.
It is not badat first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met.
In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.
It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the houseto reach the smell.
But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow
smell.
There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs round the
room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had
been rubbed over and over.
I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and roundround
and round and roundit makes me dizzy!
* * * * * *
I really have discovered something at last.
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out.
The front pattern does moveand no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls
around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.
Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars
and shakes them hard.
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that patternit
strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their
eyes white!
If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.
* * * * * *
I think that woman gets out in the daytime!
And I'll tell you whyprivatelyI've seen her!
I can see her out of every one of my windows!
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.
I see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those dark grape arbors, creeping
all around the garden.
I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under
the blackberry vines.
I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!
I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I know John would suspect
something at once.
And John is so queer now, that I don't want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides,
I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.
I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.
But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time.
And though I always see her, she may be able to creep faster than I can turn!
I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a
high wind.
* * * * * *
If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little.
I have found out another funny thing, but I shan't tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too
much.
There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don't like
the look in his eyes.
And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give.
She said I slept a good deal in the daytime.
John knows I don't sleep very well at night, for all I'm so quiet!
He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind.
As if I couldn't see through him!
Still, I don't wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months.
It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it.
* * * * * *

Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough. John to stay in town over night, and won't be out until this
evening.
Jennie wanted to sleep with methe sly thing! But I told her I should undoubtedly rest better for a night
all alone.
That was clever, for really I wasn't alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to
crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.
I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that
paper.
A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.
And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I declared I would finish it to-
day!
We go away to-morrow, and they are moving all my furniture down again to leave things as they were
before.
Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I did it out of pure spite at the vicious
thing.
She laughed and said she wouldn't mind doing it herself, but I must not get tired.
How she betrayed herself that time!
But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me,not alive!
She tried to get me out of the roomit was too patent! But I said it was so quiet and empty and clean
now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me even for dinnerI
would call when I woke.
So now she is gone, and the servants are gone, and the things are gone, and there is nothing left but that
great bedstead nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it.
We shall sleep downstairs to-night, and take the boat home tomorrow.
I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again.
How those children did tear about here!
This bedstead is fairly gnawed!
But I must get to work.
I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path.
I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes.
I want to astonish him.
I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I
can tie her!
But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on!
This bed will not move!
I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner
but it hurt my teeth.
Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just
enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with
derision!
I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable
exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.
Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might
be misconstrued.
I don't like to look out of the windows eventhere are so many of those creeping women, and they
creep so fast.
I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?
But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden ropeyou don't get me out in the road there!
I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!
It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!
I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the
wall, so I cannot lose my way.
Why there's John at the door!
It is no use, young man, you can't open it!
How he does call and pound!
Now he's crying for an axe.
It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!
"John dear!" said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front steps, under a plaintain leaf! "
That silenced him for a few moments.
Then he saidvery quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!"

"I can't," said I. "The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!"
And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and
see, and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.
"What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing! "
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.
"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't
put me back!"
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had
to creep over him every time!

WILLA CATHER (1873-1947)

Introduction

Willa Cather is one of Americas greatest writers of fiction. She liked to focus in her stories on
striking individual personalities who felt out of place in their environment. Many of her major
characters are artists, but the title figure in the story Pauls Case is the creator of nothing but his
own fantasies and lies. The instinct for such creation, however, is artistic, even if the results are
narrowly personal and defensively psychological.

Cather sets the first part of the story in the Midwestern American city of Pittsburgh, which was at the
heart of American industrialization in the late 19
th
and early 20
th
Centuries. Pittsburgh was, and is,
famous for its iron foundries and steel mills intensely dirty industries that are also very necessary
and profitable manufacturers in an industrialized world. Paul, who is an instinctive if nave lover
of finery and high culture, could hardly be more out of place.

Pauls young life has been dominated by his intense psychological need to separate himself from his
surroundings. This has involved lying and pretending, but Paul does not get much pleasure out of
these generally pathetic ruses. In fact, he is more their victim than their beneficiary. His high school
art teacher alone seems able to infer that Pauls pretensions and airs are not so much socially
aggressive as psychologically defensive.

Paul is in many respects an unattractive figure. Cathers own mastery of the art of story-telling is
evident in her ability to win our sympathy for her character, without claiming that he is anything other
than pathetically out of place. But that is enough.

The idea of the American dream is that anyone who is willing to work for it can achieve his or her
dream. But what if ones dream is of tranquility and luxury a dream that the very notion of work
(much less work that is sheer drudgery) dispels and disproves? What does America, or any modern
business-driven society, have to offer to such a dreamer of beauty and ease, not born into
independent wealth? Cathers answer in this story is neither pleasant nor reassuring, but it is deeply
sympathetic, and beautifully elegiac.


Pauls Case (1905)

A Study in Temperament

by Willa Cather
It was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh High School to account for his
various misdemeanours. He had been suspended a week ago, and his father had called at the Principal's
office and confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul entered the faculty room suave and smiling. His
clothes were a trifle outgrown and the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and
worn; but for all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly
knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his buttonhole. This latter adornment the faculty
somehow felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban of
suspension.
Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and a narrow chest. His eyes were
remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliancy and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort
of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large, as though he were addicted to
belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter about them which that drug does not produce.
When questioned by the Principal as to why he was there, Paul stated, politely enough, that he wanted
to come back to school. This was a lie, but Paul was quite accustomed to lying; found it, indeed,
indispensable for overcoming friction. His teachers were asked to state their respective charges against
him, which they did with such a rancour and aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case.
Disorder and impertinence were among the offences named, yet each of his instructors felt that it was
scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of the trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically
defiant manner of the boy's; in the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which he
seemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had been making a synopsis of a
paragraph at the blackboard, his English teacher had stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand.
Paul had started back with a shudder and thrust his hands violently behind him. The astonished woman
could scarcely have been more hurt and embarrassed had he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary
and definitely personal as to be unforgettable. In one way and another, he had made all his teachers,
men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of physical aversion. In one class he habitually sat
with his hand shading his eyes; in another he always looked out of the window during the recitation; in
another he made a running commentary on the lecture, with humorous intention.
His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolized by his shrug and his flippantly
red carnation flower, and they fell upon him without mercy, his English teacher leading the pack. He
stood through it smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips were continually twitching,
and he had a habit of raising his eyebrows that was contemptuous and irritating to the last degree.)
Older boys than Paul had broken down and shed tears under that baptism of fire, but his set smile did
not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort was the nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed
with the buttons of his overcoat, and an occasional jerking of the other hand that held his hat. Paul was
always smiling, always glancing about him, seeming to feel that people might be watching him and
trying to detect something. This conscious expression, since it was as far as possible from boyish
mirthfulness, was usually attributed to insolence or "smartness."
As the inquisition proceeded, one of his instructors repeated an impertinent remark of the boy's, and the
Principal asked him whether he thought that a courteous speech to have made a woman. Paul shrugged
his shoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched.
"I don't know," he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite or impolite, either. I guess it's a sort of way I have
of saying things regardless."
The Principal, who was a sympathetic man, asked him whether he didn't think that a way it would be
well to get rid of. Paul grinned and said he guessed so. When he was told that he could go, he bowed
gracefully and went out. His bow was but a repetition of the scandalous red carnation.
His teachers were in despair, and his drawing master voiced the feeling of them all when he declared
there was something about the boy which none of them understood. He added: "I don't really believe
that smile of his comes altogether from insolence; there's something sort of haunted about it. The boy is
not strong, for one thing. I happen to know that he was born in Colorado, only a few months before his
mother died out there of a long illness. There is something wrong about the fellow."
The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one saw only his white teeth and the
forced animation of his eyes. One warm afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing-board, and
his master had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an
old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his sleep, and stiff with a nervous tension that drew
them back from his teeth.
His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to have felt so vindictive toward a
mere boy, to have uttered this feeling in cutting terms, and to have set each other on, as it were, in the
grewsome game of intemperate reproach. Some of them remembered having seen a miserable street cat
set at bay by a ring of tormentors.
As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the Soldiers' Chorus from Faust looking wildly behind him
now and then to see whether some of his teachers were not there to writhe under his light-heartedness.
As it was now late in the afternoon and Paul was on duty that evening as usher at Carnegie Hall, he
decided that he would not go home to supper. When he reached the concert hall the doors were not yet
open and, as it was chilly outside, he decided to go up into the picture galleryalways deserted at this
hourwhere there were some of Raffelli's gay studies of Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian scene
or two that always exhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in the gallery but the old guard,
who sat in one corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch over one eye and the other closed. Paul
possessed himself of the place and walked confidently up and down, whistling under his breath. After a
while he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethought him to look at his watch, it
was after seven o'clock, and he rose with a start and ran downstairs, making a face at Augustus, peering
out from the cast-room, and an evil gesture at the Venus of Milo as he passed her on the stairway.
When Paul reached the ushers' dressing-room half-a-dozen boys were there already, and he began
excitedly to tumble into his uniform. It was one of the few that at all approached fitting, and Paul
thought it very becomingthough he knew that the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow chest,
about which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always considerably excited while he dressed,
twanging all over to the tuning of the strings and the preliminary flourishes of the horns in the music-
room; but to-night he seemed quite beside himself, and he teased and plagued the boys until, telling him
that he was crazy, they put him down on the floor and sat on him.
Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of the house to seat the early comers.
He was a model usher; gracious and smiling he ran up and down the aisles; nothing was too much
trouble for him; he carried messages and brought programmes as though it were his greatest pleasure in
life, and all the people in his section thought him a charming boy, feeling that he remembered and
admired them. As the house filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the colour came
to his cheeks and lips. It was very much as though this were a great reception and Paul were the host.
Just as the musicians came out to take their places, his English teacher arrived with checks for the seats
which a prominent manufacturer had taken for the season. She betrayed some embarrassment when she
handed Paul the tickets, and a hauteur which subsequently made her feel very foolish. Paul was startled
for a moment, and had the feeling of wanting to put her out; what business had she here among all these
fine people and gay colours? He looked her over and decided that she was not appropriately dressed and
must be a fool to sit downstairs in such togs. The tickets had probably been sent her out of kindness, he
reflected as he put down a seat for her, and she had about as much right to sit there as he had.
When the symphony began Paul sank into one of the rear seats with a long sigh of relief, and lost
himself as he had done before the Rico. It was not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in
particular to Paul, but the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious and potent spirit
within him; something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He
felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable
splendour. When the soprano soloist came on, Paul forgot even the nastiness of his teacher's being there
and gave himself up to the peculiar stimulus such personages always had for him. The soloist chanced
to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth, and the mother of many children; but she wore
an elaborate gown and a tiara, and above all she had that indefinable air of achievement, that world-
shine upon her, which, in Paul's eyes, made her a veritable queen of Romance.

After a concert was over Paul was always irritable and wretched until he got to sleep, and to-night he
was even more than usually restless. He had the feeling of not being able to let down, of its being
impossible to give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could be called living at
all. During the last number he withdrew and, after hastily changing his clothes in the dressing-room,
slipped out to the side door where the soprano's carriage stood. Here he began pacing rapidly up and
down the walk, waiting to see her come out.
Over yonder the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and square through the fine rain, the
windows of its twelve stories glowing like those of a lighted card-board house under a Christmas tree.
All the actors and singers of the better class stayed there when they were in the city, and a number of the
big manufacturers of the place lived there in the winter. Paul had often hung about the hotel, watching
the people go in and out, longing to enter and leave school-masters and dull care behind him forever.
At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor, who helped her into her carriage and closed
the door with a cordial auf wiedersehen which set Paul to wondering whether she were not an old
sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage over to the hotel, walking so rapidly as not to be far from
the entrance when the singer alighted and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors that were opened
by a negro in a tall hat and a long coat. In the moment that the door was ajar it seemed to Paul that he,
too, entered. He seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an
exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease. He reflected upon the mysterious
dishes that were brought into the dining-room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen them in
the supper party pictures of the Sunday World supplement. A quick gust of wind brought the rain down
with sudden vehemence, and Paul was startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel
driveway; that his boots were letting in the water and his scanty overcoat was clinging wet about him;
that the lights in front of the concert hall were out, and that the rain was driving in sheets between him
and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what he wantedtangibly before him,
like the fairy world of a Christmas pantomime, but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, as the
rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to shiver in the black night
outside, looking up at it.
He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to come sometime; his father in his
night-clothes at the top of the stairs, explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised fictions that
were forever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellow wall-paper, the creaking bureau
with the greasy plush collar-box and over his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington
and John Calvin, and the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in red worsted by
his mother.
Half an hour later, Paul alighted from his car and went slowly down one of the side streets off the main
thoroughfare. It was a highly respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and where
business men of moderate means begot and reared large families of children, all of whom went to
Sabbath-school and learned the shorter catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were
as exactly alike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which they lived. Paul never went
up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing. His home was next to the house of the Cumberland
minister. He approached it to-night with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of sinking
back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had when he came home. The moment
he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head. After each of these orgies of
living, he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable
beds, of common food, of a house penetrated by kitchen odours; a shuddering repulsion for the
flavourless, colourless mass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and
fresh flowers.
The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul felt to the sight of it all; his ugly
sleeping chamber; the cold bath-room with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping
spiggots; his father, at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from his night-shirt, his feet thrust
into carpet slippers. He was so much later than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and
reproaches. Paul stopped short before the door. He felt that he could not be accosted by his father to-
night; that he could not toss again on that miserable bed. He would not go in. He would tell his father
that he had no car fare, and it was raining so hard he had gone home with one of the boys and stayed all
night.
Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the house and tried one of the basement
windows, found it open, raised it cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to the floor. There he
stood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise he had made, but the floor above him was silent, and
there was no creak on the stairs. He found a soap-box, and carried it over to the soft ring of light that
streamed from the furnace door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of rats, so he did not try to sleep,
but sat looking distrustfully at the dark, still terrified lest he might have awakened his father. In such
reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and nights out of the dreary blanks of the
calendar, when his senses were deadened, Paul's head was always singularly clear. Suppose his father
had heard him getting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a burglar? Then, again,
suppose his father had come down, pistol in hand, and he had cried out in time to save himself, and his
father had been horrified to think how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose a day should
come when his father would remember that night, and wish there had been no warning cry to stay his
hand? With this last supposition Paul entertained himself until daybreak.
The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken by the last flash of autumnal
summer. In the morning Paul had to go to church and Sabbath-school, as always. On seasonable Sunday
afternoons the burghers of Cordelia Street always sat out on their front "stoops," and talked to their
neighbours on the next stoop, or called to those across the street in neighbourly fashion. The men
usually sat on gay cushions placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in
their Sunday "waists," sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending to be greatly at their ease. The
children played in the streets; there were so many of them that the place resembled the recreation
grounds of a kindergarten. The men on the stepsall in their shirt sleeves, their vests unbuttonedsat
with their legs well apart, their stomachs comfortably protruding, and talked of the prices of things, or
told anecdotes of the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords. They occasionally looked over the
multitude of squabbling children, listened affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to
see their own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and interspersed their legends of the iron kings
with remarks about their sons' progress at school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had
saved in their toy banks.
On this last Sunday of November, Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest step of his "stoop," staring
into the street, while his sisters, in their rockers, were talking to the minister's daughters next door about
how many shirt-waists they had made in the last week, and how many waffles some one had eaten at the
last church supper. When the weather was warm, and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of
mind, the girls made lemonade, which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher, ornamented with
forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought very fine, and the neighbours always joked about
the suspicious colour of the pitcher.
To-day Paul's father sat on the top step, talking to a young man who shifted a restless baby from knee to
knee. He happened to be the young man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom it
was his father's dearest hope that he would pattern. This young man was of a ruddy complexion, with a
compressed, red mouth, and faded, near-sighted eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold
bows that curved about his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel corporation, and
was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with a future. There was a story that, some five
years agohe was now barely twenty-sixhe had been a trifle dissipated but in order to curb his
appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing of wild oats might have entailed, he had
taken his chief's advice, oft reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one had married the first woman
whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to be an angular schoolmistress, much
older than he, who also wore thick glasses, and who had now borne him four children, all near-sighted,
like herself.
The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the
details of the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were at home, and
"knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy." His father told, in turn, the plan his
corporation was considering of putting in an electric railway plant at Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he
had an awful apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there. Yet he rather liked to hear
these legends of the iron kings, that were told and retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of
palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy, and
he was interested in the triumphs of these cash boys who had become famous, though he had no mind
for the cash-boy stage.
After supper was over, and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paul nervously asked his father whether he
could go to George's to get some help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked for car fare. This
latter request he had to repeat, as his father, on principle, did not like to hear requests for money,
whether much or little. He asked Paul whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told
him that he ought not to leave his school work until Sunday; but he gave him the dime. He was not a
poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up in the world. His only reason for allowing Paul to
usher was, that he thought a boy ought to be earning a little.
Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odour of the dish-water from his hands with the ill-smelling
soap he hated, and then shook over his fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden
in his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got
out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days,
and began to live again.
The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one of the downtown theatres
was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals
whenever he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every available moment loitering about
Charley Edwards's dressing-room. He had won a place among Edwards's following not only because the
young actor, who could not afford to employ a dresser, often found him useful, but because he
recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term vocation.
It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting.
This was Paul's fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he inhaled
the gassy, painty, dusty odour behind the scenes, he breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt within him
the possibility of doing or saying splendid, brilliant, poetic things. The moment the cracked orchestra
beat out the overture from Martha, or jerked at the serenade from Rigoletto, all stupid and ugly things
slid from him, and his senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.
Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness, that a
certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience
of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how
to succeed in life, and the unescapable odours of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these
smartly-clad men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple orchards that
bloomed perennially under the lime-light.
It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the stage entrance of that theatre was
for Paul the actual portal of Romance. Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all
Charley Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float about London of fabulously rich
Jews, who had subterranean halls there, with palms, and fountains, and soft lamps and richly apparelled
women who never saw the disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled
city, enamoured of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-
and-white Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.
Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been perverted by garish fiction, but the
truth was that he scarcely ever read at all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or
corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his friends urged upon himwell,
he got what he wanted much more quickly from music; any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel
organ. He needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his senses,
and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. It was equally true that he was not stage
strucknot, at any rate, in the usual acceptation of that expression. He had no desire to become an
actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He felt no necessity to do any of these things; what
he wanted was to see, to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after
blue league, away from everything.
After a night behind the scenes, Paul found the school-room more than ever repulsive; the bare floors
and naked walls; the prosy men who never wore frock coats, or violets in their buttonholes; the women
with their dull gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful seriousness about prepositions that govern the dative. He
could not bear to have the other pupils think, for a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must
convey to them that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a jest, anyway. He had
autographed pictures of all the members of the stock company which he showed his classmates, telling
them the most incredible stories of his familiarity with these people, of his acquaintance with the
soloists who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them and the flowers he sent them. When these
stories lost their effect, and his audience grew listless, he became desperate and would bid all the boys
good-bye, announcing that he was going to travel for a while; going to Naples, to Venice, to Egypt.
Then, next Monday, he would slip back, conscious and nervously smiling; his sister was ill, and he
should have to defer his voyage until spring.
Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his instructors know how heartily he
despised them and their homilies, and how thoroughly he was appreciated elsewhere, he mentioned
once or twice that he had no time to fool with theorems; addingwith a twitch of the eyebrows and a
touch of that nervous bravado which so perplexed themthat he was helping the people down at the
stock company; they were old friends of his.
The upshot of the matter was that the Principal went to Paul's father, and Paul was taken out of school
and put to work. The manager at Carnegie Hall was told to get another usher in his stead; the door-
keeper at the theatre was warned not to admit him to the house; and Charley Edwards remorsefully
promised the boy's father not to see him again.
The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul's stories reached them
especially the women. They were hard-working women, most of them supporting indigent husbands or
brothers, and they laughed rather bitterly at having stirred the boy to such fervid and florid inventions.
They agreed with the faculty and with his father that Paul's was a bad case.
The east-bound train was ploughing through a January snow-storm; the dull dawn was beginning to
show grey when the engine whistled a mile out of Newark. Paul started up from the seat where he had
lain curled in uneasy slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window glass with his hand, and peered out.
The snow was whirling in curling eddies above the white bottom lands, and the drifts lay already deep
in the fields and along the fences, while here and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks
protruded black above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, and a gang of labourers who stood
beside the track waved their lanterns.
Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He had made the all-night journey in a
day coach, partly because he was ashamed, dressed as he was, to go into a Pullman, and partly because
he was afraid of being seen there by some Pittsburgh business man, who might have noticed him in
Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle awoke him, he clutched quickly at his breast pocket,
glancing about him with an uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping,
the slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed oblivion, and even the crumby, crying
babies were for the nonce stilled. Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.
When he arrived at the Jersey City station, he hurried through his breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and
keeping a sharp eye about him. After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he consulted a cabman,
and had himself driven to a men's furnishing establishment that was just opening for the day. He spent
upward of two hours there, buying with endless reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put
on in the fitting-room; the frock coat and dress clothes he had bundled into the cab with his linen. Then
he drove to a hatter's and a shoe house. His next errand was at Tiffany's, where he selected his silver and
a new scarf-pin. He would not wait to have his silver marked, he said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop
on Broadway, and had his purchases packed into various travelling bags.
It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and after settling with the cabman,
went into the office. He registered from Washington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and
that he had come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his story plausibly and had no
trouble, since he volunteered to pay for them in advance, in engaging his rooms; a sleeping-room,
sitting-room and bath.
Not once, but a hundred times Paul had planned this entry into New York. He had gone over every
detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in his scrap book at home there were pages of description about
New York hotels, cut from the Sunday papers. When he was shown to his sitting-room on the eighth
floor, he saw at a glance that everything was as it should be; there was but one detail in his mental
picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for the bell boy and sent him down for flowers. He
moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting away his new linen and fingering it delightedly as
he did so. When the flowers came, he put them hastily into water, and then tumbled into a hot bath.
Presently he came out of his white bath-room, resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with
the tassels of his red robe. The snow was whirling so fiercely outside his windows that he could scarcely
see across the street, but within the air was deliciously soft and fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils
on the taboret beside the couch, and threw himself down, with a long sigh, covering himself with a
Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste, he had stood up to such a strain,
covered so much ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come
about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into
deep, drowsy retrospection.
It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatre and concert hall, when they
had taken away his bone, the whole thing was virtually determined. The rest was a mere matter of
opportunity. The only thing that at all surprised him was his own couragefor he realized well enough
that he had always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that, of late years, as the meshes
of the lies he had told closed about him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter.
Until now, he could not remember the time when he had not been dreading something. Even when he
was a little boy, it was always therebehind him, or before, or on either side. There had always been
the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which something seemed
always to be watching himand Paul had done things that were not pretty to watch, he knew.
But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown down the gauntlet to the thing
in the corner.
Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but yesterday afternoon that he had been
sent to the bank with Denny & Carson's deposit, as usualbut this time he was instructed to leave the
book to be balanced. There was above two thousand dollars in checks, and nearly a thousand in the bank
notes which he had taken from the book and quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made
out a new deposit slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his returning to the office, where
he had finished his work and asked for a full day's holiday to-morrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly
reasonable pretext. The bank book, he knew, would not be returned before Monday or Tuesday, and his
father would be out of town for the next week. From the time he slipped the bank notes into his pocket
until he boarded the night train for New York, he had not known a moment's hesitation. It was not the
first time Paul had steered through treacherous waters.
How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done; and this time there would be no
awakening, no figure at the top of the stairs. He watched the snow flakes whirling by his window until
he fell asleep.
When he awoke, it was three o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with a start; half of one of his
precious days gone already! He spent more than an hour in dressing, watching every stage of his toilet
carefully in the mirror. Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always
wanted to be.
When he went downstairs, Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth Avenue toward the Park. The snow
had somewhat abated; carriages and tradesmen's wagons were hurrying soundlessly to and fro in the
winter twilight; boys in woollen mufflers were shovelling off the doorsteps; the avenue stages made fine
spots of colour against the white street. Here and there on the corners were stands, with whole flower
gardens blooming under glass cases, against the sides of which the snow flakes stuck and melted;
violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valleysomehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they
blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself was a wonderful stage winterpiece.
When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased, and the tune of the streets had changed. The
snow was falling faster, lights streamed from the hotels that reared their dozen stories fearlessly up into
the storm, defying the raging Atlantic winds. A long, black stream of carriages poured down the avenue,
intersected here and there by other streams, tending horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the
entrance of his hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery were running in and out of the awning
stretched across the sidewalk, up and down the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the street. Above,
about, within it all was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of thousands of human beings as hot for
pleasure as himself, and on every side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of
wealth.
The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of realization; the plot of all dramas,
the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the snow flakes.
He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.
When Paul went down to dinner, the music of the orchestra came floating up the elevator shaft to greet
him. His head whirled as he stepped into the thronged corridor, and he sank back into one of the chairs
against the wall to get his breath. The lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of
colourhe had, for a moment, the feeling of not being able to stand it. But only for a moment; these
were his own people, he told himself. He went slowly about the corridors, through the writing-rooms,
smoking-rooms, reception-rooms, as though he were exploring the chambers of an enchanted palace,
built and peopled for him alone.
When he reached the dining-room he sat down at a table near a window. The flowers, the white linen,
the many-coloured wine glasses, the gay toilettes of the women, the low popping of corks, the
undulating repetitions of the Blue Danube from the orchestra, all flooded Paul's dream with bewildering
radiance. When the roseate tinge of his champagne was addedthat cold, precious, bubbling stuff that
creamed and foamed in his glassPaul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all. This
was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this was what all the struggle was about. He
doubted the reality of his past. Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where fagged-
looking businessmen got on the early car; mere rivets in a machine they seemed to Paul,sickening
men, with combings of children's hair always hanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their
clothes. Cordelia StreetAh! that belonged to another time and country; had he not always been thus,
had he not sat here night after night, from as far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just
such shimmering textures, and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this one between his thumb and
middle finger? He rather thought he had.
He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to meet or to know any of these
people; all he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant. The mere stage
properties were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in his loge at the
Metropolitan. He was now entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the
imperative desire to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings
explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it passively. He had only to glance
down at his attire to reassure himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.
He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed that night, and sat long watching the
raging storm from his turret window. When he went to sleep it was with the lights turned on in his
bedroom; partly because of his old timidity, and partly so that, if he should wake in the night, there
would be no wretched moment of doubt, no horrible suspicion of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington
and Calvin above his bed.
Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound. Paul breakfasted late, and in the afternoon he fell
in with a wild San Francisco boy, a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a "little flyer" over
Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town, and the two boys went out
together after dinner, not returning to the hotel until seven o'clock the next morning. They had started
out in the confiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the elevator was singularly
cool. The freshman pulled himself together to make his train, and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two
o'clock in the afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for ice-water, coffee, and the Pittsburgh
papers.
On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There was this to be said for him, that
he wore his spoils with dignity and in no way made himself conspicuous. Even under the glow of his
wine he was never boisterous, though he found the stuff like a magician's wand for wonder-building.
His chief greediness lay in his ears and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest
pleasures were the grey winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his
clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette and his sense of power. He could not remember a time when he
had felt so at peace with himself. The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every day
and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied for pleasure, even at school; but to be noticed
and admired, to assert his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good deal more
manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for boastful pretensions, now that he could, as his
actor friends used to say, "dress the part." It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him. His
golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he could.
On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the whole affair exploited in the Pittsburgh
papers, exploited with a wealth of detail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature was at a
low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the boy's father had refunded the full amount of
the theft, and that they had no intention of prosecuting. The Cumberland minister had been interviewed,
and expressed his hope of yet reclaiming the motherless lad, and his Sabbath-school teacher declared
that she would spare no effort to that end. The rumour had reached Pittsburgh that the boy had been
seen in a New York hotel, and his father had gone East to find him and bring him home.
Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak to the knees, and clasped his head
in his hands. It was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over
him finally and forever. The grey monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years;
Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed
back upon him with a sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly
stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over. The sweat broke out on his face, and he sprang to
his feet, looked about him with his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the mirror. With
something of the old childish belief in miracles with which he had so often gone to class, all his lessons
unlearned, Paul dressed and dashed whistling down the corridor to the elevator.
He had no sooner entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the music than his remembrance
was lightened by his old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all
sufficient. The glare and glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories had again, and for the last time,
their old potency. He would show himself that he was game, he would finish the thing splendidly. He
doubted, more than ever, the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank his wine
recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of those fortunate beings born to the purple, was he not still
himself and in his own place? He drummed a nervous accompaniment to the Pagliacci music and looked
about him, telling himself over and over that it had paid.
He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the music and the chill sweetness of his wine, that he might have
done it more wisely. He might have caught an outbound steamer and been well out of their clutches
before now. But the other side of the world had seemed too far away and too uncertain then; he could
not have waited for it; his need had been too sharp. If he had to choose over again, he would do the
same thing to-morrow. He looked affectionately about the dining-room, now gilded with a soft mist.
Ah, it had paid indeed!
Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and feet. He had thrown himself
across the bed without undressing, and had slept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands were lead
heavy, and his tongue and throat were parched and burnt. There came upon him one of those fateful
attacks of clear-headedness that never occurred except when he was physically exhausted and his nerves
hung loose. He lay still and closed his eyes and let the tide of things wash over him.
His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or other," he told himself. The memory of
successive summers on the front stoop fell upon him like a weight of black water. He had not a hundred
dollars left; and he knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the wall that stood between
all he loathed and all he wanted. The thing was winding itself up; he had thought of that on his first
glorious day in New York, and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his dressing-table
now; he had got it out last night when he came blindly up from dinner, but the shiny metal hurt his eyes,
and he disliked the looks of it.
He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again to attacks of nausea. It was
the old depression exaggerated; all the world had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow he was not
afraid of anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into the dark corner at last and
knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there, but somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He
saw everything clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he had lived the sort of
life he was meant to live, and for half an hour he sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was
not the way, so he went downstairs and took a cab to the ferry.
When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab, directing the driver to follow
the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town. The snow lay heavy on the roadways and had drifted deep in
the open fields. Only here and there the dead grass or dried weed stalks projected, singularly black,
above it. Once well into the country, Paul dismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the
tracks, his mind a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual picture of
everything he had seen that morning. He remembered every feature of both his drivers, of the toothless
old woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his
ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable to cope with vital matters near at
hand, worked feverishly and deftly at sorting and grouping these images. They made for him a part of
the ugliness of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter burning on his tongue. He stooped and
put a handful of snow into his mouth as he walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little
hillside, where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him, he stopped and sat down.
The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed; their red glory all over. It occurred
to him that all the flowers he had seen in the glass cases that first night must have gone the same way,
long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter
outside the glass; and it was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by
which the world is run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and scooped a little hole
in the snow, where he covered it up. Then he dozed a while, from his weak condition, seemingly
insensible to the cold.
The sound of an approaching train awoke him, and he started to his feet, remembering only his
resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late. He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his
teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced
nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right moment came, he jumped. As he
fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left
undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow
of Algerian sands.
He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and
on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed. Then, because the picture making
mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the
immense design of things.


SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876-1941)

Introduction

Sherwood Andersons masterpiece, Winesburg, Ohio, is a collection of stories about loneliness and
heartache in small-town America in the early 20
th
Century. Andersons simple and direct prose style
and his sympathetic and evocative story-telling exerted a strong influence on the younger generation
of American writers, some of whom would go on to become more famous and successful novelists,
such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

Anderson himself was generally a failure as a novelist. He seemed to lack an instinct for form and
structure that is necessary for successful story-telling in a large novel format. But he was a master of
the short story that is focused on one particular character, situation, and emotion.

The Strength of God is the story of a respectable small-town Protestant minister, Curtis Hartman, who
suddenly finds himself obsessed with a woman schoolteacher, whose undressed body he can see
through his church study window. The story is a meditation on the relationship between body and soul,
and a critique of the social boundaries that hamper each.

The schoolteacher, who lies on her bed in the evening, reading and smoking, seems to the minister a
soul that he must save from the sins of the body. But it is his own soul that is in danger. For the
minister, who has lived an uneventful and generally unthoughtful life, is driven by his passion to
ponder his own nature as both a spiritual and a physical being. For the first time in his life, his
existence seems to him a mystery. He could not understand himself, Anderson writes.

Paradoxically, as the minister becomes aware of the mystery within himself, his sermons become
more clear and forceful. The ministers self-admitted desire for the school teacher, and his
subsequent willingness to question his hitherto assumed religious dogma concerning right and wrong,
enable him to discover the heart of all religious impulse in the unfathomable depths of human desire
and longing.

The minister is fortunate in his vision of Kate Smith at prayer even as he himself reaches the apex
of his life-crisis. But many of the characters in Winesburg, Ohio are not so fortunate. Their lives do
not make sense to them, and their acute desires turn into chronic frustrations. The town itself is at
least partly to blame, or so Anderson repeatedly implies, because of its narrow-mindedness and
prudery in regards to human desire. Minister Hartman would seem to have won a lucky reprieve
from frustration. But society itself would have to change before many of his fellow townspeople
could experience such fulfillment. And in any case, and under whatever circumstance, there will
always be those who are unlucky and unfortunate. Andersons fiction speaks for them.


The Strength of God (1919)

THE STRENGTH OF GOD

THE REVEREND Curtis Hartman was pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Winesburg, and had been
in that position ten years. He was forty years old, and by his nature very silent and reticent. To
preach, standing in the pulpit before the people, was always a hardship for him and from Wednesday
morning until Saturday evening he thought of nothing but the two sermons that must be preached on
Sunday. Early on Sunday morning he went into a little room called a study in the bell tower of the
church and prayed. In his prayers there was one note that always predominated. "Give me strength
and courage for Thy work, O Lord!" he pleaded, kneeling on the bare floor and bowing his head in
the presence of the task that lay before him.
The Reverend Hartman was a tall man with a brown beard. His wife, a stout, nervous woman, was
the daughter of a manufacturer of underwear at Cleveland, Ohio. The minister himself was rather a
favorite in the town. The elders of the church liked him because he was quiet and unpretentious and
Mrs. White, the banker`s wife, thought him scholarly and refined.
The Presbyterian Church held itself somewhat aloof from the other churches of Winesburg. It was
larger and more imposing and its minister was better paid. He even had a carriage of his own and on
summer evenings sometimes drove about town with his wife. Through Main Street and up and down
Buckeye Street he went, bowing gravely to the people, while his wife, afire with secret pride, looked
at him out of the corners of her eyes and worried lest the horse become frightened and run away.
For a good many years after he came to Winesburg things went well with Curtis Hartman. He was not
one to arouse keen enthusiasm among the worshippers in his church but on the other hand he made
no enemies. In reality he was much in earnest and sometimes suffered prolonged periods of remorse
because he could not go crying the word of God in the highways and byways of the town. He
wondered if the flame of the spirit really burned in him and dreamed of a day when a strong sweet
new current of power would come like a great wind into his voice and his soul and the people would
tremble before the spirit of God made manifest in him. "I am a poor stick and that will never really
happen to me," he mused dejectedly, and then a patient smile lit up his features. "Oh well, I suppose
I`m doing well enough," he added philosophically.
The room in the bell tower of the church, where on Sunday mornings the minister prayed for an
increase in him of the power of God, had but one window. It was long and narrow and swung outward
on a hinge like a door. On the window, made of little leaded panes, was a design showing the Christ
laying his hand upon the head of a child. One Sunday morning in the summer as he sat by his desk in
the room with a large Bible opened before him, and the sheets of his sermon scattered about, the
minister was shocked to see, in the upper room of the house next door, a woman lying in her bed and
smoking a cigarette while she read a book. Curtis Hartman went on tiptoe to the window and closed it
softly. He was horror stricken at the thought of a woman smoking and trembled also to think that his
eyes, just raised from the pages of the book of God, had looked upon the bare shoulders and white
throat of a woman. With his brain in a whirl he went down into the pulpit and preached a long sermon
without once thinking of his gestures or his voice. The sermon attracted unusual attention because of
its power and clearness. "I wonder if she is listening, if my voice is carrying a message into her soul,"
he thought and began to hope that on future Sunday mornings he might be able to say words that
would touch and awaken the woman apparently far gone in secret sin.
The house next door to the Presbyterian Church, through the windows of which the minister had seen
the sight that had so upset him, was occupied by two women. Aunt Elizabeth Swift, a grey
competentlooking widow with money in the Winesburg National Bank, lived there with her daughter
Kate Swift, a school teacher. The school teacher was thirty years old and had a neat trim-looking
figure. She had few friends and bore a reputation of having a sharp tongue. When he began to think
about her, Curtis Hartman remembered that she had been to Europe and had lived for two years in
New York City. "Perhaps after all her smoking means nothing," he thought. He began to remember
that when he was a student in college and occasionally read novels, good although somewhat worldly
women, had smoked through the pages of a book that had once fallen into his hands. With a rush of
new determination he worked on his sermons all through the week and forgot, in his zeal to reach the
ears and the soul of this new listener, both his embarrassment in the pulpit and the necessity of prayer
in the study on Sunday mornings.
Reverend Hartman`s experience with women had been somewhat limited. He was the son of a
wagon maker from Muncie, Indiana, and had worked his way through college. The daughter of the
underwear manufacturer had boarded in a house where he lived during his school days and he had
married her after a formal and prolonged courtship, carried on for the most part by the girl herself. On
his marriage day the underwear manufacturer had given his daughter five thousand dollars and he
promised to leave her at least twice that amount in his will. The minister had thought himself
fortunate in marriage and had never permitted himself to think of other women. He did not want to
think of other women. What he wanted was to do the work of God quietly and earnestly.
In the soul of the minister a struggle awoke. From wanting to reach the ears of Kate Swift, and
through his sermons to delve into her soul, he began to want also to look again at the figure lying
white and quiet in the bed. On a Sunday morning when he could not sleep because of his thoughts he
arose and went to walk in the streets. When he had gone along Main Street almost to the old
Richmond place he stopped and picking up a stone rushed off to the room in the bell tower. With the
stone he broke out a corner of the window and then locked the door and sat down at the desk before
the open Bible to wait. When the shade of the window to Kate Swift`s room was raised he could see,
through the hole, directly into her bed, but she was not there. She also had arisen and had gone for a
walk and the hand that raised the shade was the hand of Aunt Elizabeth Swift.
The minister almost wept with joy at this deliverance from the carnal desire to "peep" and went back
to his own house praising God. In an ill moment he forgot, however, to stop the hole in the window.
The piece of glass broken out at the corner of the window just nipped off the bare heel of the boy
standing motionless and looking with rapt eyes into the face of the Christ.
Curtis Hartman forgot his sermon on that Sunday morning. He talked to his congregation and in his
talk said that it was a mistake for people to think of their minister as a man set aside and intended by
nature to lead a blameless life. "Out of my own experience I know that we, who are the ministers of
God`s word, are beset by the same temptations that assail you," he declared. "I have been tempted
and have surrendered to temptation. It is only the hand of God, placed beneath my head, that has
raised me up. As he has raised me so also will he raise you. Do not despair. In your hour of sin raise
your eyes to the skies and you will be again and again saved."
Resolutely the minister put the thoughts of the woman in the bed out of his mind and began to be
something like a lover in the presence of his wife. One evening when they drove out together he
turned the horse out of Buckeye Street and in the darkness on Gospel Hill, above Waterworks Pond,
put his arm about Sarah Hartman`s waist. When he had eaten breakfast in the morning and was ready
to retire to his study at the back of his house he went around the table and kissed his wife on the
cheek. When thoughts of Kate Swift came into his head, he smiled and raised his eyes to the skies.
"Intercede for me, Master," he muttered, "keep me in the narrow path intent on Thy work."
And now began the real struggle in the soul of the brown-bearded minister. By chance he discovered
that Kate Swift was in the habit of lying in her bed in the evenings and reading a book. A lamp stood
on a table by the side of the bed and the light streamed down upon her white shoulders and bare
throat. On the evening when he made the discovery the minister sat at the desk in the dusty room
from nine until after eleven and when her light was put out stumbled out of the church to spend two
more hours walking and praying in the streets. He did not want to kiss the shoulders and the throat of
Kate Swift and had not allowed his mind to dwell on such thoughts. He did not know what he wanted.
"I am God`s child and he must save me from myself," he cried, in the darkness under the trees as he
wandered in the streets. By a tree he stood and looked at the sky that was covered with hurrying
clouds. He began to talk to God intimately and closely. "Please, Father, do not forget me. Give me
power to go tomorrow and repair the hole in the window. Lift my eyes again to the skies. Stay with
me, Thy servant, in his hour of need."
Up and down through the silent streets walked the minister and for days and weeks his soul was
troubled. He could not understand the temptation that had come to him nor could he fathom the
reason for its coming. In a way he began to blame God, saying to himself that he had tried to keep his
feet in the true path and had not run about seeking sin. "Through my days as a young man and all
through my life here I have gone quietly about my work," he declared. "Why now should I be
tempted? What have I done that this burden should be laid on me?"
Three times during the early fall and winter of that year Curtis Hartman crept out of his house to the
room in the bell tower to sit in the darkness looking at the figure of Kate Swift lying in her bed and
later went to walk and pray in the streets. He could not understand himself. For weeks he would go
along scarcely thinking of the school teacher and telling himself that he had conquered the carnal
desire to look at her body. And then something would happen. As he sat in the study of his own
house, hard at work on a sermon, he would become nervous and begin to walk up and down the room.
"I will go out into the streets," he told himself and even as he let himself in at the church door he
persistently denied to himself the cause of his being there. "I will not repair the hole in the window
and I will train myself to come here at night and sit in the presence of this woman without raising my
eyes. I will not be defeated in this thing. The Lord has devised this temptation as a test of my soul
and I will grope my way out of darkness into the light of righteousness."
One night in January when it was bitter cold and snow lay deep on the streets of Winesburg Curtis
Hartman paid his last visit to the room in the bell tower of the church. It was past nine o`clock when
he left his own house and he set out so hurriedly that he forgot to put on his overshoes. In Main Street
no one was abroad but Hop Higgins the night watchman and in the whole town no one was awake but
the watchman and young George Willard, who sat in the office of the Winesburg Eagle trying to
write a story. Along the street to the church went the minister, plowing through the drifts and thinking
that this time he would utterly give way to sin. "I want to look at the woman and to think of kissing
her shoulders and I am going to let myself think what I choose," he declared bitterly and tears came
into his eyes. He began to think that he would get out of the ministry and try some other way of life.
"I shall go to some city and get into business," he declared. "If my nature is such that I cannot resist
sin, I shall give myself over to sin. At least I shall not be a hypocrite, preaching the word of God with
my mind thinking of the shoulders and neck of a woman who does not belong to me."
It was cold in the room of the bell tower of the church on that January night and almost as soon as he
came into the room Curtis Hartman knew that if he stayed he would be ill. His feet were wet from
tramping in the snow and there was no fire. In the room in the house next door Kate Swift had not yet
appeared. With grim determination the man sat down to wait. Sitting in the chair and gripping the
edge of the desk on which lay the Bible he stared into the darkness thinking the blackest thoughts of
his life. He thought of his wife and for the moment almost hated her. "She has always been ashamed
of passion and has cheated me," he thought. "Man has a right to expect living passion and beauty in a
woman. He has no right to forget that he is an animal and in me there is something that is Greek. I
will throw off the woman of my bosom and seek other women. I will besiege this school teacher. I
will fly in the face of all men and if I am a creature of carnal lusts I will live then for my lusts."
The distracted man trembled from head to foot, partly from cold, partly from the struggle in which he
was engaged. Hours passed and a fever assailed his body. His throat began to hurt and his teeth
chattered. His feet on the study floor felt like two cakes of ice. Still he would not give up. "I will see
this woman and will think the thoughts I have never dared to think," he told himself, gripping the
edge of the desk and waiting.
Curtis Hartman came near dying from the effects of that night of waiting in the church, and also he
found in the thing that happened what he took to be the way of life for him. On other evenings when
he had waited he had not been able to see, through the little hole in the glass, any part of the school
teacher`s room except that occupied by her bed. In the darkness he had waited until the woman
suddenly appeared sitting in the bed in her white nightrobe. When the light was turned up she
propped herself up among the` pillows and read a book. Sometimes she smoked one of the cigarettes.
Only her bare shoulders and throat were visible.
On the January night, after he had come near dying with cold and after his mind had two or three
times actually slipped away into an odd land of fantasy so that he had by an exercise of will power to
force himself back into consciousness, Kate Swift appeared. In the room next door a lamp was lighted
and the waiting man stared into an empty bed. Then upon the bed before his eyes a naked woman
threw herself. Lying face downward she wept and beat with her fists upon the pillow. With a final
outburst of weeping she half arose, and in the presence of the man who had waited to look and not to
think thoughts the woman of sin began to pray. In the lamplight her figure, slim and strong, looked
like the figure of the boy in the presence of the Christ on the leaded window.
Curtis Hartman never remembered how he got out of the church. With a cry he arose, dragging the
heavy desk along the floor. The Bible fell, making a great clatter in the silence. When the light in the
house next door went out he stumbled down the stairway and into the street. Along the street he went
and ran in at the door of the Winesburg Eagle. To George Willard, who was tramping up and down in
the office undergoing a struggle of his own, he began to talk half incoherently. "The ways of God are
beyond human understanding," he cried, running in quickly and closing the door. He began to
advance upon the young man, his eyes glowing and his voice ringing with fervor. "I have found the
light," he cried. "After ten years in this town, God has manifested himself to me in the body of a
woman." His voice dropped and he began to whisper. "I did not understand," he said. "What I took to
be a trial of my soul was only a preparation for a new and more beautiful fervor of the spirit. God has
appeared to me in the person of Kate Swift, the school teacher, kneeling naked on a bed. Do you
know Kate Swift? Although she may not be aware of it, she is an instrument of God, bearing the
message of truth."
Reverend Curtis Hartman turned and ran out of the office. At the door he stopped, and after looking
up and down the deserted street, turned again to George Willard. "I am delivered. Have no fear." He
held up a bleeding fist for the young man to see. "I smashed the glass of the window," he cried. "Now
it will have to be wholly replaced. The strength of God was in me and I broke it with my fist."

GEORGE SANTAYANA (1863-1952)

Introduction

George Santayana was born in Spain, but grew up in America and worked as a philosopher and
professor there for the first part of his long life. He spent the last half of his life in Europe, from the
vantage point of which he wrote several books in which he attempted to analyze and explain
American society, identity, and culture to a sophisticated European and American audience.

In the essay excerpted below, Santayana reviews many of the positive aspects of the typical
American character as he observed it nearly 100 years ago. In order to understand the complexity of
Santayanas argument in this essay, it is necessary to read between the lines that is, to focus on
the subtext of his assertions. In other words, what negative aspects of American identity and
culture is Santayana pointing towards in his general assessment of positive American values and
characteristics?

Santayanas attitude toward America is highly ambivalent. His point of view is valuable because he
refuses to give easy answers to difficult questions. Rather, he alerts the reader to both the positive
values of American identity and culture and to its less obvious (but just as real and crucial) limitations
and weaknesses.

Consider the sentence concerning the average American personality, He finds it rather a waste of time
to think about the past at all. In the context of Santayanas argument, he is stressing that the average
American is oriented towards the future. But the statement is also obviously critical of the American for
forgetting the past for rejecting the richness of cultural inheritance and neglecting the lessons of
history. Similarly, when Santayana writes that the Americans imagination is practical, and the future
it forecasts is immediate, he is pointing out not only the confidence and optimism of the typical
American character, but also its historical short-sightedness and cultural naivet.

Santayana reinforces his portrayal of an un-self-critical America when he remarks that American
societys love of quantity indicates a diffidence as to quality. Santayana is in effect contending
that the American democratic principle of the rule of the majority may well result in the effective
suppression of a superior talented minority viewpoint.


from Materialism and Idealism in American Life (1920)

The discovery of the new world exercised a sort of selection among the inhabitants of Europe. All the
colonists, except the negroes, were voluntary exiles. The fortunate, the deeply rooted, and the lazy
remained at home; the wilder instincts or dissatisfaction of others tempted them beyond the horizon.
The American is accordingly the most adventurous, or the descendant of the most adventurous, of
Europeans. It is in his blood to be socially a radical, though perhaps not intellectually. What has existed
in the past, especially in the remote past, seems to him not only not authoritative, but irrelevant, inferior,
and outworn. He finds it rather a sorry waste of time to think about the past at all. But his enthusiasm
for the future is profound; he can conceive of no more decisive way of recommending am opinion or a
practice than to say that it is what everybody is coming to adopt. This expectation of what he approves,
or approval of what he expects, makes up his optimism. It is the necessary faith of the pioneer.

The optimism of the pioneer is not limited to his view of himself and his own future: it starts from
that; but feeling assured, safe, and cheery within, he looks with smiling and most kindly eyes on
everything and everybody about him.

Consider now the great emptiness of America: not merely the primitive physical emptiness, surviving
in some regions, and the continental spacing of the chief natural features, but also the moral
emptiness of a settlement where men and even houses are easily moved about, and no one, almost,
lives where he was born or believes what he has been taught. Not that the American has jettisoned
these impedimenta in anger; they have simply slipped from him as he moves. Great empty spaces
bring a sort of freedom to both soul and body. You
may pitch your tent where you will; or if ever you decide to build anything, it can be in a style of your
own devising. You have room, fresh materials, few models, and no critics. You trust your own
experience, not only because you must; but because you find you may do so safely and prosperously;
the forces that determine fortune are not yet too complicated for one man to explore. Your
detachable condition makes you lavish with, money and cheerfully experimental; you lose little if
you lose all, since you remain completely yourself. At the same mine your absolute initiative gives
you practice in coping with novel situations, and in being original; it teaches you shrewd
management. Your life and mind will become dry and direct, with few decorative flourishes. In your
works everything will be stark and pragmatic; you mill not understand why anybody should make
those little sacrifices to instinct or custom which we call grace.

At the same time the American is imaginative; for where life is intense, imagination is intense also.
Were he not imaginative he would not live so much in the future. But his imagination is practical, and
the future it forecasts is immediate; it works with the clearest and least ambiguous terms known to his
experience, in terms of number, measure, contrivance, economy and speed. He is an idealist working
on matter. Understanding as he does the material potentialities of things, he is successful in invention,
conservative in reform, and quick in emergencies. All his life he jumps into the train after it has
started. And jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.
There is an enthusiasm in his sympathetic handling of material forces which 'goes far to cancel the
illiberal character which it might otherwise assume. The good workman hardly distinguishes his
artistic intention from the potency in himself and in things which is about to realize that intention.
Accordingly his ideals fall into the form of premonitions and prophecies; and his studious prophecies
often come true. So do the happy workmanlike ideals of the American.

Idealism in the American, accordingly goes, hand in hand with present contentment and with
foresight of what the future very likely will actually bring. He is not a revolutionist; he believes lie is
already on the right track and moving towards an excellent destiny.

The American is wonderfully alive; and his vitality, not having often found a suitable outlet, makes
him appear agitated on the surface; he is always letting off an unnecessarily loud blast of incidental
steam. Yet his vitality is not superficial; it is inwardly prompted, and as sensitive and quick as a
magnetic needle. He is inquisitive, and ready with an answer to any question that he may put to
himself of his own accord; but if you try to pour instruction into him, on matters that do not touch his
own spontaneous life, he shows the most extra-ordinary powers of resistance and oblivescence; so
that he often is remarkably expert in some directions and surprisingly obtuse in others. He seems to
bear lightly the sorrowful burden of human knowledge. In a word, he is young.

In America there is a tacit optimistic assumption about existence, to the effect that the more
existence the better. The soulless critic might urge that quantity is only a physical category, implying
no excellence, but at best an abundance of opportunities both for good and for evil. Yet the young
soul, being curious and hungry, views existence a priori under the form of the good; its instinct to live
implies a faith that most things it can become or see or do will be worth while. Respect for quantity is
accordingly something more than the childish joy and wonder at bigness; it is the fisherman's joy in a
big haul, the good uses of which he can take for granted. Such optimism is amiable.

Here I think we may perceive that this love of quantity often has a silent partner, which is diffidence
as to quality. The democrat conscience recoils before anything that savors of privilege; and lest it
should concede an unmerited privilege to any pursuit or person, it reduces all things as far as possible
to the common denominator of quantity.
Chapter 6: America Comes of Age and Looks Backwards

America Enters the Modern World

At the beginning of the 20
th
Century, America had in many respects come of age as a country and
culture. More than 100-years-old as a nation, it was now among the chief countries of the world in
terms of the size of its population, territory, industry, military, and economy. And yet, with its growth
and growing strength, something vital had been lost a youthful idealism, optimism, and innocence.

In general, the writers of the early 20
th
Century who are now considered important were more
concerned with Americas spiritual losses than with its practical material achievements during this
period. The work of the famous trio of modern novelists Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
and William Faulkner is insistently backward-looking and suffused with nostalgia. It is also ironic,
romantic, and rueful.


Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is perhaps the most famous of early American 20
th
Century fiction writers
nearly as famous (or perhaps more so) abroad as at home. From a distance of several decades, it
may seem hard to account for this reputation. Hemingways creative output was relatively meager
and his narrative vision obsessive and narrow in comparison to novelists such as Willa Cather or
William Faulkner. Hemingways writing, however, obviously struck a chord with his
contemporaries, and it continues to exert a strong influence and appeal today. His fiction embodies
an attitude that might be described as admittedly hopeless but hopeful nevertheless. To many of his
readers, such an attitude seemed (and seems) unusually honest and courageous. To others, it appears
to give way too easily to self-pity. Whatever ones reaction, there is no doubt that Hemingway is a
master at representing a romantically nostalgic and ironically embittered mood through a remarkably
efficient yet resonant verbal precision and visual clarity.


F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fizgeralds prose is more luxurious and verbose than Hemingways, aiming at and often
attaining an effect of grand romantic sadness. He excels at portrayals of heartache and heartbreak,
and is a poet of lost horizons and broken dreams. Although Fitzgeralds focus in his narratives is on
particular romantic personalities, their generally sad and sometimes tragic stories may be understood
to be representative of a general failure of American ideals, and of a gradual but inevitable
diminishment of the countrys collective hopes and dreams.


William Faulkner

William Faulkners fiction was more prolific and larger in scope and vision than that of either
Fitzgerald or Hemingway. Like the work of Willa Cather who is perhaps the only early 20
th

Century novelist of comparable achievement Faulkners fiction creates and operates within its own
distinctive regional American universe. Faulkners fiction is set almost exclusively in the American
South in the years following that regions devastating defeat by Northern forces in the American
Civil War. His major characters are often in some ways traumatized by that history and inheritance
of defeat, and his narratives are notable for their tendency to look backwards and to consider the
present and the future as having been determined usually in a tragic, though sometimes also
humorous fashion by the past.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner were all successful novelists who became famous and revered
cultural figures during their lifetime (though to varied extents). Only two American poets of the early
20
th
Century attained similar notoriety. One was T. S. Eliot, who lived most of his adult life in
England, and the other was Robert Frost.


T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot was born into an old and famous American family that could trace its roots back to
Americas early Puritan settlers in New England. His poetry expresses their inward-looking religious
inheritance, while it critiques the world at large for being spiritually empty and misguided. Eliots
poetry speaks with great authority of modern mans spiritually lost condition, and of a civilization
that he felt to be disintegrating in the face of rapid technological and social change and upheaval.


Robert Frost

Robert Frost stands out from the rest of the authors in this chapter in his tough-minded attitude
towards the fast-changing contemporary world which he claimed was no better or worse than the
world at any other time in human history. Frost claimed that he had a lovers quarrel with the
world. His poetry questions the meaning of existence and criticizes human behavior, but it also
expresses an implicit joy in living and being, and a compassion for humanity in its often hostile
environment.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)

Introduction

Ernest Hemingways spare and precise prose style has been so influential and so often imitated that it
is easy to forget how innovative it was. Certainly it was not wholly original. Hemingway learned
and borrowed a great deal from the writing of older modern figures such as Gertrude Stein and
Sherwood Anderson. But while Anderson tended to focus on telling a story simply and clearly,
Hemingways stories are often as meaningful for what they do not say as for what they do.

In his use of a seemingly direct prose style, Hemingway is actually a master of obliquity and
indirection. The story Soldiers Home, for instance, is pointedly not about a soldiers heroic
homecoming from a victorious war, but about a character so traumatized by his war experience that
he no longer is able to feel at home anywhere at all least of all in the childhood setting that reminds
him constantly of a time when he took the world, and his place within it, for granted.

Krebs is, paradoxically, only at home in his feeling of alienation. This story as with In Another
Country, and much of Hemingways fiction details the tragic and self-defeating manner in which a
traumatized and marginalized individuals efforts to accommodate himself to even a congenial and
sympathetic environment serves only further to isolate him from others, and from himself.
Hemingways eventual suicide at the height of his fame, if not of his creative powers would seem
to underscore his own enduring sense of alienation and estrangement.


SOLDIER'S HOME (1925)
Krebs went to the war from a Methodist college in Kansas. There is a picture which shows him
among his fraternity brothers, all of them wearing exactly the same height and style collar. He
enlisted in the Marines in 1917 and did not return to the United States until the second division
returned from the Rhine in the summer of 1919.
There is a picture which shows him on the Rhone with two German girls and another corporal.
Krebs and the corporal look too big for their uniforms. The German girls are not beautiful. The
Rhine does not show in the picture.
By the time Krebs returned to his home town in Oklahoma the greeting of heroes was over. He
came back much too late. The men from the town who had been drafted had all been welcomed
elaborately on their return. There had been a great deal of hysteria. Now the reaction had set in.
People seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late, years after
the war was over.
At first Krebs, who had been at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel and in the
Argonne did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted
to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs
found that to be listened to at all he had to lie and after he had done this twice he, too, had a
reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that had happened
to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. All of the times that had been able to
make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back
when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he
might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost
themselves.
His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had
seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers.
Even his lies were not sensational at the pool room. His acquaintances, who had heard detailed
accounts of German women found chained to machine guns in the Argonne and who could not
comprehend, or were barred by their patriotism from interest in, any German machine gunners
who were not chained, were not thrilled by his stories.
Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration,
and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and the talked a few
minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other
soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. In this way he lost
everything.
During this time, it was late summer, he was sleeping late in bed, getting up to walk down town
to the library to get a book, eating lunch at home, reading on the front porch until he became
bored and then walking down through the town to spend the hottest hours of the day in the cool
dark of the pool room. He loved to play pool.
In the evening he practiced on his clarinet, strolled down town, read and went to bed. He was
still a hero to his two young sisters. His mother would have given him breakfast in bed if he had
wanted it. She often came in when he was in bed and asked him to tell her about the war, but her
attention always wandered. His father was non-committal.
Before Krebs went away to the war he had never been allowed to drive the family motor car. His
father was in the real estate business and always wanted the car to be at his command when he
required it to take clients out into the country to show them a piece of farm property. The car
always stood outside the First National Bank building where his father had an office on the
second floor. Now, after the war, it was still the same car.
Nothing was changed in the town except that the young girls had grown up. But they lived in
such a complicated world of already defined alliances and shifting feuds that Krebs did not feel
the energy or the courage to break into it. He liked to look at them, though. There were so many
good-looking young girls. Most of them had their hair cut short. When he went away only little
girls wore their hair like that or girls that were fast. They all wore sweaters and shirt waists with
round Dutch collars. It was a pattern. He liked to look at them from the front porch as they
walked on the other side of the street. He liked to watch them walking under the shade of the
trees. He liked the round Dutch collars above their sweaters. He liked their silk stockings and
flat shoes. He liked their bobbed hair and the way they walked.
When he was in town their appeal to him was not very strong. He did not like them when he saw
them in the Greek's ice cream parlor. He did not want them themselves really. They were too
complicated. There was something else. Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not want to have to
work to get her. He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long
time getting her. He did not want to get into the intrigue and the politics. He did not want to have
to do any courting. He did not want to tell any more lies. It wasn't worth it.
He did not want any consequences. He did not want any consequences ever again. He wanted to
live along without consequences. Besides he did not really need a girl. The army had taught him
that. It was all right to pose as though you had to have a girl. Nearly everybody did that. But it
wasn't true. You did not need a girl. That was the funny thing. First a fellow boasted how girls
mean nothing to him, that he never thought of them, that they could not touch him. Then a
fellow boasted that he could not get along without girls, that he had to have them all the time,
that he could not go to sleep without them.
That was all a lie. It was all a lie both ways. You did not need a girl unless you thought about
them. He learned that in the army. Then sooner or later you always got one. When you were
really ripe for a girl you always got one. You did not have to think about it. Sooner or later it
could come. He had learned that in the army.
Now he would have liked a girl if she had come to him and not wanted to talk. But here at home
it was all too complicated. He knew he could never get through it all again. It was not worth the
trouble. That was the thing about French girls and German girls. There was not all this talking.
You couldn't talk much and you did not need to talk. It was simple and you were friends. He
thought about France and then he began to think about Germany. On the whole he had liked
Germany better. He did not want to leave Germany. He did not want to come home. Still, he had
come home. He sat on the front porch.
He liked the girls that were walking along the other side of the street. He liked the look of them
much better than the French girls or the German girls. But the world they were in was not the
world he was in. He would like to have one of them. But it was not worth it. They were such a
nice pattern. He liked the pattern. It wis exciting. But he would not go through all the talking. He
did not want one badly enough. He liked to look at them all, though. It was not worth it. Not
now when things were getting good again.
He sat there on the porch reading a book on the war. It was a history and he was reading about
all the engagements he had been in. It was the most interesting reading he had ever done. He
wished there were more maps. He looked forward with a good feeling to reading all the really
good histories when they would come out with good detail maps. Now he was really learning
about the war. He had been a good soldier. That made a difference.
One morning after he had been home about a month his mother came into his bedroom and sat
on the bed. She smoothed her apron.
"I had a talk with your father last night, Harold," she said, "and he is willing for you to take the
car out in the evenings."
"Yeah?" said Krebs, who was not fully awake. "Take the car out? Yeah?"
"Yes. Your father has felt for some time that you should be able to take the car out in the
evenings whenever you wished but we only talked it over last night."
"I'll bet you made him," Krebs said.
"No. It was your father's suggestion that we talk the matter over."
"Yeah. I'll bet you made him," Krebs sat up in bed.
"Will you come down to breakfast, Harold?" his mother said."
"As soon as I get my clothes on," Krebs said.
His mother went out of the room and he could hear her frying something downstairs while he
washed, shaved and dressed to go down into the dining-room for breakfast. While he was eating
breakfast, his sister brought in the mail.
"Well, Hare," she said. "You old sleepy-head. What do you ever get up for?"
Krebs looked at her. He liked her. She was his best sister.
"Have you got the paper?" he asked.
She handed him The Kansas City Star and he shucked off its brown wrapper and opened it to the
sporting page. He folded The Star open and propped it against the water pitcher with his cereal
dish to steady it, so he could read while he ate.
"Harold," his mother stood in the kitchen doorway, "Harold, please don't muss up the paper.
Your father can't read his Star if its been mussed."
"I won't muss it," Krebs said.
His sister sat down at the table and watched him while he read.
"We're playing indoor over at school this afternoon," she said. "I'm going to pitch."
"Good," said Krebs. "How's the old wing?"
"I can pitch better than lots of the boys. I tell them all you taught me. The other girls aren't much
good."
"Yeah?" said Krebs.
"I tell them all you're my beau. Aren't you my beau, Hare?"
"You bet."
"Couldn't your brother really be your beau just because he's your brother?"
"I don't know."
"Sure you know. Couldn't you be my beau, Hare, if I was old enough and if you wanted to?"
"Sure. You're my girl now."
"Am I really your girl?"
"Sure."
"Do you love me?"
"Uh, huh."
"Do you love me always?"
"Sure."
"Will you come over and watch me play indoor?"
"Maybe."
"Aw, Hare, you don't love me. If you loved me, you'd want to come over and watch me play
indoor."
Krebs's mother came into the dining-room from the kitchen. She carried a plate with two fried
eggs and some crisp bacon on it and a plate of buckwheat cakes.
"You run along, Helen," she said. "I want to talk to Harold."
She put the eggs and bacon down in front of him and brought in a jug of maple syrup for the
buckwheat cakes. Then she sat down across the table from Krebs.
"I wish you'd put down the paper a minute, Harold," she said.
Krebs took down the paper and folded it.
"Have you decided what you are going to do yet, Harold?" his mother said, taking off her
glasses.
"No," said Krebs.
"Don't you think it's about time?" His mother did not say this in a mean way. She seemed
worried.
"I hadn't thought about it," Krebs said.
"God has some work for every one to do," his mother said. "There can be no idle hands in His
Kingdom."
"I'm not in His Kingdom," Krebs said.
"We are all of us in His Kingdom."
Krebs felt embarrassed and resentful as always.
"I've worried about you too much, Harold," his mother went on. "I know the temptations you
must have been exposed to. I know how weak men are. I know what your own dear grandfather,
my own father, told us about the Civil War and I have prayed for you. I pray for you all day
long, Harold."
Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate.
"Your father is worried, too," his mother went on. "He thinks you have lost your ambition, that
you haven't got a definite aim in life. Charley Simmons, who is just your age, has a good job and
is going to be married. The boys are all settling down; they're all determined to get somewhere;
you can see that boys like Charley Simmons are on their way to being really a credit to the
community."
Krebs said nothing.
"Don't look that way, Harold," his mother said. "You know we love you and I want to tell you
for your own good how matters stand. Your father does not want to hamper your freedom. He
thinks you should be allowed to drive the car. If you want to take some of the nice girls out
riding with you, we are only too pleased. We want you to enjoy yourself. But you are going to
have to settle down to work, Harold. Your father doesn't care what you start in at. All work is
honorable as he says. But you've got to make a start at something. He asked me to speak to you
this morning and then you can stop in and see him at his office."
"Is that all?" Krebs said.
"Yes. Don't you love your mother dear boy?"
"No," Krebs said.
His mother looked at him across the table. Her eyes were shiny. She started crying.
"I don't love anybody," Krebs said.
It wasn't any good. He couldn't tell her, he couldn't make her see it. It was silly to have said it.
He had only hurt her. He went over and took hold of her arm. She was crying with her head in
her hands.
"I didn't mean it," he said. "I was just angry at something. I didn't mean I didn't love you."
His mother went on crying. Krebs put his arm on her shoulder.
"Can't you believe me, mother?"
His mother shook her head.
"Please, please, mother. Please believe me."
"All right," his mother said chokily. She looked up at him. "I believe you, Harold."
Krebs kissed her hair. She put her face up to him.
"I'm your mother," she said. "I held you next to my heart when you were a tiny baby."
Krebs felt sick and vaguely nauseated.
"I know, Mummy," he said. "I'll try and be a good boy for you."
"Would you kneel and pray with me, Harold?" his mother asked.
They knelt down beside the dining-room table and Krebs's mother prayed.
"Now, you pray, Harold," she said.
"I can't," Krebs said.
"Try, Harold."
"I can't."
"Do you want me to pray for you?"
"Yes."
So his mother prayed for him and then they stood up and Krebs kissed his mother and went out
of the house. He had tried so to keep his life from being complicated. Still, none of it had
touched him. He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie. He would go to Kansas
City and get a job and she would feel all right about it. There would be one more scene maybe
before he got away. He would not go down to his father's office. He would miss that one. He
wanted his life to go smoothly. It had just gotten going that way. Well, that was all over now,
anyway. He would go over to the schoolyard and watch Helen play indoor baseball.


In Another Country

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan
and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets
looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in
the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small
birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down
from the mountains.

We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the
town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long.
Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three
bridges. On one of them a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her
charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterward in your pocket. The hospital was very old and
very beautiful, and you entered a gate and walked across a courtyard and out a gate on the other side.
There were usually funerals starting from the courtyard. Beyond the old hospital were the new brick
pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested in what was the
matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference.
The doctor came up to the machine where I was sitting and said: "What did you like best to do before
the war? Did you practice a sport?"
I said: "Yes, football."
"Good," he said. "You will be able to play football again better than ever."
My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to the ankle without a calf, and the
machine was to bend the knee and make it move as riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and
instead the machine lurched when it came to the bending part. The doctor said:" That will all pass.
You are a fortunate young man. You will play football again like a champion."
In the next machine was a major who had a little hand like a baby's. He winked at me when the
doctor examined his hand, which was between two leather straps that bounced up and down and
flapped the stiff fingers, and said: "And will I too play football, captain-doctor?" He had been a very
great fencer, and before the war the greatest fencer in Italy.
The doctor went to his office in a back room and brought a photograph which showed a hand that had
been withered almost as small as the major's, before it had taken a machine course, and after was a
little larger. The major held the photograph with his good hand and looked at it very carefully. "A
wound?" he asked.
"An industrial accident," the doctor said.
"Very interesting, very interesting," the major said, and handed it back to the doctor.
"You have confidence?"
"No," said the major.
There were three boys who came each day who were about the same age I was. They were all three
from Milan, and one of them was to be a lawyer, and one was to be a painter, and one had intended
to be a soldier, and after we were finished with the machines, sometimes we walked back together to
the Caf Cova, which was next door to the Scala. We walked the short way through the communist
quarter because we were four together. The people hated us because we were officers, and from a
wine-shop someone called out, "A basso gli ufficiali!" as we passed. Another boy who walked with us
sometimes and made us five wore a black silk handkerchief across his face because he had no nose
then and his face was to be rebuilt. He had gone out to the front from the military academy and been
wounded within an hour after he had gone into the front line for the first time. They rebuilt his face,
but he came from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly right. He went to South
America and worked in a bank. But this was a long time ago, and then we did not any of us know how
it was going to be afterward. We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not
going to it any more.
We all had the same medals, except the boy with the black silk bandage across his face, and he had
not been at the front long enough to get any medals. The tall boy with a very pale face who was to be
a lawyer had been lieutenant of Arditi and had three medals of the sort we each had only one of. He
had lived a very long time with death and was a little detached. We were all a little detached, and
there was nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital. Although,
as we walked to the Cova through the though part of town, walking in the dark, with light and singing
coming out of the wine-shops, and sometimes having to walk into the street when the men and
women would crowd together on the sidewalk so that we would have had to jostle them to et by, we
felt held together by there being something that had happened that they, the people who disliked us,
did not understand.
We ourselves all understood the Cova, where it was rich and warm and not too brightly lighted, and
noisy and smoky at certain hours, and there were always girls at the tables and the illustrated papers
on a rack on the wall. The girls at the Cova were very patriotic, and I found that the most patriotic
people in Italy were the caf girls - and I believe they are still patriotic.
The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had done to get them. I
showed them the papers, which were written in very beautiful language and full of fratellanza and
abnegazione, but which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals
because I was an American. After that their manner changed a little toward me, although I was their
friend against outsiders. I was a friend, but I was never really one of them after they had read the
citations, because it had been different with them and they had done very different things to get their
medals. I had been wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an
accident. I was never ashamed of the ribbons, though, and sometimes, after the cocktail hour, I would
imagine myself having done all the things they had done to get their medals; but walking home at
night through the empty streets with the cold wind and all the shops closed, trying to keep near the
street lights, I knew that would never have done such things, and I was very much afraid to die, and
often lay in bed at night by myself, afraid to die and wondering how I would be when back to the
front again.
The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk, although I might seem a
hawk to those who had never hunted; they, the three, knew better and so we drifted apart. But I
stayed good friends with the boy who had been wounded his first day at the front, because he would
never know now how he would have turned out; so he could never be accepted either, and I liked him
because I thought perhaps he would not have turned out to be a hawk either.
The major, who had been a great fencer, did not believe in bravery, and spent much time while we
sat in the machines correcting my grammar. He had complimented me on how I spoke Italian, and we
talked together very easily. One day I had said that Italian seemed such an easy language to me that I
could not take a great interest in it; everything was so easy to say. "Ah, yes," the major said. "Why,
then, do you not take up the use of grammar?" So we took up the use of grammar, and soon Italian
was such a difficult language that I was afraid to talk to him until I had the grammar straight in my
mind.

The major came very regularly to the hospital. I do not think he ever missed a day, although I am
sure he did not believe in the machines. There was a time when none of us believed in the machines,
and one day the major said it was all nonsense. The machines were new then and it was we who
were to prove them. It was an idiotic idea, he said, "a theory like another". I had not learned my
grammar, and he said I was a stupid impossible disgrace, and he was a fool to have bothered with me.
He was a small man and he sat straight up in his chair with his right hand thrust into the machine and
looked straight ahead at the wall while the straps thumbed up and down with his fingers in them.
"What will you do when the was is over if it is over?" he asked me. "Speak grammatically!"
"I will go to the States."
"Are you married?"
"No, but I hope to be."
"The more a fool you are," he said. He seemed very angry. "A man must not marry."
"Why, Signor Maggiore?"
"Don't call me Signor Maggiore."
"Why must not a man marry?"
"He cannot marry. He cannot marry," he said angrily. "If he is to lose everything, he should not place
himself in a position to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find
things he cannot lose."
He spoke very angrily and bitterly, and looked straight ahead while he talked.
"But why should he necessarily lose it?"
"He'll lose it," the major said. He was looking at the wall. Then he looked down at the machine and
jerked his little hand out from between the straps and slapped it hard against his thigh. "He'll lose it,"
he almost shouted. "Don't argue with me!" Then he called to the attendant who ran the machines.
"Come and turn this damned thing off."
He went back into the other room for the light treatment and the massage. Then I heard him ask the
doctor if he might use his telephone and he shut the door. When he came back into the room, I was
sitting in another machine. He was wearing his cape and had his cap on, and he came directly toward
my machine and put his arm on my shoulder.
"I am sorry," he said, and patted me on the shoulder with his good hand. "I would not be rude. My
wife has just died. You must forgive me."
"Oh-" I said, feeling sick for him. "I am so sorry."
He stood there biting his lower lip. "It is very difficult," he said. "I cannot resign myself."
He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry. "I am utterly unable to
resign myself," he said and choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself
straight and soldierly, with tears on both cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the machines and
out the door.
The doctor told me that the major's wife, who was very young and whom he had not married until he
was definitely invalided out of the war, had died of pneumonia. She had been sick only a few days.
No one expected her to die. The major did not come to the hospital for three days. Then he came at
the usual hour, wearing a black band on the sleeve of his uniform. When he came back, there were
large framed photographs around the wall, of all sorts of wounds before and after they had been
cured by the machines. In front of the machine the major used were three photographs of hands like
his that were completely restored. I do not know where the doctor got them. I always understood we
were the first to use the machines. The photographs did not make much difference to the major
because he only looked out of the window.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)

Introduction

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a romantic figure in both his life and art. His tormented marriage to an
emotionally fragile southern belle (similar in some ways to Jonquil Cary in The Sensible Thing)
and his ongoing struggles with writers block and alcoholism never entirely dampened a youthful
idealism and an eye for the exquisite and the beautiful. He was particularly gifted at portraying a
heart-rending yearning that is no less sad and tragic for being prone to naivet and over-credulousness.

In his greatest work, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald consciously parallels the disappointed dreams of
the novels larger-than-life title figure with the aging and decline of the Great American Dream of
finding a new life that will be perfect and perfectly rewarding in every respect. That such a youthful
dream (like George OKellys romantic infatuation and heartache) is bound to fade into the actual
mixture of pleasures and sadness that is our daily life does not entirely invalidate its appeal, or
eradicate our memory of its power to entice, and to disappoint.


The Sensible Thing
AT the Great American Lunch Hour
young George O'Kelly straightened his desk deliberately and with an assumed air of interest. No one
in the office must know that he was in a hurry, for success is a matter of atmosphere, and it is not well
to advertise the fact that your mind is separated from your work by a distance of seven hundred
miles.
But once out of the building he set his teeth and began to run, glancing now and then at the gay noon
of early spring which filled Times Square and loitered less than twenty feet over the heads of the
crowd. The crowd all looked slightly upward and took deep March breaths, and the sun dazzled their
eyes so that scarcely any one saw any one else but only their own reflection on the sky.
George O'Kelly, whose mind was over seven hundred miles away, thought that all outdoors was
horrible. He rushed into the subway, and for ninety-five blocks bent a frenzied glance on a car-card
which showed vividly how he had only one chance in five of keeping his teeth for ten years. At 137th
Street he broke off his study of commercial art, left the subway, and began to run again, a tireless,
anxious run that brought him this time to his home - one room in a high, horrible apartment-house in
the middle of nowhere.
There it was on the bureau, the letter - in sacred ink, on blessed oaoer - all over the city, people, if
they listened, could hear the beating of George O'Kelly's heart. He read the commas, the blots, and
the thumb-smudge on the margin - then he threw himself hopelessly upon his bed.
He was in a mess, one of those terrific messes which are ordinary incidents in the life of the poor,
which follow poverty like birds of prey. The poor go under or go up or go wrong or even go on,
somehow, in a way the poor have - but George O'Kelly was so new to poverty that had any one
denied the uniqueness of his case he would have been astounded.
Less than two years ago he had been graduated with honors from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and had taken a position with a firm of construction engineers in southern Tennessee. All
his life he had thought in terms of tunnels and skyscrapers and great squat dams and tall, three-
towered bridges, that were like dancers holding hands in a row, with heads as tall as cities and skirts
of cable strand. It had seemed romantic to George O'Kelly to change the sweep of rivers and the
shape of mountains so that life could flourish in the old bad lands of the world where.it had never
taken root before. He loved steel, and there was always steel near him in his dreams, liquid steel,
steel in bars, and blocks and beams and formless plastic masses, waiting for him, as paint and canvas
to his hand. Steel inexhaustible, to be made lovely and austere in his imaginative fire ...
At present he was an insurance clerk at forty dollars a week with his dream slipping fast behind him.
The dark little girl who had made this mess, this terrible and intolerable mess, was waiting to be sent
for in a town in Tennessee.
In fifteen minutes the woman from whom he sublet his room knocked and asked him with maddening
kindness if, since he was home, he would have some lunch. He shook his head, but the interruption
aroused him, and getting up from the bed he wrote a telegram.
"Letter depressed me have you lost your nerve you are foolish and just upset to think of breaking off
why not marry me immediately sure we can make it all right ___"
He hesitated for a wild minute, and then added in a hand that could scarcely be recognized as his
own: "In any case I will arrive to-morrow at six o'clock."
When he finished he ran out of the apartment and down to the telegraph office near the subway stop.
He possessed in this world not quite one hundred dollars, but the letter showed that she was
"nervous" and this left him no choice. He knew what "nervous" meant - that she was emotionally
depressed, that the prospect of marrying into a life of poverty and struggle was putting too much
strain upon her love.
George O'Kelly reached the insurance company at his usual run, the run that had become almost
second nature to him, that seemed best to express the tension under which he lived. He went straight
to the manager's office.
"I want to see you, Mr. Chambers," he announced breathlessly.
"Well ?" Two eyes, eyes like winter windows, glared at him with ruthless impersonality.
"I want to get four days' vacation."
"Why, you had a vacation just two weeks ago !" said Mr. Chambers in surprise.
"That's true," admitted the distraught young man, "but now I've got to have another."
"Where'd you go last time ? To your home ?"
"No, I went to - a place in Tennessee."
"Well, where do you want to go this time ?"
"Well, this time I want to go to - a place in Tennessee."
"You're consistent, anyhow," said the manager dryly. "But I didn't realize you were employed here as
a travelling salesman."
"I'm not," cried George desperately, "but I've got to go."
"All right," agreed Mr. Chambers, "but you don't have to come back. So don't !"
"I won't." And to his own astonishment as well as Mr. Chambers' George's face grew pink with
pleasure. He felt happy, exultant -for the first time in six months he was absolutely free. Tears of
gratitude stood in his eyes, and he seized Mr. Chambers warmly by the hand.
"I want to thank you," he said with a rush of emotion, "I don't want to come back. I think I'd have
gone crazy if you'd said that I could come back. Only I couldn't quit myself, you see, and I want to
thank you for - for quitting for me."
He waved his hand magnanimously, shouted aloud, "You owe me three days' salary but you can keep
it!" and rushed from the office. Mr. Chambers rang for his stenographer to ask if O'Kelly had seemed
queer lately. He had fired many men in the course of his career, and they had taken it in many
different ways, but none of them had thanked him - ever before.
II
Jonquil Gary was her name, and to George O'Kelly nothing had ever looked so fresh and pale as her
face when she saw him and fled to him eagerly along the station platform. Her arms were raised to
him, her mouth was half parted for his kiss, when she held him off suddenly and lightly and, with a
touch of embarrassment, looked around. Two boys, somewhat younger than George, were standing
in the background.
"This is Mr. Craddock and Mr. Holt," she announced cheerfully. "You met them when you were here
before."
Disturbed by the transition of a kiss into an introduction and suspecting some hidden significance,
George was more confused when he found that the automobile which was to carry them to Jonquil's
house belonged to one of the two young men. It seemed to put him at a disadvantage. On the way
Jonquil chattered between the front and back seats, and when he tried to slip his arm around her
under cover of the twilight she compelled him with a quick movement to take her hand instead.
"Is this street on the way to your house ?" he whispered. "I don't recognize it."
"It's the new boulevard. Jerry just got this car today, and he wants to show it to me before he takes us
home."
When, after twenty minutes, they were deposited at Jonquil's house, George felt that the first
happiness of the meeting, the joy he had recognized so surely in her eyes back in the station, had
been dissipated by the intrusion of the ride. Something that he had looked forward to had been rather
casually lost, and he was brooding on this as he said good night stiffly to the two young men. Then his
ill-humor faded as Jonquil drew him into a familiar embrace under the dim light of the front hall and
told him in a dozen ways, of which the best was without words, how she had missed him. Her emotion
reassured him, promised his anxious heart that everything would be all right.
They sat together on the sofa, overcome by each other's presence, beyond all except fragmentary
endearments. At the supper hour Jonquil's father and mother appeared and were glad to see George.
They liked him, and had been interested in his engineering career when he had first come to
Tennessee over a year before. They had been sorry when he had given it up and gone to New York
to look for something more immediately profitable, but while they deplored the curtailment of his
career they sympathized with him and were ready to recognize the engagement. During dinner they
asked about his progress in New York.
"Everything's going fine," he told them with enthusiasm. "I've been promoted - better salary."
He was miserable as he said this - but they were all so glad.
"They must like you," said Mrs. Gary, "that's certain - or they wouldn't let you off twice in three
weeks to come down here."
"I told them they had to," explained George hastily; "I told them if they didn't I wouldn't work for
them any more."
"But you ought to save your money," Mrs. Gary reproached him gently. "Not spend it all on this
expensive trip."
Dinner was over - he and Jonquil were alone and she came back into his arms.
"So glad you're here," she sighed. "Wish you never were going away again, darling."
"Do you miss me ?"
"Oh, so much, so much."
"Do you - do other men come to see you often ? Like those two kids ?
"The question surprised her. The dark velvet eyes stared at him.
"Why, of course they do. All the time. Why - I've told you in letters that they did, dearest."
This was true - when he had first come to the city there had been already a dozen boys around her,
responding to her picturesque fragility with adolescent worship, and a few of them perceiving that her
beautiful eyes were also sane and kind.
"Do you expect me never to go anywhere" - Jonquil demanded, leaning back against the sofa-pillows
until she seemed to look at him from many miles away - "and just fold my hands and sit still - forever
?"
"What do you mean ?" he blurted out in a panic. "Do you mean you think I'll never have enough
money to marry you ?"
"Oh, don't jump at conclusions so, George."
"I'm not jumping at conclusions. That's what you said."
George decided suddenly that he was on dangerous grounds. He had not intended to let anything
spoil this night. He tried to take her again jn his arms, but she resisted unexpectedly, saying:
"It's hot. I'm going to get the electric fan."
When the fan was adjusted they sat down again, but he was in a supersensitive mood and
involuntarily he plunged into the specific world he had intended to avoid.
"When will you marry me ?"
"Are you ready for me to marry you ?"
All at once his nerves gave way, and he sprang to his feet.
"Let's shut off that damned fan," he cried, "it drives me wild. It's like a clock ticking away all the time
I'll be with you. I came here to be happy and forget everything about New York and time ____"
He sank down on the sofa as suddenly as he had risen. Jonquil turned off the fan, and drawing his
head down into her lap began stroking his hair.
"Let's sit like this," she said softly, "just sit quiet like this, and I'll put you to sleep. You're all tired and
nervous and your sweetheart 'll take care of you."
"But I don't want to sit like this," he complained, jerking up suddenly, "I don't want to sit like this at
all. I want you to kiss me. That's the only thing that makes me rest. And anyway I'm not nervous - it's
you that's nervous. I'm not nervous at all."
To prove that he wasn't nervous he left the couch and plumped himself into a rocking-chair across the
room.
"Just when I'm ready to marry you you write me the most nervous letters, as if you're going to back
out, and I have to come rushing down here ___"
"You don't have to come if you don't want to."
"But I do want to !" insisted George.
It seemed to him that he was being very cool and logical and that she was putting him deliberately in
the wrong. With every word they were drawing farther and farther apart - and he was unable to stop
himself or to keep worry and pain out of his voice.
But in a minute Jonquil began to cry sorrowfully and he came back to the sofa and put his arm around
her. He was the comforter now, drawing her head close to his shoulder, murmuring old familiar things
until she grew calmer and only trembled a little, spasmodically, in his arms. For over an hour they sat
there, while the evening pianos thumped their last cadences into the street outside. George did not
move, or think, or hope, lulled into numbness by the premonition of disaster. The clock would tick on,
past eleven, past twelve, and then Mrs. Gary would call down gently over the banister - beyond that
he saw only tomorrow and despair.
ill
In the heat of the next day the breaking-point came. They had each guessed the truth about the other,
but of the two she was the more ready to admit the situation.
'There's no use going on," she said miserably, "you know you hate the insurance business, and you'll
never do well in it."
"That's not it," he insisted stubbornly; "I hate going on alone. If you'll marry me and come with me
and take a chance with me, I can make good at anything, but not while I'm worrying about you down
here."
She was silent a long time before she answered, not thinking - for she had seen the end - but only
waiting, because she knew that every word would seem more cruel than the last. Finally she spoke :

"George, I love you with all my heart, and I don't see how I can ever love any one else but you. If
you'd been ready for me two months ago I'd have married you - now I can't because it doesn't seem to
be the sensible thing."
He made wild accusations - there was some one else - she was keeping something from him !
"No, there's no one else."
This Was true. But reacting from the strain of this affair she had found relief in the company of young
boys like Jerry Holt, who had the merit of meaning absolutely nothing in her life.
George didn't take the situation well, at all. He seized her in 25 his arms and tried literally to kiss
her into marrying him at once. When this failed, he broke into a long monologue of self-pity, and
ceased only when he saw that he was making himself despicable in her sight. He threatened to leave
when he had no intention of leaving, and refused to go when she told him that, after all, it was best
that he should.
For a while she was sorry, then for another while she was merely kind.
"You'd better go now," rhe cried at last, so loud that Mrs. Gary
came down-stairs in alarm. 26
"Is something the matter ?"
"I'm going away, Mrs. Gary," said George brokenly. Jonquil had left the room.
"Don't feel so badly, George." Mrs. Gary blinked at him in helpless sympathy - sorry and, in the same
breath, glad that the little tragedy was almost done. "If I were you I'd go home to your mother for a
week or so. Perhaps after all this is the sensible thing
"Please don't talk," he cried. "Please don't say anything to me
now!"
Jonquil came into the room again, her sorrow and her nervousness alike tucked under powder and
rouge and hat.
"I've ordered a taxicab," she said impersonally. "We can drive around until your train leaves."
She walked out on the front porch. George put on his coat and hat and stood for a minute exhausted in
the hall - he had eaten
scarcely a bite since he had left New York. Mrs. Gary came over, drew his head down and kissed him
on the cheek, and he felt very ridiculous andweak in his knowledge that the scene had been
ridiculous and weak at the end. If he had only gone the night before - left her for the last time with a
decent pride.
The taxi had come, and for an hour these two that had been lovers rode along the less-frequented
streets. He held her hand and grew calmer in the sunshine, seeing too late that there had been
nothing all along to do or say.
"I'll come back," he told her.
"I know you will," she answered, trying to put a cheery faith into her voice. "And we'll write each
other - sometimes."
"No," he said, "we won't write. I couldn't stand that. Some day I'll come back."
"I'll never forget you, George."
They reached the station, and she went with him while he bought his ticket...
"Why, George O'Kelly and Jonquil Gary !"
It was a man and a girl whom George had known when he had worked in town, and Jonquil seemed
to greet their presence with relief. For an interminable five minutes they all stood there talking; then
the train roared into the station, and with ill-concealed agony in his face George held out his arms
toward Jonquil. She took an uncertain step toward him, faltered, and then pressed his hand quickly as
if she were taking leave of a chance friend.
"Good-by, George," she was saying, "I hope you have a pleasant trip."
"Good-by, George. Come back and see us all again."
Dumb, almost blind with pain, he seized his suitcase, and in some dazed way got himself aboard the
train.
Past clanging street-crossings, gathering speed through wide suburban spaces toward the sunset.
Perhaps she too would see the sunset and pause for a moment, turning, remembering, before he
faded with her sleep into the past. This night's dusk would cover up forever the sun and the trees and
the flowers and laughter of his young world.

IV
On a damp afternoon in September of the following year a
young man with his face burned to a deep copper glow got off a
train at a city in Tennessee. He looked around anxiously, and
seemed relieved when he found that there was no one in the
station to meet him. He taxied to the best hotel in the city where
he registered with some satisfaction as George O'Kelly, Cuzco,
Peru.
Up in his room he sat for a few minutes at the window looking down into the familiar street below.
Then with his hand trembling faintly he took off the telephone receiver and called a number.
"Is Miss Jonquil in ?"
"This is she."
"Oh -" His voice after overcoming a faint tendency to waver went on with friendly formality.
"This is George O'Kelly. Did you get my letter ?"
"Yes. I thought you'd be in today."
Her voice, cool and unmoved, disturbed him, but not as he had expected. This was the voice of a
stranger, unexcited, pleasantly glad to see him - that was all. He wanted to put down the telephone
and catch his breath.
"I haven't seen you for - a long time." He succeeded in making this sound offhand. "Over a year."
He knew how long it had been - to the day.
"It'll be awfully nice to talk to you again."
"I'll be there in about an hour."
He hung up. For four long seasons every minute of his leisure had been crowded with anticipation of
this hour, and now this hour was here. He had thought of finding her married, engaged, in love - he
had not thought she would be unstirred at his return.
There would never again in his life, he felt, be another ten months like these he had just gone
through. He had made an admittedly remarkable showing for a young engineer - stumbled into two
unusual opportunities, one in Peru, whence he had just returned, and another, consequent upon it, in
New York, whither he was bound. In this short time he had risen from poverty into
a position of unlimited opportunity.
He looked at himself in the dressing-table mirror. He was almost black with tan, but it was a romantic
black, and in the last week, since he had had time to think about it, it had given him considerable
pleasure. The hardiness of his frame, too, he appraised with a sort of fascination. He had lost part of
an eyebrow somewhere, and he still wore an elastic bandage on his knee, but he was too young not to
realize that on the steamer many women had looked at him with unusual tributary interest.
His clothes, of course, were frightful. They had been made for him by a Greek tailor in Lima - in two
days. He was young enough, too, to have explained this sartorial deficiency to Jonquil in his
otherwise laconic note. The only further detail it contained was a request that he should not be met at
the station.
George O'Kelly, of Cuzco, Peru, waited an hour and a half in the hotel, until, to be exact, the sun had
reached a midway position in the sky. Then, freshly shaven and talcum-powdered toward a somewhat
more Caucasian hue, for vanity at the last minute had overcome romance, he engaged a taxicab and
set out for the house he knew so well.
He was breathing hard - he noticed this but he told himself that it was excitement, not emotion. He
was here; she was not married - that was enough. He was not even sure what he had to say to her.
But this was the moment of his life that he felt he could least easily have dispensed with. There was
no triumph, after all, without a girl concerned, and if he did not lay his spoils at her feet he could at
least hold them for a passing moment before her eyes.
The house loomed up suddenly beside him, and his first thought was that it had assumed a strange
unreality. There was nothing changed - only everything was changed. It was smaller and it seemed
shabbier than before - there was no cloud of magic hovering over its roof and issuing from the
windows of the upper floor. He rang the door-bell and an unfamiliar colored maid appeared. Miss
Jonquil would be down in a moment. He wet his lips nervously and walked into the sitting-room - and
the feeling of unreality increased. After all, he saw, this was only a room,~and not the enchanted
chamber where he had passed those poignant
hours. He sat in a chair, amazed to find it a chair, realizing that his imagination had distorted and
colored all these simple familiar things.
Then the door opened and Jonquil came into the room - and it was as though everything in it suddenly
blurred before his eyes. He had not remembered how beautiful she was, and he felt his face grow
pale and his voice diminish to a poor sigh in his throat.
She was dressed in pale green, and a gold ribbon bound back her dark, straight hair like a crown. The
familiar velvet eyes caught his as she came through the door, and a spasm of fright went through him
at her beauty's power of inflicting pain.
He said "Hello," and they each took a few steps forward and shook hands. Then they sat in chairs
quite far apart and gazed at each other across the room.
"You've come back," she said, and he answered just as tritely: "I wanted to stop in and see you as I
came through."
He tried to neutralize the tremor in his voice by looking anywhere but at her face. The obligation to
speak was on him, but, unless he immediately began to boast, it seemed that there was nothing to say.
There had never been anything casual in their previous relations - it didn't seem possible that people
in this position would talk about the weather.
"This is ridiculous," he broke out in sudden embarrassment. "I don't know exactly what to do. Does
my being here bother you?"
"No." The answer was both reticent and impersonally sad. It depressed him.
"Are you engaged ?" he demanded.
"No."
"Are you in love with some one ?"
She shook her head.
"Oh." He leaned back in his chair. Another subject seemed exhausted - the interview was not taking
the course he had intended.
"Jonquil," he began, this time on a softer key, "after all that's happened between us, I wanted to come
back and see you. Whatever I do in the future I'll never love another girl as I've loved you."

This was one of the speeches he had rehearsed. On the steamer it had seemed to have just the right
note - a reference to the tenderness he would always feel for her combined with a non-committal
attitude toward his present state of mind. Here with the past around him, beside him, growing minute
by minute more heavy on the air, it seemed theatrical and stale.
She made no comment, sat without moving, her eyes fixed on him with an expression that might have
meant everything or nothing.
"You don't love me any more, do you ?" he asked her in a level voice.
"No."
When Mrs. Gary came in a minute later, and spoke to him
about his success - there had been a half-column about him in
the local paper - he was a mixture of emotions. He knew now
that he still wanted this girl, and he knew that the past sometimes
comes back - that was all. For the rest he must be strong and
watchful and he would see.
"And now," Mrs. Gary was saying, "I want you two to go and see the lady who has the
chrysanthemums. She particularly told me she wanted to see you because she'd read about you in the
paper."
They went to see the lady with the chrysanthemums. They walked along the street, and he
recognized with a sort of excitement just how her shorter footsteps always fell in between his own.
The lady turned out to be nice, and the chrysanthemums were enormous and extraordinarily
beautiful. The lady's gardens were full of them, white and pink and yellow, so that to be among them
was a trip back into the heart of summer. There were two gardens full, and a gate between them;
when they strolled toward the second garden the lady went first through the gate.
And then a curious thing happened. George stepped aside to let Jonquil pass, but instead of going
through she stood still and stared at him for a minute. It was not so much the look, which was not a
smile, as it was the moment of silence. They saw each other's eyes, and both took a short, faintly
accelerated breath, and then they went on into the second garden. That was all.

The afternoon waned. They thanked the lady and walked home slowly, thoughtfully, side by side.
Through dinner, too, they were silent. George told Mr. Gary something of what had happened in
South America, and managed to let it be known that everything would be plain sailing for him in the
future.
Then dinner was over, and he and Jonquil were alone in the room which had seen the beginning of
their love affair and the end. It seemed to him long ago and inexpressibly sad. On that sofa he had
felt agony and grief such as he would never feel again. He would never be so weak or so tired and
miserable and poor. Yet he knew that that boy of fifteen months before had had something, a trust, a
warmth that was gone forever. The sensible thing - they had done the sensible thing. He had traded
his first youth for strength and carved success out of despair. But with his youth, life had carried away
the freshness of his love.
'You won't marry me, will you ?" he said quietly.
Jonquil shook her dark head.
"I'm never going to marry," she answered.
He nodded.
"I'm going on to Washington in the morning," he said.
"Oh _"
"I have to go. I've got to be in New York by the first, and meanwhile I want to stop off in
Washington."
"Business !"
"No-o," he said as if reluctantly. "There's some one there I must see who was very kind to me when I
was so - down and out."
This was invented. There was no one in Washington for him to see - but he was watching Jonquil
narrowly, and he was sure that she winced a little, that her eyes closed and then opened wide again.
"But before I go I want to tell you the things that happened to me since I saw you, and, as maybe we
won't meet again, I wonder if - if just this once you'd sit in my lap like you used to. I wouldn't ask
except since there's no one else - yet - perhaps it doesn't matter."
She nodded, and in a moment was sitting in his lap as she had sat so often in that vanished spring. The
feel of her head against
his shoulder, of her familiar body, sent a shock of emotion over him. His arms holding her had a
tendency to tighten around her, so he leaned back and began to talk thoughtfully into the air.
He told her of a despairing two weeks in New York which had terminated with an attractive if not
very profitable job in a construction plant in Jersey City. When the Peru business had first presented
itself it had not seemed an extraordinary opportunity. He was to be third assistant engineer on the
expedition, but only ten of the American party, including eight rodmen and surveyors, had ever
reached Cuzco. Ten days later the chief of the expedition was dead of yellow fever. That had been
his chance, a chance for anybody but a fool, a marvellous chance __
"A chance for anybody but a fool ?" she interrupted innocently.
"Even for a fool," he continued. "It was wonderful. Well, I wired New York _"
"And so," she interrupted again, "they wired that you ought to take a chance ?"
"Ought to !" he exclaimed, still leaning back. "That I had to. There was no time to lose _"
"Not a minute ?"
"Not a minute."
"Not even time for _" she paused.
"For what ?"
"Look."
He bent his head forward suddenly, and she drew herself to him in the same moment, her lips half
open like a flower.
"Yes," he whispered into her lips. "There's all the time in the world ..."
All the time in the world - his life and hers. But for an instant as he kissed her he knew that though he
search through eternity he could never recapture those lost April hours. He might press her close now
till the muscles knotted on his amis - she was something desirable and rare that he had fought for and
made his own - but never again an intangible whisper in the dusk, or on the breeze of night...
Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but
never the same love twice.

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1879-1962)

Introduction

William Faulkner was one of those rare fiction writers who create an entire distinctive fictional
universe to which each of his stories and novels contributes. Faulkner was born and lived most of his
life in Americas Deep South region, an area with many distinctive characteristics. The South has
a history of being Americas most politically and culturally conservative region, as well as its most
socially homogenous and hierarchical. It is an area in which family, community, and religion are all
highly valued, and the individual must accommodate himself to these groups to a greater extent than
in areas of the country in which individuals live in greater anonymity and with more independence
from others (if with less group support and comfort). Southerners are famous for being talkative and
friendly, and for being interested and invested in each others lives.

The feeling of group cohesiveness is emphasized in Faulkners story A Rose for Emily by the first-
person narrators repeated use of the collective subject we. The community members obvious
mutual curiosity and self-involvement makes Miss Emilys willful isolation and aloofness seem even
more strange and eccentric. And yet her familys historical position of privilege and power in this
socially traditional community protects her from criticism and attack. Also her position as a single
woman shields her in a society that prides itself on its courtesy to and respect for the weaker sex.

The communitys respect and deference toward Miss Emily stands in sharp contrast to her own
behavior toward others particularly to her Northern beau (or boyfriend). In that sense, this
story is both a joke on and a critique of Southern manners and morals, as is much of Faulkners
fiction. But it is also a celebration of the strongly traditional and backward-looking society that could
manage to provide a comfortable home for such an eccentric character as Miss Emily a society that,
even in Faulkners lifetime, was quickly vanishing into the blander and more generic society of
modern America.


A Rose for Emily (1930)


When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of
respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside
of her house, which no one save an old manservant--a combined gardener and cook--had
seen in at least ten years.

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and
spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had
once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and
obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left,
lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps--an
eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those
august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and
anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon
the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the
edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron--remitted her taxes,
the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily
would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss
Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business,
preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could
have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.

When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this
arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax
notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to
call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself,
offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic
shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all.
The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.

They called a special meeting of the board of aldermen. A deputation waited upon her,
knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-
painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall
from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse--a close,
dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered
furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather
was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning
with slow motes in the single sunray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a
crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.

They rose when she entered--a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to
her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head.
Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely
plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in
motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked
like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to
another while the visitors stated their errand.

She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman
came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the
gold chain.

Her voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me.
Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves."

"But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff,
signed by him?"

"I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff.... I have
no taxes in Jefferson."

"But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see. We must go by the--"

"See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson."

"But, Miss Emily--"

"See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in
Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out."

So SHE VANQUISHED them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty
years before about the smell. That was two years after her father's death and a short time after
her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her--had deserted her. After her father's
death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A
few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about
the place was the Negro man --a young man then--going in and out with a market basket.

"Just as if a man--any man--could keep a kitchen properly," the ladies said; so they were not
surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and
the high and mighty Griersons.

A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old.

"But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said.

"Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law?"

"I'm sure that won't be necessary, "Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that
nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."

The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident
deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to
bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the board of aldermen met--
three greybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.

"It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain
time to do it in, and if she don't. . ."

"Damn it, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"

So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about the
house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while
one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his
shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings.
As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it,
the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly
across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two
the smell went away.

That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering
how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the
Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men
were quite good enough to Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau;
Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the
foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the
backflung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased
exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of
her chances if they had really materialized.

When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way,
people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had
become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny
more or less.

The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and
aid, as is our custom. Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of
grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with
the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the
body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her
father quickly.

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the
young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to
cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

SHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her
look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of
tragic and serene.

The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her
father's death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules
and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with
a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him
cuss the riggers, and the riggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he
knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square,
Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss
Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of
bays from the livery stable.

At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, "Of
course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." But there were still
others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse
oblige--without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come
to her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over
the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the
two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.

And as soon as the old people said "Poor Emily," the whispering

began. "Do you suppose it's really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else
could . . ." This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed
upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team
passed: "Poor Emily."

She carried her head high enough--even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if
she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had
wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat
poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say "Poor Emily," and while
the two female cousins were visiting her.

"I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman,
though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was
strained across the temples and about the eye sockets as you imagine a lighthouse keeper's
face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said.

"Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recoin--"

"I want the best you have. I don't care what kind."

The druggist named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is--"

"Arsenic," Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?"

"Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But what you want--"

"I want arsenic."

The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag.
"Why, of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law requires you to tell
what you are going to use it for."

Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he
looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought
her the package; the druggist didn't come back. When she opened the package at home, there
was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats."

SO THE NEXT DAY we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing.
When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him."
Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because Homer himself had remarked--he liked
men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks Club--that he was not a
marrying man. Later we said "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday
afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat
cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.

Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to
the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist
minister--Miss Emily's people were Episcopal--to call upon her. He would never divulge what
happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again
drove about the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's
relations in Alabama.

So she had blood kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments . At first
nothing happened. Then we were sure that they

were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's
toilet set in silver, with the letters H.B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had
bought a complete outfit of men's clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are
married." We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more
Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.

So we were not surprised when Homer Barron--the streets had been finished some time
since--was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we
believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily's coming, or to give her a chance to
get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily's allies to help
circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had
expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the
Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening.

And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro
man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then
we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the
lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was
to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many
times had been too virulent and too furious to die.

When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the
next few years it grew greyer and greyer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron gray,
when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron
gray, like the hair of an active man.

From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years,
when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china painting. She fitted up a
studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel
Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that
they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate.
Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted.

Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting
pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and
tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladles' magazines. The front door closed upon the
last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily
alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it.
She would not listen to them.

Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow greyer and more stooped, going in and out
with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by
the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the
downstairs windows--she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house--like the carven
torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she
passed from generation to generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.

And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro
man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to
get any information from the Negro. He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his
voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.

She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her grey head
propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.

The negro met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant
voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the
house and out the back and was not seen again.

The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town
coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her
father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old
men--some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss
Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and
courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom
all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite
touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.

Already we knew that there was one room in that region abovestairs which no one had seen in
forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in
the ground before they opened it.

The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin,
acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for
a bridal: upon the valence curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the
dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with
tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar
and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in
the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the
discarded socks.

The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The
body had apparently once lain in the attitude of

an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love,
had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had
become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside
him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted
something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the
nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-grey hair.



T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965)

Introduction

T. S. Eliot was famous for having a terrific memory for literature, and his poetry is itself remarkably
memorable. Few students who encounter one of his most famous poems, such as The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock, ever entirely forget it. The poem is about a character Prufrock who is himself
nearly paralyzed by his inability to forget his sad and frustrated past so as to move on into a more
positive future. For Prufrock, the past is repeated in the present and the future he predicts and
prepares for himself is more of the same.

T. S. Eliot was a master at depicting spiritual malaise, a sickness of the individual will. His
psychological portrayals are so real and convincing that they seem to be representative of a general
condition of modern society, and not simply of a particularly unhappy individual. Certainly that was
how Eliots contemporaries understood his poetic portrayals which struck such a chord with the
reading public as to make Eliot (on the basis of a mere handful of poems) the most famous living poet
in the language.


The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917)

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!')
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
(They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!')
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in
upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.'

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail
along the floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a
screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
'That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.'

. . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)

Introduction

T. S. Eliots only possible rival in popularity as a poet in the middle years of the 20
th
Century was
Robert Frost, whose poems seem to occupy an entirely different universe. Whereas Eliots poems
are tragic, romantic, and ironic, Frosts poems are practical, analytic, and sympathetic.

In his typical poem, Frost presents a scene from the natural world or from human society, which he
then proceeds to analyze and to question. In his poetic analysis of the world, which is both curious
and sympathetic, Frost seems to be searching for some sort of natural order in the universe. The
order he discovers seems to be improvised and created in part by the observer, rather than
representative of some sort of perfect plan or design. If there is a design (as he suggests in the poem
with this title), then it is an eminently practical one, and is not indicative of a moral ideal, as Western
religion and even Western literature have tended to insist.

In Frosts depicted universe, people and things all get along as best as they can and the implication
is that this is all that we realistically can ask of one another, and of ourselves, and of the world.


Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.


Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."


An Old Mans Winter Night

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.
Chapter 7: Changing American Identities

Changes in the Nature of the American Individual

The 20
th
Century saw major changes in American culture and society related to the manner in which
people relate to one another and to themselves. The changes were related to many factors, both
sociological and psychological.

One basic sociological fact is that, from the time of the earliest settlers, Americans have tended to
move around a lot. With the onset of modern mechanized travel, and the creation of national and
international business networks requiring a mobile workforce, this mobility has increased. Americas
exceptionally mobile society has worked to isolate individuals from traditional family networks and
extended social communities.

At the same time as Americans were becoming increasingly isolated from one another physically,
they were becoming increasingly conscious of themselves as isolated psychological and emotional
entities, as the psychological model of human individuality and interaction pioneered by Sigmund
Freud and others became pervasive in American thought and culture. Modern psychology intensified
a tendency in American culture to consider the individual as an isolated and ideally independent
entity. Moreover, psychological models of the individual have tended to consider much of what has
hitherto been assumed as part of the vital and necessary fabric of society such as family hierarchy
and duty and social obligation as potential hindrances to the growth, happiness, and independence
of the autonomous individual.

In many respects, American society and culture seem to be fixed in a seemingly permanent state of
rebelliousness against authority and tradition that is also acted out as an extreme reactionary
rebelliousness against its own rebelliousness that is to say, a fixation on rules and conformity. Most
Americans complain routinely and bitterly about the system, while operating very rigidly within its
proscribed rules and boundaries.

The task of the artist within any society is to question that societys assumptions and to critique its
values. In this sense, the artist operates as a physician diagnosing a patient. All four of the authors in
this chapter in some way question and critique two major idealistic assumptions of American culture
and thought: (1) That the individual may operate as an independent and isolated entity apart from
family and community, and (2) That if we were only free to do exactly what we wanted to do, we
would be perfectly and entirely happy. These authors implicitly assert, rather, that an individuals
individuality is innately bound up in his relation with others, and that we are only made free when we
understand our behavior and emotions, both their causes and nature and our limited control over
them.


Paul Bowles

One of the biggest social changes that attended the advent of modern psychology concerned the
relation between parents and children within the family network and society in general. The
changing relationship between children and adults mirrored the spread of a psychological model of
individual identity that traced emotional difficulties in adulthood to psychological traumas in
childhood. Paul Bowles story, The Frozen Fields, is typical of a type of psychological fiction that
analyzes the psychological sickness or neurosis of a particular family group or relationship. The
implication in the story is that the fathers anger towards and abuse of his son will inevitably
transform the child into a cold and distant personality who will find it difficult in adult life to relate
toward others in an emotionally open and rewarding manner. The story is a psychological tragedy in
the making.


James Purdy

James Purdys story Why Cant They Tell You Why? is similarly about childhood trauma. But the
child in this story, unlike the child in Bowles story, is not seemingly innocent and good-natured to
begin with, and he is not merely the victim of an abusive adult. Rather, the child is portrayed as
being both a disturbed and a disturbing personality. He cannot explain his obsessive behavior, and
neither can his mother but more crucially, neither can we as readers entirely comprehend it.
Purdys story seems to insist that human emotion, instinct, and personality is more mysterious and
complex than any of us may know, and it makes an implicit plea for mutual human sympathy, since
we all carry within ourselves emotions that reach far beyond our capacity to control or comprehend
them.


Flannery OConnor

In her stories A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery
OConnor also depicts unknown psychological and emotional forces at work, shaping our human
destinies. However, whereas Purdys fiction offers, in effect, a plea for mutual human sympathy in
the face of such forces, OConnors fiction is concerned with displaying the various ways in which
human prejudice, stupidity and above all pride serve to prompt and exacerbate human misery.
Her fictional universe is essentially a moral landscape in which evil wears a human face. A devout
Christian, OConnor claimed that the purpose of her fiction was to shock and frighten her readers into
an awareness of their flawed human natures, so that they might turn to religion for help and guidance.
In her deeply religious work, she carries on an intense and disturbing moral theme that has persisted
in American literature and culture since the arrival of the original Puritan settlers.


Jane Bowles

Jane Bowles story Everything is Nice is like Purdys fiction in that it treats human existence and
emotion as fundamentally mysterious. In some ways it is hard to say what her story is about, and it is
also very hard to predict where the narrative is going and why the characters behave as they do. And
yet, these characters seem very real, and although their behavior is unpredictable and unexplained, it
seems to carry within itself its own inexplicable cause and reason. In a sense, the story as the title
affirms is about the simple pleasures we manage to derive, against all odds as it sometimes seems,
from our complex personalities and lives.


Different Approaches to Fiction

Both Paul Bowles (Janes husband) and Flannery OConnor create fictional universes that are
essentially moral and predictable in nature, with good and evil, right and wrong as major categories
of behavior and judgment. In the fiction of James Purdy and Jane Bowles, however, such labels are
not so easy to assign, and the argument of their narratives is more difficult to encapsulate.

From another point of view, one might say that Paul Bowles and Flannery OConnor present fictional
worlds that are very broad in scope, focusing on the behaviors and identities of the individual within
society; whereas James Purdy and Jane Bowles focus on the narrow but deep analysis of the
individual psyche itself. Their fiction operates as psychological discovery and description, rather
than as sociological judgment and analysis.

Despite their differences, we may discern in all four authors work an earnest effort to prompt us to
question our lives, and to increase our knowledge, which is the difference between the product of the
legitimate artist and that of the mere entertainer.


PAUL BOWLES (1910- )

Introduction

Paul Bowles began his artistic career as a musical composer, but gradually turned more and more to
writing fiction and non-fiction. He lived most of his long life in North Africa, while traveling
extensively to other exotic and out-of-the-way places. In much of his fiction, he attempts to
demonstrate the manner in which supposedly civilized individuals may instinctively revert to
savagery and barbarity when put into alien cultural situations in which their assumed values are
called into question and their habitual mode of living is put under pressure.

In the story The Frozen Fields, Bowles illustrates the manner in which a parents excessive
disciplining of a child in the purported service of turning the child into a civilized adult may actually
be a form of savagery and brutality a sort of unleashed chaos in the name of order. The child in the
story instinctively aligns himself with powerful rebel figures that challenge and disrupt the
established patriarchal power system, such as the rich family outsider, Mr. Gordon, who is an implied
homosexual, alcoholic, and drug addict (making him an outsider in terms of society as well). The
amoral power figure of the wolf also attracts the childs allegiance, as he desperately attempts to
build a psychological defense against his fathers tyranny. The tragic irony of the story is that, by
sympathizing with the savage wolf figure, the boy is unwittingly augmenting an aggressive aspect of
his own nature that mirrors his fathers angry disposition.

Bowles prose style is efficient and melodic. It is also implicitly ironic, in that his carefully crafted
and modulated sentences and narratives are employed to tell stories about the chaos of human
society and the brutality of human nature.


The Frozen Fields (1957)

The train was late because the hot-box under one of the coaches had caught fire in the middle of a
great flat field covered with snow. They had stayed there about an hour. After the noise and rushing
of the train, the sudden silence and the embarrassed stirring of people in their seats induced a general
restlessness. At one point another train had shot by on the next track with a roar worse than thunder;
in the wake of that, the nervousness of the passengers increased, and they began to talk fretfully in
low voices.
Donald had started to scratch pictures with his fingernail in the ice that covered the lower part of
the windowpane by his seat. His father had said: "Stop that." He knew better than to ask "Why?" but
he thought it; he could not see what harm it would do, and he felt a little resentful toward his mother
for not intervening. He could have arranged for her to object to the senseless prohibition, but
experience had taught him that she could be counted on to come to his defense only a limited number
of times during any given day, and it was imprudent to squander her reserve of good will.
The snow had been cleared from the station platform when they got out. It was bitter cold; a fat
plume of steam trailed downward from the locomotive, partially enveloping the first coach. Donald's
feet ached with the cold.
"There's Uncle Greg and Uncle Willis!" he cried, and he jumped up and down several times.
"You don't have to shout," said his father. "We see them. And stand still. Pick up your bag."
.Uncle Willis wore a black bearskin coat that almost touched the ground. He put his hands under
Donald's arms and lifted him up so that his head was at a level with his own, and kissed him hard on
the mouth. Then he swung him over into Uncle Greg's arms, and Uncle (ireg did the same thing.
"How's the man, hey?" cried Uncle Greg, as he set him down.
"Fine," said Donald, conscious of a feeling of triumph, because his father did not like to see boys
being kissed. "Men shake hands," he had told him. "They don't kiss each other."
^ "' The sky was crystal clear, and although it was already turning lavender with the passing of
afternoon, it still shone with an intense light, like the sky in one scene at the Russian Ballet. His
mother had taken him a few weeks earlier because she wanted to see Pavlova; it was not the dancing
that had excited him, but the sudden direct contact with the world of magic. This was n magic sky
above him now, nothiiighkc the one lie was used to seeing above the streets of New York/r.verything
connected with the farm was imbued with magic. The house was the nucleus of an enchanted world
more real than the world that other people knew about. During the long green summers he had spent
there with his mother and the members of her family he had discovered that world and explored it,
and none of them had ever noticed that he was living in it. But his father's presence here would
constitute a grave danger, because it was next to impossible to conceal anything from him, and once
aware of the existence of the other world he would spare no pains to destroy it. Donald was not yet
sure whether all the entrances were safely guarded or effectively camouflaged.
They sat in the back of the sleigh with a brown buffalo robe tucked around them. The two big
gray horses were breathing out steam through their wide nostrils. Silently the white countryside
moved past, its frozen trees pink in the late light. Uncle Greg held the reins, and Uncle Willis, sitting
beside him, was turned sideways in his seat, talking to Donald's mother.
"My feet hurt," said Donald.
"Well, God Almighty, boy!" cried Uncle Willis. "Haven't you got 'em on the bricks? There are
five hot bricks down there. That's what they're there for." lie bent over and lifted up part of the heavy
lap-robe. The bricks were wrapped in newspaper.
"My feet are like blocks of ice, too," said Donald's mother. "Here, take your shoes off and put
your feet on these." She pushed two of the bricks toward Donald.
"He just wants attention," said Donald's father. But he did not forbid him to have the bricks.
"Is that better?" Uncle Willis asked a moment later.
"It feels good. I low many miles is it to the farm?"
"Seven miles to The Corner, and a mile and a half from there."
"Oh, I know it's a mile and a half from The Corner," said Donald. He had walked it many times
in the summer, and he knew the names of the farms along the road. "First you come to the Elders,
then the Landons, then the Madisons"
His father pushed him hard in the ribs with his elbow. "Just keep quiet for a while."
Uncle Willis pretended not to have heard this. "Well, well. You certainly have a good
memory. How old are you now?"
Donald's throat haci const[icted; it was a familiar occurrence
which d!d not at al| mean that fie was goingto crymerelythat Re
felt like crying. Hecoughed and said in a stitled voice: "Six ' Then he
coughed againfashamed, and fearful that Uncle Willis might have no
ticed something amiss, he added: "But I'll be seven the day after New
Year's."
They were all silent after that; there were only the muffled rhythm of the horses' trot and the
soft, sliding sound of the runners on the packed snow. The sky was now a little darker than the
white meadows, and the woods on the hillside beyond, with their millions of bare branches, began to
look frightening. Donald was glad to be sitting in the middle, {je kpew ^herg were no wolves out
there, and yet, could anybody be reajly certain? There had been wolves at one time-and Bears as
welland simply because nobody had seen one in many years, they now said there weren't any.
But that was no proof.
They came to The Corner, where the road to the farm turned off from the main road. Seven
rusty mail-boxes stood there in a crooked row, one for each house on the road.
"R.F.D. Number One," said Uncle Willis facetiously. This had always been a kind of joke
among them, ever since they had bought the farm, because they were townspeople and thought the
real farmers were very funny.
Now Donald felt he was on home ground, and it gave him the confidence to say: "Rural Free
Delivery." He said the words carefully, since the first one sometimes gave him difficulty. But he
pronounced it all right, and Uncle Greg, without turning round, shouted: "That's right! You go to
school now?"
"Yes." He did not feel like saying more, because he was following the curves in the road, which he
knew by heart. But everything looked so different from the way he remembered it that he found it
hard to believe it was the same place. The land had lost.its intimacy, become^ bare and unprotected.
Even in the oncoming night he could see right
through the leafless hushes ijiaLshoiikLhnvc hicjclcn the_eiiij?tyfields_ J)TOnd. TTis
TeeTwerc all right now, hut his hands in their woolen mittens under the buffalo skin
were numh with cold.
The farm came into view; in each downstairs window there wasa lighted candle and a
holly wreath. He bent over and put his shoeson. It was hard because his fingers ached.
When he sat up again thesleigh had stopped. The kitchen door had opened; someone was
coming out. Everyone was shouting "Hello!" and "Merry Christmas!" Between the sleigh
and the kitchen fce was aware only of being kissedand patted, lifted up and set dpwn.
4ifljLt>iJ^iatlie had grown. His"grandfather helped him take off his shoes again aricf
removed a lidfrom the top of thr stove so he could warm his hands over the flames.The
kitchen smellcd, as in summer, of woodsmoke, sour milk andkerosene. '| It was
always very exciting to be in the midst of many people.lEach one was an added
protection against the constant watchfulness/ of his mother and father. At home there
were only he arT3TIiey,"~so~mat mealtimes were periods of torture. Tonight there were
eight at thesupper table. They put an enormous old leather-bound dictionary ina chair so
he would be high enough, and he sat between his grandmother and Aunt Emilie. She
had dark brown eyes and was verypretty. Uncle Greg had married her a year ago, and
Donald knew frommany overheard conversations that none of the others really liked her.
Gramma was saying: "Louisa and Ivor couldn't get down till tomorrow. Mr.
Gordon's driving them down as far as Portersville in his car. They'll all stay in the
hotel tonight, and we've got to go in first thing in the morning and bring them out."
"Mr. Gordon, too, I suppose," said his mother.
"Oh, probably," Uncle Greg said. "He won't want to stay alone Christmas Hay."
His mother looked annoyed. "It seems sort of unnecessary," she said.
"Chri5ttTia^js_aij^w"/}' day, after all."
"Well, he's part of Ihc Family now,' said Uncle Willis with a crooked smile.
His mother replied with great feeling: "I think it's terrible/'
"He's pretty bad these days," put in Grampa, shaking his head.
"Still on the old fire-water?" asked his father. <
Uncle Greg raised his eyebrows. "That and worse. You know. . . . And Ivor too."
Donald knew they were being mysterious because of him. He pretended not to be
listening, and busied himself making marks on the t abl ecl ot h wi t h hi s napki n r i ng.
His father's mouth had fallen open with astonishment. "Where do they get it?" he demanded.
"Prescription," said Uncle Willis lightly. "Some crooked Polack doc|or up there."
., ...''Oh, honestly," cried his mother. "I don't see how Louisa stands it."
Aunt Emilie, who had been quiet until now, suddenly spoke. "Oh, I don't know," she said
speculatively. "They're both very good to her. I think Mr. Gordon's very generous. He pays the
rent on her apartment, you know, and gives her the use of the car and chauffeur most
afternoons."
"You don't know anything about it," said Uncle Greg in a gruff, unpleasant voice which
was meant to stop her from talking. But she" went oh, a bit shrilly, and even Donald could
hear that they were in the habit of arguing.
"I do happen tQ know that Ivor's perfectly willing to give her a divorce anytime she wants
it, because she told me so nerself."
There was silence at the table; Donald was certain that itlie had not been there they
would all have begun to talk at that point. Aunt Emilie had said something bf Wfis
rmrsnppn^d to hear. . *"
"Well," said Uncle Willis heartily, "how about another piece of
cake, Donald, old man?" i
"How about bed, you mean," said his father. "It's time he went \ to bed."
.,:. His mother said nothing, helped him from his chair and took him
upstairs.
The little panes of his bedroom window were completely covered
with ice. Opening his mouth, he breathed on one pane until a round
hole had been melted through and he could see blackness outside.
"Don't do that, dear," said his mother. "Gramma'11 have to clean the
window. Now come on; into bed with you. There's a nice hot brick
under the covers so your feet won't get cold." She tucked the blankets
around him, kissed him, and took the lamp from the table. His father's
,J voice, annoyed, came up from the foot of the stairs. "Hey, Laura!
iWhat's going on up there? Come on." \
"Won't there be any light in my room at all?" Donald asked her.
"I'm coming," she called. She looked down at Donald. "You never have a light at home."
"I know, but home I can turn it on if I need it."
"Well, you're not going to need it tonight. Your father would have a fit if IJeft the
lamp^You know that. Now JtrsFgoTcTsleepT"^
v^jut I won't be able to sleep," he said miserably.
"Laura!" shouted his father.
"Just a minute!" she cried, vexed.
"Please, Mother . . * ? "
Her voice was adamant. "This cold ai r will put you to sleep in two shakes of a lamh's tail.
Now go to sleep." She went to the doorway, the lamp in her hand, and disappeared through
it, closing the door behind her.
There was a little china clock on the table that ticked very loud and fast. At infrequent
intervals from below came a muffled burst of laughter which immediately subsided. His
mother had said: "I'll open this window about an inch: that' ll be enough." The room was
growing colder by the minute. I le pushed the sole of one foot against the heated brick in the
middle of the bed, and heard the crackle of the newspaper that enfolded it. There was
nothing left to do but go to slceryfOrThis way through the borderlands of consciousness he
had a fantasy. From the mountain behind the farm, running silently over the icy crust of the
snow, leaping over the rocks and bushes, came a wolf. He was running toward the farm.
When he got there he would look through the windows until he found the dining-room where
the grownups were sitting around the big table. Donald shuddered when he saw his eyes in
the dark through the glass. And now, calculating every movement perfectly, the wolf sprang,
smashing the panes, and seized Donald's father by the throat. In an instant, before anyone
could move or cry out, he was gone again with his prey still between his jaws, his head
turned sideways as he dragged the limp form swiftly over the surface of the snow.
The white light of dawn was in the room when he opened his eyes. Already there were
bumpings in the bowels of the house: people were stirring. He heard a window slammed shut,
and then the regular sound of someone splitting wood with a hatchet. Presently there were
nearer noises, and he knew that his parents in the next room had gotten up. Then his door
was flung open and his mother came in, wearing a thick brown flannel bathrobe, and with her
hair falling loose down her back. "Merry Christmas!" she cried, holding up a gigantic red
mesh stocking crammed with fruit and small packages. "Look what I found hanging by the
fireplace!" He was disappointed because he had hoped to go and get his stocking himself. "I
brought it up to you because the house is as cold as a barn," she told him. "You stay put right
here in bed ti l l it's warmed up a little."
"When'll we have the tree?" The important ritual was the tree: the most interesting
presents were piled under it.
"You just hold your horses," she told him. "You've got your
The Frozen Fields ' 355
stocking. We can't have the tree till Aunt Louisa gets here. You wouldn't want her to miss it,
would you?"
"Where's my present for Aunt Louisa and Uncle Ivor? Uncle Ivor's coming, too, isn't he?"
"Of course he's coming," she replied, with that faintly different way of speaking she used
when she mentioned Uncle Ivor. "I've already put it under the tree with' the other things. SJow
you just stay where you are, all covered up, and look at your stocking. I'm going to get dressed."
She shivered and hurried back into her room.
The only person he had to thank at breakfast was his grandfather, for a box of colored pencils
which had been jammed into the foot of the stocking. The other gifts had been tagged: "For
Donald from Santa." Uncle Willis and Uncle Greg had eaten an early breakfast and gone in the
sleigh to the hotel in Portersville to fetch Aunt Louisa and Uncle Ivor. When they got back,
Donald ran to the window and saw that Mr. Gordon had come. Everyone had talked so
mysteriously about Mr. Gordon that he was very eager to see him. But at that moment his mother
called him upstairs to help her make the beds. "We all have to do as much as we can for
Gramma," she told him. "Lord knows she's got all she can manage with the kitchen work."
But eventually he heard Aunt Louisa calling up the staircase. They went down: he was
smothered in kisses, and Aunt Louisa asked him: "How's my boy? You're my boy, aren't you?"
Then Uncle Ivor kissed him, and he shook hands with Mr. Gordon, who^ was already sitting in
Grampa s armchair, where nobody else eversat. jie was plump and pale, and he wore two big
diamond rings on one hand and an even bigger sapphire on the other. As he breathed he wheezed
slighrlyj now and then he pulled an enormous yellow silk handkerchief out of his breast pocket
and wiped his forehead with it. Donald sat down on the other side of the room and turned the
pages of a magazine, from rime to time looking up to observe him. He had called HonuM "my
l.id.
which sounded very strange, like someoneialking jp ? h
nn
k. At one ]5oint he noticed Donald's
attention, andoeckoned to him. Donald went and stood beside the armchair while Mr. Gordon
reached into his pocket and pulled out a fat watch with a little button, and tiny chimes struck
inside the watch. A few minutes later he signaled to him afresh; Donald bounded over to him and
pressed the button again. The next time, his mother told him to stop bothering Mr. Gordon.
"But he asked me to," objected Donald.
j' v' i "Sit down right there. We're all going in and have our tree in a little while. Uncle Ivor's
going to be Santa Claus."
Presently Uncle Willis came into the room. "Well, everybody," he
said, ruhhing his hands together, "I t hi nk the parlor's warm enougl now. Mow about our tree?"
"It's about time," said Aunt Emilie. She was wearing a red taffet; dress which Donald had
heard his mother discussing with his fathe
r
earlier. "Most inappropriate," she had said. "The girl
doesn't seem t( realize she's living on a farm." Aunt Emilie reached down and tool-Donald's
hand. "Would you care to accompany me, sir?" she said They walked into the parlor holding
hands. The fire in the fireplaci roared and crackled.
"Where's Ivor?" said Uncle Greg. "Has everybody got a seat?"
"Here he is," said Uncle Ivor, coming in from the hallway. Hr had put on an old red knitted
skull-cap and a red dressing gown, and he had a wreath of green fluted paper around his neck.
"This is all Santa Clans could find," he announced.
Aunt Louisa began to laugh. "Look at your Uncle Ivor," she told Donald. "I am," said Donald.
But he was really looking at the tree. It was a tall hemlock that reached to the ceiling, and
underneath it was piled the most enormous assortment of packages he had ever seen. "Look at
that!" they all cried.
"What (in you suppose is in them all?" said Aunt Louisa.
"I don't know," he replied.
Uncle Ivor sat down on the floor as near the tree as he could get, and lifting up a large crate
he passed it to Uncle Greg, who stood in the middle of the room. "Let's get this out of the way
first," he said. Then Uncle Greg intoned: "To Donald from the Folks at Rutland."
While Uncle Ivor went on passing out packages, Donald strugglecf with his box. He was
vaguely aware of the little cries that were being uttered around him: "How lovely! But it's too
much!" "Oh, you shouldn't have!" "Why did you do it?" as the others opened their gifts, but be was
too preoccupied to t^tice that most of the exclamations^ were bcJiigjicldressed to Mr. Gordon,
'^^s^JJjJ^c window looking
It was too good to believe: a fire engine three feet long, witlf rubber tires and a bell
and a siren and three ladders that shot upward automatically when it stopped. Donald
looked at it, and for a moment was almost frightened by the power he knew it had to
change his world.
"Oh . . . isn't . . . that . . . lovely!" said his mother, her annoyance giving a sharp
edge to each word. "Louisa, why did you do it?" Donald glanced up quickly and saw
Auut Louisa indicate Mr. Gordon with a jerk of her head, as if she were saying:
"F.verything is his fault."
I lis mother moved along the door toward the crate and fished out
the greeting card. "I want you to keep each card in with the present it came with," she told
Donald, "because you'll have a lot of thank-you notes to write tomorrow, and you don't want to
get them mixed up. But you can thank Aunt Louisa and Uncle Ivor right now."
He hatecTto be told to thank a person in that 'person's presence, as though he were a baby.
But he said the words bravely, facing Mr. Gordon: "Thank you so much for the beautiful fire
engine."
"There's more there, my lad," beamed Mr. Gordon; the diamonds
flashed in the sunlight. *<
Aunt Emilie was holding out her arm in front of her, looking at her new wrist-watch.
Grampa had put on a black silk dressing gown and was smoking a cigar. He looked perfectly
content as he turned to Mr. Gordon and said: "Well, you've spoiled us all." But Donald's mother
interpreted his phrase as a reproach, and added in explanation: "We're not used to getting such
elaborate gifts, Mr. Gordon."
Mr. Gordon laughed, and turning to Donald, told him: "You've 1
barely started, my lad. Tell your Uncle Ivor to get on with it." /
Now it seemed as though nearly every package was for Donald. He opened them as fast as
he could, and was freshly bewildered by the apparition of each new marvel. There were, of
course, the handkerchiefs and books and mufflers from the family, but there was also a Swiss
music box with little metal records that could be changed; there were roller skates, a large set
of lead soldiers, a real accordion, and a toy village with a streetcar system that ran on a battery.
As Donald opened each package, the little cries ofajimiration made by his parents came closer
to sounding like groans.'Finally his father said, in a voice loud enough for Mr. Gordon to hear
him above the general conversation: "It's bad business for one kid to get so much."
Mr. Gordon had heard him. "You were young once yourself," he said airily.
/
y
Aunt Emilie was trying on a fur jacket that Uncle Greg had give her. Her face was flushed
with excitement; she had just planted a big kiss on Uncle Greg's cheek.
"The little Astor baby got five thousand dollars' worth of toys on
its last birthday," she said to Donald's father, running her hand back
and forth along the fur. - ,
T'lM.;' Donald's father looked at her with narrowed eyes. "That," he
said, enunciating very clearly, "is what might be called an asinine
-remark."
. Save for the crackling of the fire there was silence for a moment
in the room. Those who had not heard knew that something had hap-^
pened. Uncle GregTooked^quickly at Donald's father, and then at Aunt
Emilie. Maybe there would be a quarrel, thought Donald, with everyone against his
father. The idea delighted him; at the same time he felt guilty, as though it were his
doing.
Uncle Ivor was handing him a package. Automatically he untied the ribbon, and
pulled out a tan cashmere sweater. "That's Mother's and Daddy's present to you," his
mother said quietly. "It's a little big for you now, but I got it big purposely so you could
grow into it." The small crisis had passed; they all began to talk again. Donald was
relieved and disappointed. "How about christening that bottle of brandy?" cried Uncle
Willis.
"You menfol k sir here," Gramma told them. "We've got to get out into the kitchen."
"I'll bring yours out to you," said Uncle Ivor to Aunt Louisa as she got up.
On her way out of the room Donald's mother bent over and touched his shoulder. "I
want you to put every present back into its box j ust the way it was. After that you carry
them all up into our room and stack them carefully in the corner under the window. You
hear me?"
She went out. Donald sat a moment; then he jumped up and ran aft er her to ask if he
might save out just one thingthe fire engine, perhaps. She was saying to Gramma: ". . .
quite uncalled for. Besides, I don't know how we're ever going to get it all back to New
York. Owen can take the big things at least with him tomorrow, I suppose."
Me stopped running, and felt peace descend upon him. Mis father was leaving the
farm. Then let him take everything with him, fire engine and al l ; it would not matter. Me
turned and went back into the parlor, where he meticulously packed the toys into their
boxes, put. the covers on, and tied them up with lengths of ribbon and string.
"What's all this?" exclaimed Mr. Gordon suddenly, noticing him. "What are you
doing?"
"I have to take everything upstairs," said Donald.
Mis fat her joined t he conversation. "I don' t want to find those boxes lying all
over the place up (here, either. See that you pile 'cm neatly. Understand?"
Donald continued to work without looking up.
Af t er a moment Mr. Gordon said under his breath: "Well, I'll be damned." Then to
Donald's father: "I've seen some well-behaved kids in my time, but 1 don' t mind
telling you I never saw one like that. Never."
"Discipline begins in the cradle," said his father shortly, s sinister,"
murmured Mr. Gordon to himself.
Donald glanced up and saw his father looking at Mr.
Gordon
with hatred. '
In the kitchen his grandmother, his aunts and his
mother were
busy preparing dinner. Donald sat by the window mashing
potatoes.
The blue of the sky had disappeared behind one curtain
of cloud,
uniformly white, "We'll have more snow before night," said
Gramma,
looking out of the window above the sink. : 4
>.'. "Want to smell something good?" Donald's mother
asked him.
He ran across to the stove and she opened the oven door:
the aroma
of onions mingled with that of the roasting turkey. "He's
coming along
beautifully," she announced. She shut the oven door with a
bang and
hung the potholders on their hooks. Then she went into
the pantry.
Donald followed her. It was very cold in here, and it
smelled of pickles
and spices. His mother was searching for something along
the shelves,
among the jars and tin boxes.
-< "Mother," he said.
. > ' '

'!. "Hmm?" she replied distraughtly, without looking
down at him.'
; i:."Why does Mr. Gordon live at Uiicje Ivor's?"
Now she did look at him, and with an inteTJsiTy'that
startled him "What was that?" she demanded sharply.
Then, before he could repeat his question, she went on in
a suddenly matter-of-fact voice: "Dear don't you know
that Uncle Ivor's what they call a male nurse? Like Miss
Oliver, you remember, who took care of you when you
hac influenza? Only a man. A man nurse."
"Is Mr. Gordon sick?"
"Yes, he is," she said, lowering her voice to little
more than whisper. "He's a very sick man, but we don't
talk about it."
"What's he got?" He was conscious^ of being
purposely childisl
at the momerjtj in the hope oTTearning n}
nr
f - P
llt
his
mother was already saying: "I clon't know, dear. You go
back into the kitchen now. It's too cold for you in here.
Scoot! Out with you!" He giggled, ran back into the
kitchen, satisfied for having definitely established the
existence of a mystery.
. ' During dinner his father looked across at him with the
particular kind of sternness he reserved for remarks which
he knew were unwelcome, said: "You haven't been outside
yet today, young man. We'll take a walk down the road
later."
Aunt Louisa had brpught a large glass of brandy to the
table with her, and was sipping if along with her food. "It's
too cold, Owen," she objected. "He'll catch his death
o'cold." Donald knew she was trying to help him, but he
wished she had kept quiet. If it became an issue, his
father would certainly not forget about the walk.
"Too cold!" scoffed his father. "We have a few basic rules in our little family, and one
of them is that he has to get some fresh air every day."
;
''Couldn't you make an exception for Christmas? Just for one
day?": demanded Aunt Louisa. '"!*''^NU^iH**-'
- Donald did not dare look up, for fear of seeing the expression on
his father's face.
;

"Listen, Louisa," he said acidly. "I suggest you just stay on your side of the fence, and
I'll stay on mine. We'll get along a lot better." Then as an afterthought he snapped: "That
al l right with you?"
Aunt Louisa leaned across Grampa's plate toward Donald's father
and spoke very loud, so that everyone stopped eating. "No, it's not
all right with me!" she cried. "All you do is pick on the child from
morning till night. It's shameful! I won't sit by and watch my own
flesh and blood plagued that way!" '
Both Gramma and Donald's father began to speak at once. Gramma was saying,
"Louisa," trying to soothe her. Donald's father 'shouted: "You've never had a kid. You don't
know the first thing about raising kids."
"I know when a man's selfish and plain cussed," Aunt Louisa declared.
"Louisa!" cried Gramma in a tone of surprise and mild reproof. Doriald continued to
look at his plate.
;
{ -"Have I ever come up to Rutland and stuck my nose = in your affairs and criticized?
Have I?" demanded Donald's father."'
"Now come on," said Uncle Willis quickly. "Let's not spoil a beautiful Christmas."
"That's right," Grarnpa said. "We're all happy. Let's not say anything we'll be sorry for
later."
But Aunt Louisa would not retreat. She took a fast pulp of brandy and almost choked on
it. Then, still leaning toward Donald's father, she went on: "What do you mean, come to
Rutland and criticize? What've you got to criticize in Rutland? Something wrong there?"
For an instant Donald's father did not reply. During that instant
it was as though everyone felt the need to say something without being
able to say it. The one who broke the short silence was Donald's
father, using a peculiar, soft voice which Donald recognized immedi
ately as a vicious imitation of Uncle Ivor. "Cjh, no! There's nothing
wrong in Rr<flandj" '
Suddenly, wit Pi two simultaneous motions, Donald's mother slapped her.napkin into her
place and pushed her chair back violently. She rose and ran out of the room, slamminp. the
door. No one said
anything. Donald sat frozen, unable to look up, unable
even to breathe. Then he realized that his father had got
up, too, and was on his way out.
"Leave her alone, Owen," said Gramma.
"You keep out of this," his father said. His footsteps
made the stairs creak as he went up. No one said anything
until Gramma made as if to rise. "I'm going up," she
declared.
"For God's sake, Abbie, sit still," Grampa told her.
Gramma cleared her throat, but did not get up.
Aunt Louisa looked very red, and the muscles of her
face were twitching. "Hateful," she said in a choked
voice. "Just hateful."
"I felt like slapping his face," confided Aunt Emilie.
"Did you hear what he said to me when we were having
our presents?"
At a glance from Uncle Greg, Aunt Emilie stopped.
"Why, Donald!" she exclaimed brightly, "you've scarcely
touched your dinner! Aren't you hungry?"
In his mind's eye he was seeing the bedroom upstairs,
where his father was twisting his mother's arm and
shaking her to make her look at him. When she wouldn't,
he punched her, knocking her down, and kicked her as
hard as he could, all over her body. Donald looked up.
"Not very," he said.
Without warning Mr. Gordon began to talk, holding
his glass in front of him and examining it as he turned it
this way and that. "Family quarrels," he sighed. "Same old
thing. Reminds me of my boyhood. When I look back on it,
it seems to me we never got through a meal without a
fight, but I suppose we must have once in a while." He set
the glass down. "Well, they're_all dead now^ thank GodJl
Donal_d lookecl^juicRiy'across at Mr. Gordon as if he
were seeing him for the first time.
"It's snowing!" cried Gramma triumphantly. "Look, it's
snowing again. I knew we'd have more snow before dark."
She did not want Mr. Gordon to go on talking.
Aunt Louisa sobbed once, got up, and went out into
the kitchen. Uncle Ivor followed her.
"Why, Donald! You've got the wishbone!" cried Aunt
Emilie. "Eat the meat off it and we'll hang it up over the
stove to dry, and tomorrow we'll wish on it. Wouldn't that
be fun?"
Lie picked it up in his fingers and began to chew on
the strips of white meat that clung to it. When he had
carefully cleaned it, he got down and went out into the
kitchen with it.
The room was very quiet; the tea-kettle simmered on
the stove. Outside the window the falling snowflakes
looked dark against the
whiteness beyond. Aunt Louisa was sitting on the high
stool, doubled over, with a crumpled handkerchief in her
hand, and Uncle Ivor was bending over her talking in a
very low voice. Donald laid the wishbone on the sink shelf
and started to tiptoe out, but Uncle Ivor saw him. "How'd
you like to go up to the henhouse with me, Donald?" he
said. "I've got to find us a dozen eggs to take back to
Rutland."
"I'll get my coat," Donald told him, eager to go out
before his father came back downstairs.
The path up the hill to the henhouse had been made
not by clearing the snow away, but by tramping it down.
The new snow was drifting over the track; in some places
it already had covered it. When Uncle Ivor went into the
henhouse Donald stood still, bending his head back to
catch some snowflakes in his mouth, "Come on in and
shut the door. You'll let all the heat out," Uncle Ivor told
him.
"I'm coming," said Donald. He stepped through the
doorway and closed the door. The smell inside was very
strong. As Uncle Ivor ap-proached the hens, they set up a
low, distrustful murmur.
"Tell me, Donald," said Uncle Ivor as he explored the
straw with his hands.
"What?" said Donald.
"Does your mother often run to her room and shut the
door, the way she did just now?"
"Sometimes."
.
....; "Why? Is your father mean to her?" >' v.<i-
<i'ip>v
;
'.;:;, "Oh," said Donald vaguely, "they have fights." He
felt un
comfortable.
"Yes. Well, it's a great pity your father ever got
married. It would have been better for everybody if he'd
stayed single."
"But then I wouldn't have been born at all," cried
Donald, uncertain whether Uncle Ivor was serious or not.
"At least, we hope not!" said Uncle Ivor, rolling his
eyes and looking silly. Now Donald knew it was a kind of
joke, and he laughed. The door was flung open. "Donald!"
roared his father. ' ? ; '
<;
,
"What is it?" he said, his voice very feeble.
!

;
'"*''^'V.
:
')!;
!
.''X
"Come out here!" .I
1
''
He stumbled toward the door; his father was peering
inside uncertainly. "What are you doing in there?" he
demanded.
"Helping Uncle Ivor look for eggs."
"Hmmph!" Donald stepped out and his father shut the
door.
They started to walk along the road in the direction of
the Smith-son farm. Presently his father fell in behind
him and prodded him in the back, saying: "Krep your
hcnd up. Chest out! D'you want to get
The Frozen Fields 363
rotund-shouldered? Before you know it you'll have curvature
of the*'
spine." ' '
'..jij.'.
' Wh e n they had got out of sight of the house, in a
place where the tangle of small trees came to the
edge of the road on both sides, his father stopped
walking. He looked around, reached down, picked up
a handful of the new snow, and rolled it into a hard
ball. Then he threw it at a fairly large tree, some
distance from the road. It broke, leaving a white mark
on the dark trunk. "Let's see you hit it," he told Donald.
A wolf could be waiting here, somewhere back in,
the still gloom of the woods. It was very important not
to make him angry. If his father wanted to take a
chance and throw snowballs into the woods, he could,
but Donald would not. Then perhaps the wolf would
understand that he, at least, was his friend.
"Go on," said his father.
"No. I don't want to."
With mock astonishment his father said: "Oh, you
don't?" Then
his face became dangerous and his voice cracked like
a whip. "Are
you going to do what I told you?" I - . < : , , ,
"No." It was the first time he had openly defied
him. His father
turned very red. <,; *
"Listen here, you young whippersnapper!" he cried,
his voice tight with anger. "You think you're going to
get away with this?" Before Donald knew what was
happening, his father had seized him with one hand
while he bent over and with the other scooped up as
much snow as he could. "We'll settle this little matter
right now," he said through his teeth. Suddenly he was
rubbing the snow violently over Donald's face, and at
the same time that Donald gasped and squirmed, he
pushed what was left of it down his neck. As he felt the
wet, icy mass sliding down his back, he doubled over.
His eyes were squeezed shut; he was certain his father
was trying to kill him. With a desperate lunfie lie
bounded free and fell face-downvttarH Int Qfhr ""*" , '
'Get up," his father said disgustedly. He did not
move. If he held his breath long enough he might die.
His father yanked him to his feet. "I've had just
about enough of your monkeyshines," he said.
Clutching him tightly with both hands, he forced him
to hobble ahead of him, back through the twilight to
the house.
Donald moved forward, looking at the white road
in front of him/ his mind empty of thoughts. An,
unfamiliar feeling had come to him: he was not sorry
for himself for being wet and cold, or even resentful
at having been mistreated. HeJdt_(|etached; it was an
agreeable, aj-

most voluptuous sensation which he accepted without
understanding pr a^stTgnine it.
As they advanced down the long alley of maple
trees in the dusk his father said: "Now you can go and
cry in your mother's lap."
"I'm not crying," said Donald loudly, without
expression. His father did not answer.
Fortunately the kitchen was empty. He could tell
from the sound
of the voices in the parlor that Aunt Louisa, Uncle Ivor
and Mr. Gor
don were getting ready to leave. He ran upstairs to his
room and
* changed his clothes completely. The hole he had
breathed in the ice
) on the windowpane had fro/en over thickly again, but
the found mark
was still visible. As he finished dressing his mother
called him. It was
completely dark outside. He went downstairs. She was
standing in the
hallway. -^
"Oh, you've changed your clothes," she said. "Come out
and say
good-by to Aunt Louisa and Uncle Ivor. They're in the
kitchen." He
looked quickly at her face to see if there were signs of her
recent tears:
her eyes were slightly bloodshot. '..;'
Together they went into the kitchen. "Donald wants
to say good-by to you" she told Mr. Gordon, steering
Donald to Aunt Louisa. "You've given him a
wonderful Christmas"her voice became re-
proachful"but it was much too much."
The thick beaver collar of Mr. Gordon's overcoat
was turned up over his ears, and he had on enormous
fur gloves. He smiled and clapped his hands together
expectantly; it made a cushioned sound. "Oh, it was a
lot of fun," he said. "He reminds me a little of myself,
you know, when I was his age. I was a sort of shy and
quiet lad, too." Donald felt his mother's hand tighten on
his shoulder as she pushed him toward Aunt Louisa.
"Mm," she said. "Well, Auntie Louisa, here's somebody
who wants to say good-by to you." . ; ( ; f '
Even in the excitement of watching Uncle Willis
and Uncle Greg drive the others off in the sleigh,
Donald did not miss the fact that his father had not
appeared in the kitchen at all. When the sleigh had
moved out of sight down the dark road, everyone went
into the parlor and Grampa put another log on the fire.
"Where's Owen?" Gramma said in a low voice to
Donald's
mother. ' .. , .
"He must be upstairs. Tb tell the truth, I don't care
very .much /where he is." " '
"Poor child," said Gramma. "Headache a little
better?"
"A little." She sighed. "He certainly managed to
take all the pleasure out of my Christmas."
, ; !'A-mean shame," said Gramma.,,
:
, ;,, , , ,
"It was all I could do to look Ivor in the face just now. I meant it."
"I'm sure they all understood," said Gramma soothingly. "Just don't you fret about it. Anyway,
Owen'11 be gone tomorrow, and you can rest up."
Shortly after Uncle Willis and Uncle Greg got back, Donald's father came downstairs. Supper was
eaten in almost complete silence; at notime did his father speak to him or nay him any attention. As
soon" astKE meal was over his mother took nim upstairs to bed.
When she had left him, he lay in the dark listening to the sound of the fine snow as the wind drove
it against the panes. The wolf was out there in^the night, running along paths that no one had ever
seen^j down the hill and across the meadow, stopping to drink at a deep place in the brook where the
ice had not formed. The stiff hairs of his coat had caught the snow; he shook himself and climbed up the
bank to where Donald sat waiting for him. Then he lay down beside him, putting his heavy head in
Donald's lap. Donald leaned over and buried his face in the shaggy fur of his scruff. After a while they
both got up and began to run together, faster and faster, across the fields.

JAMES PURDY (1923- )

Introduction

From the time of the publication of his first book of stories in the 1950s (in which Why Cant They
Tell You Why? was included), James Purdy has proved to be a writer with the power to disturb
readers. His stories and novels often focus on human abuse of one another. But they are never
merely complaints or indictments. Rather he seems in his fiction to be searching for the deep
psychological causes of human emotion and behavior, and what his probing, searching fiction
repeatedly discovers and displays is that human beings are amazingly ignorant of their own
impulses and motivations. We dont know why we love and hate what we love and hate, although
these primal emotions are the very condition of our existence.

The boy in Why Cant They Tell You Why? who is so obsessed with the pictures of his dead
father is obviously searching for information regarding the father he never knew. But the meaning
of his obsession is unclear to him, and his inability to account for his obsession bespeaks of the
childish inability of each of us to comprehend the depths and breadths of our family ties in terms of
our individual psyches. The mothers determination to destroy the pictures, likewise, is indicative
of her utter exasperation when confronted with such depths of unaccountable devotion and emotion
in the face of which, her own vindictive and sadistic reaction is all too predictable and
understandable. It is easy to explain anger and bitterness; it is difficult and perhaps even
impossible, as Purdy implies to explain love.


Why Cant They Tell You Why? (1956)

Paul knew nearly nothing of his father until he found the box of photographs on the backstairs. From
then on he looked at them all day and every evening, and when his mother Ethel talked to Edith
Gainesworth on the telephone. He had looked amazed at lu's father in his different ages and stations
of life, first as a boy his age, then as a young man, and finally before his death in his army uniform.
Ethel had always referred to him as your father, and now the photographs made him look much
different from what this had suggested in Paul's mind.
Ethel never talked with Paul about why he was home sick from school and she pretended at first she
did not know he had found the photographs. But she told everything she thought and felt about him
to Edith Gainesworlh over the telephone, and Paul heard all of the conversations from the backstairs
where he sat with the photographs, which he had moved from the old shoe boxes where he had
found them to two big clean empty candy boxes.
"Wouldn't you know a sick kid like him would lake up with photographs," Ethel said to Edith
Gainesworth. "Instead of toys or balls, old photos. And my God, I've hardly mentioned a thing to
him about his father."
Edith Gainesworth, who studied psychology at an adult center downtown, often advised Ethel about
Paul, but she did not say anything tonight about the photographs.
"All mothers should have pensions," Ethel continued. "If it isn't a terrible feeling being on your feet
all day before the public and then having a sick kid under your feet when you're off at night. My
evenings are worse than my days."
These telephone conversations always excited Paul because they were the only times he heard
himself and the photographs discussed. When the telephone bell would ring he would run to the
backstairs and begin looking at the photographs and then as the conversation progressed he oiten
ran into the front room where Ethel was talking, sometimes carrying one of the photographs with
him and making sounds like a bird or an airplane.
Two months had gone by like this, with his having attended school hardly at all and his whole life
seemingly spent in listening to Ethel talk to Edith Gainessvorth and examining the photographs in
the candy boxes.
Then in the middle of the night Ethel missed him. She rose feeling a pressure in her scalp and neck.(
She walked over to his cot and noticed the Indian blanket had been taken away. She called Paul and
walked over to the win dow and looked out. She walked around the upstairs, calling him.
"God, there is always something to bother you," she said. "Where are you, Paul?" she repeated in a
mad sleepy voice. She went on down into the kitchen, though it did not seem possible he would be
there, he never ate anything.
Then she said Of course, remembering how many times he went to the backstairs with those
photographs.
"Now vi'hat are you doing in here, Paul?" Ethel said, and there was! a sweet but tlireatening sound
to her voice that awoke the boy from where he had been sleeping, spread out protectively over the
boxes of photographs, his Indian blanket oVer his back and .shoulder.
Paul crouched almost greedily over the bo'xes when he saw this ugly pale woman in the man's
bathrobe looking at him. There was a faint smell from her like that of an uncovered cistern when
she put on the robe.
"Just here, Ethel," he answered her question after a while,
"What do you mean, just here, Paul?" she said going up closer to him.
She took hold of his hair and jerked him by it gently as
though tin's was ;i kind of caress she sometimes gave him.
Tin's gentle jerking motion made him tremble in short suc
cessive starts under her hand, until she let go. i
He watched how she kept looking at the boxes of photographs under his guard.
"Yon sleep here to be near them?" she said.
"I don't know why, Ethel," Paul said, blowing ont air from his month as though trying to make
something disappear before him.
"Yon don't know, Paul," she said, her sweet fake awful voice and the stale awful smell of the
bathrobe stifling as she drew nearer1.
"Don't, don't 1" Paul cried.
"Don't what?" Ethel answered, pulling him toward her by seizing on his pajaina tops.
"Don't do anything to me, Ethel, my eye hurts."
"Your eye hurts," she said with unbelief.
"I'm sick to my stomach."
Then bending over suddenly, in a second she had gathered up the two boxes of photographs in her
bathrobed arms.
"Ethel!" he cried ont in the strongest, clearest voice she had ever heard come from him. "Ethel,
those are my candy boxes!"
She looked down at him as though she was seeing him for the first time, noting with surprise how
thin and puny he was, and how disgusting was one small mole that hung from his starved-looking
throat. She could not soe how this was: her son.
"These boxes of pictures are what makes you sick."
"No, no, Mama Ethel," Paul cried.
"What did I tell you about calling me Mama," she said., going over to him and putting her hand on
his forehead.
"I called you Mama Ethel, not Mama," he said.
"I suppose you think I'm a thousand years old." She raised her hand as though she was not sure what
she wished to do with it.
"I think I know what to do with these," she said with a pretended calm.
"No, Ethel," Paul said, "give them here back. They are my boxes."
Tell me why you slept out here on this backstairs where you know you'll make yourself even sicker.
I want you to tell me and tell me right away."
"I can't, Ethel, I can't," Paul said.
"Then I'm going to hum (he pictures," she replied.
He crawled hurrying over to where she stood and put his arms around her legs.
"Ethel, please don't take them, Ethel. Pretty please."
"Don't (ouch me," she said to him. Her nerves were so bad she felt that if he touched her again she
would start as though a mouse had gotten under her clothes.
"You stand up straight and tell me like a little man why you're here," she said, but she kept her eyes
half closed and turned from him.
He moved his lips to answer but then he did not: really understand what she meant by little man.
That phrase worried him whenever he heard it.
"What do you do with the pictures all the time, all day when I'm gone, and now tonight? I never
heard of anything like it." Then she moved away from him, so that his hands fell from her legs
where he had been grasping her, but she continued to stand near his hands as though puzzled what
to do next.
"I look is all, Ethel," lie began to explain.
"Don't bawl when you talk," she commanded, looking now at him in the face.
Then: "I want the truth!" she roared.
He sobbed and whined there, thinking over what it was she could want him to tell her, but
everything now had begun to go away from his attention, and he had not really ever understood
what had been expected of him here, and now everything was too hard to be borne.
"Do you hear me, Paul?" she said between her teeth, very close to him now and staring at him in
such an angry way
he closed his eyes. "If you don't answer me, do you know what I'm going to do?" !
"Punish?" Paul said in his tiniest child voice.
"No, I'm not going to punish this time," Ethel said.
"You're notl" he cried, a new fear and surprise; coining now into his tired eyes, and then staring at
her eyes, he began to cry with panicky terror, for it seemed to him then that in the whole world
there were just the two of them, him and Ethel.
"You remember where they sent Aunt Grace," Ethel said with terrible knowledge.
His crying redoubled in fury, some of his spit flying out onto the cold calcimine of the walls. He
kept turning the while to look at the close confines of the staircase as though to find some place
where he could see things outside.
"Do you remember where they sent her?" Ethel said in a quiet patient voice like a woman who has
endured every unreasonable, disrespectful action from a child whom she still can patiently love.
"Yes, yes, Ethel," Paul cried hysterically.
"Tel! Ethel where they sent Aunt Grace," she said with the same patience and kind restraint.
"I didn't know they sent little boys there," Paul said.
"You're more than a little boy now," Ethel replied. "You're old enough. . . . And if you don't tell
Ethel why you look at the photographs all the lime, we'll have to send you to th$ mental hospital
with the bars."
"I don't know why I look at them, dear Ethel," he said now in a very feeble but wildly tense voice,
and he began petting the fur on her houseslippers.
"I think you-do, Paul," she said quietly, but he could hear her gentle, patient tone disappearing and
he half raised his hands as though to protect him from anything this woman might now do.
"But I don't know why I look at them," lie repeated, screaming, and he threw his arms suddenly
around lier legs.
She moved back, but still smiling her patient, knowing, forgiving smile.
"AH right for you, Paul." When she said that all right for you it always meant the end of any
understanding or reasoning with her.
"Where are we going?" he cried, as she ushered him through the door, into the kitchen.
"We're going to the basement, of course," she replied.
They had never gone there together before, and the terror of what might happen to him now gave
him a kind of quiet that enabled him to walk sleady down the long irregular steps.
"You carry the boxes of pictures, Paul," she said, "since you like them so much."
"No, no," Paul cried.
"Carry Ihem," she commanded, giving them to him.
He held them before him and when they reached the floor of the basement, she opened the furnace
and, tightening the cord of her bathrobe, she said coldly, her white face lighted up by the fire,
"Tlirow the pictures into the furnace door, Paul." '
He stared at her as though all the nightmares had come true, the complete and final fear of what
may happen in living had unfolded itself at last.
"They're Daddy!" he said in a voice neither of them recognized.
"You had your choice," she said coolly. "You prefer a dead man to y^ur owri mother. Either you
throw his pictures in the fire, for they're what makes you sick, or you will go where they sent Aunt
Grace."
He began running around the room now, much like-a small bird which has escaped from a pet shop
into the confusion of n city street, and making odd little sounds that she did not recognize could
come from his own lungs.
"I'm not going to stand for your clowning," she called out, but aii though to an empty room.
As he ran round and round the small room with the boxes of photographs pressed against him, some
of the pictures fell upon the floor and these he stopped and tried to recapture, at the same time
holding the boxes tight against him, arid making, as he picked them up, frothing cries of impotence
and acute grief.
Ethel herself stared at him, incredulous. He not only could not be recognized as her son, he no
longer looked like a child, but in his small unmended night shirt like some crippled and dying
animal running hopelessly from its pain.
"Give me those pictures!" she shouted, and she seized a few which he held in his fingers, and threw
them quickly into the fire.
Then turning back, she moved to take the candy boxes from him.
But the final sight of him made her stop. He had crouched on the floor, and, bending his stomach
over the boxes, hissed at her, so that she stopped short, not seeing any way to get at him, seeing no
way to bring him back, while from his mouth black thick strings of something slipped out, as though
he had spewed out the heart of his grief.

FLANNERY OCONNOR (1925-1964)

Introduction

Flannery OConnor was born and raised and lived most of her brief adult life in Americas Deep
South, a region that is famous for its religious extremism and turbulent racial history. These are
some of the themes that OConnor works with in her enormously successful and influential short
fiction.

Although religion in a conventional sense rarely enters into her short stories, OConnor claimed that
she was primarily a religious writer whose vivid portrayals of human violence and ignorance are
meant to shock her readers into an awareness of their sinful human condition. In her stories, there
are no heroes or hardly even villains, but only a variety of misguided individuals whose prejudice
and pride put their lives on collision courses with one another.

In Everything that Rises must Converge, OConnor provides a portrait of a young man who seems
superior in almost every respect to his mother except for the fact that her relationship to him is
one of tenderness and forgiveness, whereas his behavior toward her is characterized by bitterness
and resentment. The storys portrayal of racial prejudice is, in a sense misleading, since the main
theme of the narrative is a failure of love, rather than a failure of equality and justice. The
implication seems to be that social justice will always be an inadequate response to our social woes
as long as we remain as individuals dominated by resentment and self-ignorance.

In A Good Man is Hard to Find, OConnor presents a more complex argument concerning our
relationship to law and love. The Misfit is obsessed with the logical failure of the Christian
doctrine of forgiveness and love, which was meant to replace the former religious doctrine of
responding to an abuse with an equal abuse so as to insure social justice. The Misfit believes that
Christs doctrine of forgiveness threw the world of human justice out of balance, so that the
individual is free to do whatever he pleases without fear of recrimination and his nihilistic
response is to do as much harm as possible to those around him.

The Grandmother, who is the Misfits antagonist in the story, is a supposedly good woman whose
failure and weakness is that she is entirely unthoughtful. Her goodness is merely a matter of
following convention, and when she tries to convince the Misfit that he is a good man, she is
speaking in terms of social convention and not of ethical being. Although the Misfit is entirely
mistaken in his understanding of human ethics, he is at least interested in the question of how one
becomes an ethical person, whereas the Grandmother has never asked herself that vital question.

As is usual in OConnors stories, there is no hero of the narrative and no clear answer to the storys
questions. Rather there is an exposure of false answers and false questions regarding our ethical
lives. OConnor professed to believe that true answers could only be found in religion and had no
place in a fictional story.

OConnors fiction is remarkable for its narrative concision and for its vigorous and even blatant
use of symbols. Her stories are moral tales that have often been compared to Hawthornes short
fiction. It might be argued that her influence and popularity owe much more to her melodramatic
narratives and trenchant prose style than to her ethical argument, which is often overlooked or
ignored by both readers and critics.


Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)

Her doctor had told Julian's mother that she must lose twenty pounds on account of her blood
pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus for a reducing class
at the Y. The reducing class was designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to
200 pounds. His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies did not tell their age or
weight. She would not ride the buses by herself at night since they had been integrated, and
because the reducing class was one of her few pleasures, necessary for her health, and free, she
said Julian could at least put himself out to take her, considering all she did for him. Julian did
not like to consider all she did for him, but every Wednesday night he braced himself and took
her.
She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall mirror, putting on her hat, while he, his
hands behind him, appeared pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows
to begin piercing him. The hat was new and had cost her seven dollars and a half. She kept
saying, "Maybe I shouldn't have paid that for it. No, I shouldn't have. I'll take it off and return it
tomorrow. I shouldn't have bought it."
Julian raised his eyes to heaven. "Yes, you should have bought it," he said. "Put it on and let's
go." It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the
other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was
less comical than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and
depressed him.
She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly on top of her head. Two wings of
gray hair protruded on either side of her florid face, but her eyes, sky-blue, were as innocent and
untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten. Were it not that she was a
widow who had struggled fiercely to feed and clothe and put him through school and who was
supporting him still, "until he got on his feet," she might have been a little girl that he had to
take to town.
"It's all right, it's all right," he said. "Let's go." He opened the door himself and started down
the walk to get her going. The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it,
bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike. Since this
had been a fashionable neighborhood forty years ago, his mother persisted in thinking they did
well to have an apartment in it. Each house had a narrow collar of dirt around it in which sat,
usually, a grubby child. Julian walked with his hands in his pockets, his head down and thrust
forward and his eyes glazed with the determination to make himself completely numb during the
time he would be sacrificed to her pleasure.
The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy figure, surmounted by the atrocious hat,
coming toward him. "Well," she said, "you only live once and paying a little more for it, I at
least won't meet myself coming and going."
"Some day I'll start making money," Julian said gloomilyhe knew he never would"and
you can have one of those jokes whenever you take the fit." But first they would move. He
visualized a place where the nearest neighbors would be three miles away on either side.
"I think you're doing fine," she said, drawing on her gloves. "You've only been out of school a
year. Rome wasn't built in a day."
She was one of the few members of the Y reducing class who arrived in hat and gloves and
who had a son who had been to college. "It takes time," she said, "and the world is in such a
mess. This hat looked better on me than any of the others, though when she brought it out I said,
Take that thing back. I wouldn't have it on my head,' and she said, 'Now wait till you see it on,'
and when she put it on me, I said, 'We-ull,' and she said, 'If you ask me, that hat does something
for you and you do something for the hat, and besides,' she said, 'with that hat, you won't meet
yourself coming and going.' "
Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an
old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the
midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith. Catching sight of his long, hopeless, irritated face,
she stopped suddenly with a grief-stricken look, and pulled back on his arm. "Wait on me," she
said. "I'm going back to the house and take this thing off and tomorrow I'm going to return it. I
was out of my head. I can pay the gas bill with that seven-fifty."
He caught her arm in a vicious grip. "You are not going to take it back," he said. "I like it."
"Well," she said, "I don't think I ought. . ."
"Shut up and enjoy it," he muttered, more depressed than ever.
"With the world in the mess it's in," she said, "it's a wonder we can enjoy anything. I tell you,
the bottom rail is on the top."
Julian sighed.
"Of course," she said, "if you know who you are, you can go anywhere." She said this every
time he took her to the reducing class. "Most of them in it are not our kind of people," she said,
"but I can be gracious to anybody. I know who I am."
"They don't give a damn for your graciousness," Julian said savagely. "Knowing who you are is
good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are."
She stopped and allowed her eyes to flash at him. "I most certainly do know who I am," she
said, "and if you don't know who you are, I'm ashamed of you."
"Oh hell," Julian said.
"Your great-grandfather was a former governor of this state," she said. "Your grandfather
was a prosperous landowner. Your grandmother was a Godhigh."
"Will you look around you," he said tensely, "and see where you are now?" and he swept his
arm jerkily out to indicate the neighborhood, which the growing darkness at least made less
dingy.
"You remain what you are," she said. "Your great-grandfather had a plantation and two
hundred slaves."
"There are no more slaves," he said irritably.
"They were better off when they were," she said. He groaned to see that she was off on that
topic. She rolled onto it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every
junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would
roll majestically into the station: "It's ridiculous. It's simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but
on their own side of the fence."
"Let's skip it," Julian said.
"The ones I feel sorry for," she said, "are the ones that are half white. They're tragic."
"Will you skip it?"
"Suppose we were half white. We would certainly have mixed feelings."
"I have mixed feelings now," he groaned.
"Well let's talk about something pleasant," she said. "I remember going to Grandpa's when I
was a little girl. Then the house had double stairways that went up to what was really the second
floorall the cooking was done on the first. I used to like to stay down in the kitchen on account
of the way the walls smelled. I would sit with my nose pressed against the plaster and take deep
breaths. Actually the place belonged to the Godhighs but your grandfather Chestny paid the
mortgage and saved it for them. They were in reduced circumstances," she said, "but
reduced or not, they never forgot who they were."
"Doubtless that decayed mansion reminded them," Julian muttered. He never spoke of it
without contempt or thought of it without longing. He had seen it once when he was a child
before it had been sold. The double stairways had rotted and been torn down. Negroes were
living in it. But it remained in his mind as his mother had known it. It appeared in his dreams
regularly. He would stand on the wide porch, listening to the rustle of oak leaves, then
wander through the high-ceilinged hall into the parlor that opened onto it and gaze at the
worn rugs and faded draperies. It occurred to him that it was he, not she, who could have
appreciated it. He preferred its threadbare elegance to anything he could name and it was
because of it that all the neighborhoods they had lived in had been a torment to him
whereas she had hardly known the difference. She called her insensitivity "being adjustable."
"And I remember the old darky who was my nurse, Caroline. There was no better person
in the world. I've always had a great respect for my colored friends," she said. "I'd do
anything in the world for them and they'd . . . "
"Will you for God's sake get off that subject?" Julian said. When he got on a bus by
himself, he made it a point to sit down beside a Negro, in reparation as it were for his
mother's sins.
"You're mighty touchy tonight," she said. "Do you feel all right?"
"Yes I feel all right," he said. "Now lay off."
She pursed her lips. "Well, you certainly are in a vile humor," she observed. "I just won't
speak to you at all."
They had reached the bus stop. There was no bus in sight and Julian, his hands still
jammed in his pockets and his head thrust forward, scowled down the empty street. The
frustration of having to wait on the bus as well as ride on it began to creep up his neck like a
hot hand. The presence of his mother was borne in upon him as she gave a pained sigh. He
looked at her bleakly. She was holding herself very erect under the preposterous hat,
wearing it like a banner of her imaginary dignity. There was in him an evil urge to break her
spirit. He suddenly unloosened his tie and pulled it off and put it in his pocket.
She stiffened. "Why must you look like that when you take me to town?" she said. "Why
must you deliberately embarrass me?"
"If you'll never learn where you are," he said, "you can at least learn where I am."
"You look like athug," she said.
"Then I must be one," he murmured.
"I'll just go home," she said. "I will not bother you. If you can't do a little thing like that
for me . . ."
Rolling his eyes upward, he put his tie back on. "Restored to my class," he muttered. He
thrust his face toward her and hissed, "True culture is in the mind, the mind," he said, and
tapped his head, "the mind."
"It's in the heart," she said, "and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who
you are."
"Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are."
"I care who I am," she said icily.
The lighted bus appeared on top of the next hill and as it approached, they moved out into the
street to meet it. He put his hand under her elbow and hoisted her up on the creaking step. She
entered with a little smile, as if she were going into a drawing room where everyone had been
waiting for her. While he put in the tokens, she sat down on one of the broad front seats for three
which faced the aisle. A thin woman with protruding teeth and long yellow hair was sitting on the
end of it. His mother moved up beside her and left room for Julian beside herself. He sat down
and looked at the floor across the aisle where a pair of thin feet in red and white canvas sandals
were planted.
His mother immediately began a general conversation meant to attract anyone who felt like
talking. "Can it get any hotter?" she said and removed from her purse a folding fan, black with a
Japanese scene on it, which she began to flutter before her.
"I reckon it might could," the woman with the protruding teeth said, "but I know for a fact my
apartment couldn't get no hotter."
"It must get the afternoon sun," his mother said. She sat forward and looked up and down the
bus. It was half filled. Everybody was white. "I see we have the bus to ourselves," she said. Julian
cringad.
"For a change," said the woman across the aisle, the owner of the red and white canvas
sandals. "I come on one the other day and they were thick as fleasup front and all through."
"The world is in a mess everywhere," his mother said. "I don't know how we've let it get in this
fix."
"What gets my goat is all those boys from good families stealing automobile tires," the woman
with the protruding teeth said. "I told my boy, I said you may not be rich but you been raised right
and if I ever catch you in any such mess, they can send you on to the reformatory. Be exactly
where you belong."
"Training tells," his mother said. "Is your boy in high school?"
"Ninth grade," the woman said.
"My son just finished college last year. He wants to write but he's selling typewriters until he
gets started," his mother said.
The woman leaned forward and peered at Julian. He threw her such a malevolent look that
she subsided against the seat. On the floor across the aisle there was an abandoned newspaper.
He got up and got it and opened it out in front of him. His mother discreetly continued the con-
versation in a lower tone but the woman across the aisle said in a loud voice, "Well that's nice.
Selling typewriters is close to writing. He can go right from one to the other."
"I tell him," his mother said, "that Rome wasn't built in a day."
Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where
he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself
when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out
and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only
place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it
but from it he could see her with absolute clarity.
The old lady was clever enough and he thought that if she had started from any of the right
premises, more might have been expected of her. She lived according to the laws of her own
fantasy world, outside of which he had never seen her set foot. The law of it was to sacrifice
herself for him after she had first created the necessity to do so by making a mess of things. If he
had permitted her sacrifices, it was only because her lack of foresight had made them necessary.
All of her life had been a struggle to act like a Chestny without the Chestny goods, and to give him
everything she thought a Chestny ought to have; but since, said she, it was fun to struggle, why
complain? And when you had won, as she had won, what fun to look back on the hard times! He
could not forgive her that she had enjoyed the struggle and that she thought she had won.
What she meant when she said she had won was that she had brought him up successfully
and had sent him to college and that he had turned out so wellgood looking (her teeth had
gone unfilled so that his could be straightened), intelligent (he realized he was too intelligent to
be a success), and with a future ahead of him (there was of course no future ahead of him).
She excused his gloominess on the grounds that he was still growing up and his radical ideas
on his lack of practical experience. She said he didn't yet know a thing about "life," that he hadn't
even entered the real worldwhen already he was as disenchanted with it as a man of fifty.
The further irony of all this was that in spite of her, he had turned out so well. In spite of
going to only a third-rate college, he had, on his own initiative, come out with a first-rate
education; in spite of growing up dominated by a small mind, he had ended up with a large one;
in spite of all her foolish views, he was free of prejudice and unafraid to face facts. Most
miraculous of all, instead of being blinded by love for her as she was for him, he had cut himself
emotionally free of her and could see her with complete objectivity. He was not dominated by
his mother.
The bus stopped with a sudden jerk and shook him from his meditation. A woman from the
back lurched forward with little steps and barely escaped falling in his newspaper as she
righted herself. She got off and a large Negro got on. Julian kept his paper lowered to watch. It
gave him a certain satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation. It confirmed his view that
with a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a radius of three hundred
miles. The Negro was well dressed and carried a briefcase. He looked around and then sat
down on the other end of the seat where the woman with the red and white canvas sandals
was sitting. He immediately unfolded a newspaper and obscured himself behind it. Julian's
mother's elbow at once prodded insistently into his ribs. "Now you see why I won't ride on
these buses by myself," she whispered.
The woman with the red and white canvas sandals had risen at the same time the Negro
sat down and had gone further back in the bus and taken the seat of the woman who had got
off. His mother leaned forward and cast her an approving look.
Julian rose, crossed the aisle, and sat down in the place of the woman with the canvas
sandals. From this position, he looked serenely across at his mother. Her face had turned an
angry red. He stared at her, making his eyes the eyes of a stranger. He felt his tension
suddenly lift as if he had openly declared war on her.
He would have liked to get in conversation with the Negro and to talk with him about art
or politics or any subject that would be above the comprehension of those around them, but
the man remained entrenched behind his paper. He was either ignoring the change of seating
or had never noticed it. There was no way for Julian to convey his sympathy.
His mother kept her eyes fixed reproachfully on his face. The woman with the protruding
teeth was looking at him avidly as if he were a type of monster new to her.
"Do you have a light?" he asked the Negro.
Without looking away from his paper, the man reached in his pocket and handed him a
packet of matches.
"Thanks," Julian said. For a moment he held the matches foolishly. A NO SMOKING sign
looked down upon him from over the door. This alone would not have deterred him; he had
no cigarettes. He had quit smoking some months before because he could not afford it.
"Sorry," he muttered and handed back the matches. The Negro lowered the paper and gave
him an annoyed look. He took the matches and raised the paper again.
His mother continued to gaze at him but she did not take advantage of his momentary
discomfort. Her eyes retained their battered look. Her face seemed to be unnaturally red, as
if her blood pressure had risen. Julian allowed no glimmer of sympathy to show on his face.
Having got the advantage, he wanted desperately to keep it and carry it through. He would
have liked to teach her a lesson that would last her a while, but there seemed no way to
continue the point. The Negro refused to come out from behind his paper.
Julian folded his arms and looked stolidly before him, facing her but as if he did not see
her, as if he had ceased to recognize her existence. He visualized a scene in which, the bus
having reached their stop, he would remain in his seat and when she said, "Aren't you going to
get off?" he would look at her as at a stranger who had rashly addressed him. The corner they
got off on was usually deserted, but it was well lighted and it would not hurt her to walk by
herself the four blocks to the Y. He decided to wait until the time came and then decide whether
or not he would let her get off by herself. He would have to be at the Y at ten to bring her back,
but he could leave her wondering if he was going to show up. There was no reason for her to think
she could always depend on him.
He retired again into the high-ceilinged room sparsely settled with large pieces of antique
furniture. His soul expanded momentarily but then he became aware of his mother across from
him and the vision shriveled. He studied her coldly. Her feet in little pumps dangled like a
child's and did not quite reach the floor. She was training on him an exaggerated look of
reproach. He felt completely detached from her. At that moment he could with pleasure have
slapped her as he would have slapped a particularly obnoxious child in his charge.
He began to imagine various unlikely ways by which he could teach her a lesson. He might
make friends with some distinguished Negro professor or lawyer and bring him home to spend the
evening. He would be entirely justified but her blood pressure would rise to 300. He could not
push her to the extent of making her have a stroke, and moreover, he had never been successful
at making any Negro friends. He had tried to strike up an acquaintance on the bus with some of
the better types, with ones that looked like professors or ministers or lawyers. One morning he had
sat down next to a distinguished-looking dark brown man who had answered his questions with a
sonorous solemnity but who had turned out to be an undertaker. Another day he had sat down
beside a cigar-smoking Negro with a diamond ring on his finger, but after a few stilted
pleasantries, the Negro had rung the buzzer and risen, slipping two lottery tickets into Julian's
hand as he climbed over him to leave.
He imagined his mother lying desperately ill and his being able to secure only a Negro
doctor for her. He toyed with that idea for a few minutes and then dropped it for a momentary
vision of himself participating as a sympathizer in a sit-in demonstration. This was possible but
he did not linger with it. Instead, he approached the ultimate horror. He brought home a beautiful
suspiciously Negroid woman. Prepare yourself, he said. There is nothing you can do about it.
This is the woman I've chosen. She's intelligent, dignified, even good, and she's suffered and she
hasn't thought it fun. Now persecute us, go ahead and persecute us. Drive her out of here, but
remember, you're driving me too. His eyes were narrowed and through the indignation he had
generated, he saw his mother across the aisle, purple-faced, shrunken to the dwarf-like
proportions of her moral nature, sitting like a mummy beneath the ridiculous banner of her hat.
He was tilted out of his fantasy again as the bus stopped. The door opened with a
sucking hiss and out of the dark a large, gaily dressed, sullen-looking colored woman got on
with a little boy. The child, who might have been four, had on a short plaid suit and a
Tyrolean hat with a blue feather in it. Julian hoped that he would sit down beside him and
that the woman would push in beside his mother. He could think of no better arrangement.
As she waited for her tokens, the woman was surveying the seating possibilitieshe
hoped with the idea of sitting where she was least wanted. There was something familiar-
looking about her but Julian could not place what it was. She was a giant of a woman. Her
face was set not only to meet opposition but to seek it out. The downward tilt of her large
lower lip was like a warning sign: DON'T TAMPER WITH ME. Her bulging figure was encased in a
green crepe dress and her feet overflowed in red shoes. She had on a hideous hat. A purple
velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green
and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. She carried a mammoth red pocketbook that
bulged throughout as if it were stuffed with rocks.
To Julian's disappointment, the little boy climbed up on the empty seat beside his
mother. His mother lumped all children, black and white, into the common category, "cute,"
and she thought little Negroes were on the whole cuter than little white children. She
smiled at the little boy as he climbed on the seat.
Meanwhile the woman was bearing down upon the empty seat beside Julian. To his
annoyance, she squeezed herself into it. He saw his mother's face change as the woman
settled herself next to him and he realized with satisfaction that this was more objectionable
to her than it was to him. Her face seemed almost gray and there was a look of dull
recognition in her eyes, as if suddenly she had sickened at some awful confrontation. Julian
saw that it was because she and the woman had, in a sense, swapped sons. Though his
mother would not realize the symbolic significance of this, she would feel it. His amusement
showed plainly on his face.
The woman next to him muttered something unintelligible to herself. He was conscious
of a kind of bristling next to him, a muted growling like that of an angry cat. He could not see
anything but the red pocketbook upright on the bulging green thighs. He visualized the
woman as she had stood waiting for her tokensthe ponderous figure, rising from the red
shoes upward over the solid hips, the mammoth bosom, the haughty face, to the green and
purple hat.
His eyes widened.
The vision of the two hats, identical, broke upon him with the radiance of a brilliant
sunrise. His face was suddenly lit with joy. He could not believe that Fate had thrust upon
his mother such a lesson. He gave a loud chuckle so that she would look at him and see that
he
saw. She turned her eyes on him slowly. The blue in them seemed to have turned a bruised
purple. For a moment he had an uncomfortable sense of her innocence, but it lasted only a
second before principle rescued him. Justice entitled him to laugh. His grin hardened until
it said to her as plainly as if he were saying aloud: Your punishment exactly fits your
pettiness. This should teach you a permanent lesson.
Her eyes shifted to the woman. She seemed unable to bear looking at him and to find the
woman preferable. He became conscious again of the bristling presence at his side. The
woman was rumbling like a volcano about to become active. His mother's mouth began to
twitch slightly at one corner. With a sinking heart, he saw incipient signs of recovery on her
face and realized that this was going to strike her suddenly as funny and was going to be no
lesson at all. She kept her eyes on the woman and an amused smile came over her face as if
the woman were a monkey that had stolen her hat. The little Negro was looking up at her with
large fascinated eyes. He had been trying to attract her attention for some time.
"Carver!" the woman said suddenly. "Come heah!"
When he saw that the spotlight was on him at last Carver drew his feet and turned
himself toward Julian's mother and giggled.
"Carver!" the woman said. "You heah me? Come heah!"
Carver slid down from the seat but remained squatting with his back against the base of it,
his head turned slyly around toward Julian's mother, who was smiling at him. The woman
reached a hand across the aisle and snatched him to her. He righted himself and hung back-
wards on her knees, grinning at Julian's mother. "Isn't he cute?" Julian's mother said to the
woman with the protruding teeth.
"I reckon he is," the woman said without conviction.
The Negress yanked him upright but he eased out of her grip and shot across the aisle and
scrambled giggling wildly, onto the seat beside his love.
"I think he likes me," Julian's mother said, and smiled at the woman. It was the smile she
used when she was being particularly gracious to an inferior. Julian saw everything lost. The
lesson had rolled off her like rain on a roof.
The woman stood up and yanked the little boy off the seat as if she were snatching him
from contagion. Julian could feel the rage in her at having no weapon like his mother's smile.
She gave the child a sharp slap across his leg. He howled once and then thrust his head into
her stomach and kicked his feet against her shins. "Be-have," she said vehemently.
The bus stopped and the Negro who had been reading the newspaper got off. The woman
moved over and set the little boy down with a thump between herself and Julian. She held
him firmly by the knee. In a moment he put his hands in front of his face and peeped at
Julian's mother through his fingers.
"I see yoooooooo!" she said and put her hand in front of her face and peeped at him.
The woman slapped his hand down. "Quit yo' foolishness," she said, "before I knock the
living Jesus out of you!"
Julian was thankful that the next stop was theirs. He reached up and pulled the cord. The
woman reached up and pulled it at the same time. Oh my God, he thought. He had the
terrible intuition that when they got off the bus together, his mother would open her purse and
give the little boy a nickel. The gesture would be as natural to her as breathing. The bus
stopped and the woman got up and lunged to the front, dragging the child, who wished to
stay on, after her. Julian and his mother got up and followed. As they neared the door,
Julian tried to relieve her of her pocketbook.
"No," she murmured, "I want to give the little boy a nickel." "No!" Julian hissed. "No!"
She smiled down at the child and opened her bag. The bus door opened and the woman
picked him up by the arm and descended with him, hanging at her hip. Once in the street she
set him down and shook him.
Julian's mother had to close her purse while she got down the bus step but as soon as her
feet were on the ground, she opened it again and began to rummage inside. "I can't find but a
penny," she whispered, "but it looks like a new one."
"Don't do it!" Julian said fiercely between his teeth. There was a streetlight on the corner
and she hurried to get under it so that she could better see into her pocketbook. The woman
was heading off rapidly down the street with the child still hanging backward on her hand.
"Oh little boy!" Julian's mother called and took a few quick steps and caught up with
them just beyond the lamp-post. "Here's a bright new penny for you," and she held out the
coin, which shone bronze in the dim light.
The huge woman turned and for a moment stood, her shoulders lifted and her face frozen
with frustrated rage, and stared at Julian's mother. Then all at once she seemed to explode like
a piece of machinery that had been given one ounce of pressure too much. Julian saw the
black fist swing out with the red pocketbook. He shut his eyes and cringed as he heard the
woman shout, "He don't take nobody's pennies!" When he opened his eyes, the woman was
disappearing down the street with the little boy staring wide-eyed over her shoulder. Julian's
mother was sitting on the sidewalk.
"I told you not to do that," Julian said angrily. "I told you not to do that!"
He stood over her for a minute, gritting his teeth. Her legs were stretched out in front of
her and her hat was on her lap. He squatted down and looked her in the face. It was totally
expressionless. "You got exactly what you deserved," he said. "Now get up."
He picked up her pocketbook and put what had fallen out back in it. He picked the hat up
off her lap. The penny caught his eye on the sidewalk and he picked that up and let it drop
before her eyes into the purse. Then he stood up and leaned over and held his hands out to
pull her up. She remained immobile. He sighed. Rising above them on either side were black
apartment buildings, marked with irregular rectangles of light. At the end of the block a man
came out of a door and walked off in the opposite direction. "All right," he said, "suppose
somebody happens by and wants to know why you're sitting on the sidewalk?"
She took the hand and, breathing hard, pulled heavily up on it and then stood for a
moment, swaying slightly as if the spots of light in the darkness were circling around her. Her
eyes, shadowed and confused, finally settled on his face. He did not try to conceal his irritation.
"I hope this teaches you a lesson," he said. She leaned forward and her eyes raked his face.
She seemed trying to determine his identity. Then, as if she found nothing familiar about him,
she started off with a headlong movement in the wrong direction.
"Aren't you going on to the Y?" he asked.
"Home," she muttered.
"Well, are we walking?"
For answer she kept going. Julian followed along, his hands behind him. He saw no reason
to let the lesson she had had go without backing it up with an explanation of its meaning. She
might as well be made to understand what had happened to her. "Don't think that was just an
uppity Negro woman," he said. "That was the whole colored race which will no longer take
your condescending pennies. That was your black double. She can wear the same hat as you,
and to be sure," he added gratuitously (because he thought it was funny), "it looked better on
her than it did on you. What all this means," he said, "is that the old world is gone. The old
manners are obsolete and your gracious-ness is not worth a damn." He thought bitterly of the
house that had been lost for him. "You aren't who you think you are," he said.
She continued to plow ahead, paying no attention to him. Her hair had come undone on
one side. She dropped her pocketbook and took no notice. He stooped and picked it up and
handed it to her but she did not take it.
"You needn't act as if the world had come to an end," he said, "because it hasn't. From now
on you've got to live in a new world and face a few realities for a change. Buck up," he said,
"it won't kill you."
She was breathing fast.
"Let's wait on the bus," he said.
"Home," she said thickly.
"I hate to see you behave like this," he said. "Just like a child. I should be able to expect
more of you." He decided to stop where he was and make her stop and wait for a bus. "I'm
not going any farther," he said, stopping. "We're going on the bus."
She continued to go on as if she had not heard him. He took a few steps and caught
her arm and stopped her. He looked into her face and caught his breath. He was looking
into a face he had never seen before. "Tell Grandpa to come get me," she said.
He stared, stricken.
"Tell Caroline to come get me," she said.
Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walking as if one leg were
shorter than the other. A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him. "Mother!"
he cried. "Darling, sweetheart, wait!" Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed
forward and fell at her side, crying, "Mamma, Mamma!" He turned her over. Her face
was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had
become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing
and closed.
"Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a
cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. "Help, help!" he shouted, but his
voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he
ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness
seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the
world of guilt and sorrow.


A Good Man is Hard to Find
by Flannery O'Connor
From:Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works the Library of America
Flannery O'Connor 1925-1964
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
THE GRANDMOTHER didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections
in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son
she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the
orange sports section of the Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read this," and
she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. "Here
this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida
and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children
in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did."
Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children's mother,
a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around
with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears. She was sitting on the
sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. "The children have been to Florida before," the old
lady said. "You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different
parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee."
The children's mother didn't seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley, a stocky
child with glasses, said, "If you don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?" He and the
little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.
"She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day," June Star said without raising her yellow head.
"Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?" the grandmother asked.
"I'd smack his face," John Wesley said.
"She wouldn't stay at home for a million bucks," June Star said. "Afraid she'd miss something. She
has to go everywhere we go."
"All right, Miss," the grandmother said. "Just remember that the next time you want me to curl your
hair."
June Star said her hair was naturally curly.
The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black
valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a
basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for
three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of
the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel
with a cat.
She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either side of her. Bailey
and the children's mother and the baby sat in front and they left Atlanta at eight forty-five with the
mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down because she thought it would be
interesting to say how many miles they had been when they got back. It took them twenty minutes
to reach the outskirts of the city.
The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and putting them up
with her purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The children's mother still had on slacks
and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw
sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in
the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had
pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her
dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.
She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too cold, and she
cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid
themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you had a
chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue
granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks
slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the
ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled. The children
were reading comic magazines and their mother had gone back to sleep.
"Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it much," John Wesley said.
"If I were a little boy," said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that way.
Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills."
"Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground," John Wesley said, "and Georgia is a lousy state
too."
"You said it," June Star said.
"In my time," said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, "children were more respectful
of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute
little pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. "Wouldn't
that make a picture, now?" she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the
back window. He waved.
"He didn't have any britches on," June Star said.
"He probably didn't have any," the grandmother explained. "Little niggers in the country don't have
things like we do. If I could paint, I'd paint that picture," she said.
The children exchanged comic books.
The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children's mother passed him over the front seat
to her. She set him on her knee and bounced him and told him about the things they were passing.
She rolled her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into his smooth
bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile. They passed a large cotton field with five or
six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island. "Look at the graveyard!" the grandmother
said, pointing it out. "That was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the plantation."
"Where's the plantation?" John Wesley asked.
"Gone With the Wind," said the grandmother. "Ha. Ha."
When the children finished all the comic books they had brought, they opened the lunch and ate it.
The grandmother ate a peanut butter sandwich and an olive and would not let the children throw the
box and the paper napkins out the window. When there was nothing else to do they played a game
by choosing a cloud and making the other two guess what shape it suggested. John Wesley took one
the shape of a cow and June Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no, an automobile, and June
Star said he didn't play fair, and they began to slap each other over the grandmother.
The grandmother said she would tell them a story if they would keep quiet. When she told a story,
she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic. She said once when she was a
maiden lady she had been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden from Jasper, Georgia. She said
he was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon every
Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr. Teagarden
brought the watermelon and there was nobody at home and he left it on the front porch and returned
in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon, she said, because a nigger boy ate it when
he saw the initials, E. A. T.! This story tickled John Wesley's funny bone and he giggled and
giggled but June Star didn't think it was any good. She said she wouldn't marry a man that just
brought her a watermelon on Saturday. The grandmother said she would have done well to marry
Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out
and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.
They stopped at The Tower for barbecued sandwiches. The Tower was a part stucco and part wood
filling station and dance hall set in a clearing outside of Timothy. A fat man named Red Sammy
Butts ran it and there were signs stuck here and there on the building and for miles up and down the
highway saying, TRY RED SAMMY'S FAMOUS BARBECUE. NONE LIKE FAMOUS RED
SAMMY'S! RED SAM! THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH. A VETERAN! RED
SAMMY'S YOUR MAN!
Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground outside The Tower with his head under a truck while a
gray monkey about a foot high, chained to a small chinaberry tree, chattered nearby. The monkey
sprang back into the tree and got on the highest limb as soon as he saw the children jump out of the
car and run toward him.
Inside, The Tower was a long dark room with a counter at one end and tables at the other and
dancing space in the middle. They all sat down at a board table next to the nickelodeon and Red
Sam's wife, a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin, came and took their
order. The children's mother put a dime in the machine and played "The Tennessee Waltz," and the
grandmother said that tune always made her want to dance. She asked Bailey if he would like to
dance but he only glared at her. He didn't have a naturally sunny disposition like she did and trips
made him nervous. The grandmother's brown eyes were very bright. She swayed her head from side
to side and pretended she was dancing in her chair. June Star said play something she could tap to
so the children's mother put in another dime and played a fast number and June Star stepped out
onto the dance floor and did her tap routine.
"Ain't she cute?" Red Sam's wife said, leaning over the counter. "Would you like to come be my
little girl?"
"No I certainly wouldn't," June Star said. "I wouldn't live in a broken-down place like this for a
minion bucks!" and she ran back to the table.
"Ain't she cute?" the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely.
"Arn't you ashamed?" hissed the grandmother.
Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the counter and hurry up with these people's
order. His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them like a sack
of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over and sat down at a table nearby and let out a
combination sigh and yodel. "You can't win," he said. "You can't win," and he wiped his sweating
red face off with a gray handkerchief. "These days you don't know who to trust," he said. "Ain't that
the truth?"
"People are certainly not nice like they used to be," said the grandmother.
"Two fellers come in here last week," Red Sammy said, "driving a Chrysler. It was a old beat-up
car but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and
you know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?"
"Because you're a good man!" the grandmother said at once.
"Yes'm, I suppose so," Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer.
His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once without a tray, two in each hand and
one balanced on her arm. "It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust," she said.
"And I don't count nobody out of that, not nobody," she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.
"Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that's escaped?" asked the grandmother.
"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he didn't attact this place right here," said the woman. "If he hears
about it being here,I wouldn't be none surprised to see him. If he hears it's two cent in the cash
register, I wouldn't be a tall surprised if he . . ."
"That'll do," Red Sam said. "Go bring these people their Co'-Colas," and the woman went off to get
the rest of the order.
"A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said. "Every- thing is getting terrible. I remember the
day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more."
He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was
entirely to blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would think we
were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly right. The
children ran outside into the white sunlight and looked at the monkey in the lacy chinaberry tree.
He was busy catching fleas on himself and biting each one carefully between his teeth as if it were a
delicacy.
They drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grand- mother took cat naps and woke up every
few minutes with her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old
plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She said the
house had six white columns across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it
and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front where you sat down with your suitor after
a stroll in the garden. She recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to it. She knew that Bailey
would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked about it, the
more she wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin arbors were still standing. "There
was a secret panel in this house," she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were,
"and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came through but it
was never found . . ."
"Hey!" John Wesley said. "Let's go see it! We'll find it! We'll poke all the woodwork and find it!
Who lives there? Where do you turn off at? Hey Pop, can't we turn off there?"
"We never have seen a house with a secret panel!" June Star shrieked. "Let's go to the house with
the secret panel! Hey Pop, can't we go see the house with the secret panel!"
"It's not far from here, I know," the grandmother said. "It wouldn't take over twenty minutes."
Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. "No," he said.
The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the house with the secret panel. John
Wesley kicked the back of the front seat and June Star hung over her mother's shoulder and whined
desperately into her ear that they never had any fun even on their vacation, that they could never do
what THEY wanted to do. The baby began to scream and John Wesley kicked the back of the seat
so hard that his father could feel the blows in his kidney.
"All right!" he shouted and drew the car to a stop at the side of the road. "Will you all shut up? Will
you all just shut up for one second? If you don't shut up, we won't go anywhere.
"It would be very educational for them," the grandmother murmured.
"All right," Bailey said, "but get this: this is the only time we're going to stop for anything like this.
This is the one and only time."
"The dirt road that you have to turn down is about a mile back," the grandmother directed. "I
marked it when we passed."
"A dirt road," Bailey groaned.
After they had turned around and were headed toward the dirt road, the grandmother recalled other
points about the house, the beautiful glass over the front doorway and the candle-lamp in the hall.
John Wesley said that the secret panel was probably in the fireplace.
"You can't go inside this house," Bailey said. "You don't know who lives there."
"While you all talk to the people in front, I'll run around behind and get in a window," John Wesley
suggested.
"We'll all stay in the car," his mother said. They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly
along in a swirl of pink dust. The grandmother recalled the times when there were no paved roads
and thirty miles was a day's journey. The dirt road was hilly and there were sudden washes in it and
sharp curves on dangerous embankments. All at once they would be on a hill, looking down over
the blue tops of trees for miles around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with
the dust-coated trees looking down on them.
"This place had better turn up in a minute," Bailey said, "or I'm going to turn around."
The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months.
"It's not much farther," the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her.
The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet
jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she
had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing,the cat, sprang onto Bailey's shoulder.
The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door
onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and landed
right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver's seat with the cat-
gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange nose-clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.
As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car,
shouting, "We've had an ACCIDENT!" The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard,
hoping she was injured so that Bailey's wrath would not come down on her all at once. The horrible
thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not
in Georgia but in Tennessee.
Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and flung it out the window against the side
of a pine tree. Then he got out of the car and started looking for the children's mother. She was
sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but she only had a cut
down her face and a broken shoulder. "We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed in a
frenzy of delight.
"But nobody's killed," June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the car,
her hat still pinned to her head but the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and the violet
spray hanging off the side. They all sat down in the ditch, except the children, to recover from the
shock. They were all shaking.
"Maybe a car will come along," said the children's mother hoarsely.
"I believe I have injured an organ," said the grandmother, pressing her side, but no one answered
her. Bailey's teeth were clattering. He had on a yellow sport shirt with bright blue parrots designed
in it and his face was as yellow as the l shirt. The grandmother decided that she would not mention
that the house was in Tennessee.
The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops of the trees on the other side of
it. Behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a few
minutes they saw a car some distance away on top of a hill, coming slowly as if the occupants were
watching them. The grandmother stood up and waved both arms dramatically to attract their
attention. The car continued to come on slowly, disappeared around a bend and appeared again,
moving even slower, on top of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black battered hearse-like
automobile. There were three men in it.
It came to a stop just over them and for some minutes, the driver looked down with a steady
expressionless gaze to where they were sitting, and didn't speak. Then he turned his head and
muttered something to the other two and they got out. One was a fat boy in black trousers and a red
sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it. He moved around on the right side of
them and stood staring, his mouth partly open in a kind of loose grin. The other had on khaki pants
and a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his face. He came
around slowly on the left side. Neither spoke.
The driver got out of the car and stood by the side of it, looking down at them. He was an older man
than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver- rimmed spectacles that
gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn't have on any shirt or undershirt. He
had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was holding a black hat and a gun. The two boys
also had guns.
"We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed.
The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew. His
face was as familiar to her as if she had known him au her life but she could not recall who he was.
He moved away from the car and began to come down the embankment, placing his feet carefully
so that he wouldn't slip. He had on tan and white shoes and no socks, and his ankles were red and
thin. "Good afternoon," he said. "I see you all had you a little spill."
"We turned over twice!" said the grandmother.
"Once"," he corrected. "We seen it happen. Try their car and see will it run, Hiram," he said quietly
to the boy with the gray hat.
"What you got that gun for?" John Wesley asked. "Whatcha gonna do with that gun?"
"Lady," the man said to the children's mother, "would you mind calling them children to sit down
by you? Children make me nervous. I want all you all to sit down right together there where you're
at."
"What are you telling US what to do for?" June Star asked.
Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth. "Come here," said their mother.
"Look here now," Bailey began suddenly, "we're in a predicament! We're in . . ."
The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. "You're The Misfit!" she
said. "I recognized you at once!"
"Yes'm," the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be known, "but it
would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me."
Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that shocked even the children.
The old lady began to cry and The Misfit reddened.
"Lady," he said, "don't you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don't mean. I don't reckon he
meant to talk to you thataway."
"You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief
from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.
The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made a little hole and then covered it up
again. "I would hate to have to," he said.
"Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good man. You don't look a bit like
you have com- mon blood. I know you must come from nice people!"
"Yes mam," he said, "finest people in the world." When he smiled he showed a row of strong white
teeth. "God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy's heart was pure gold," he
said. The boy with the red sweat shirt had come around behind them and was standing with his gun
at his hip. The Misfit squatted down on the ground. "Watch them children, Bobby Lee," he said.
"You know they make me nervous." He looked at the six of them huddled together in front of him
and he seemed to be embarrassed as if he couldn't think of anything to say. "Ain't a cloud in the
sky," he remarked, looking up at it. "Don't see no sun but don't see no cloud neither."
"Yes, it's a beautiful day," said the grandmother. "Listen," she said, "you shouldn't call yourself The
Misfit because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell "
"Hush!" Bailey yelled. "Hush! Everybody shut up and let me handle this!" He was squatting in the
position of a runner about to sprint forward but he didn't move.
"I prechate that, lady," The Misfit said and drew a little circle in the ground with the butt of his gun.
"It'll take a half a hour to fix this here car," Hiram called, looking over the raised hood of it.
"Well, first you and Bobby Lee get him and that little boy to step over yonder with you," The Misfit
said, pointing to Bailey and John Wesley. "The boys want to ast you some- thing," he said to
Bailey. "Would you mind stepping back in them woods there with them?"
"Listen," Bailey began, "we're in a terrible predicament! Nobody realizes what this is," and his
voice cracked. His eyes were as blue and intense as the parrots in his shirt and he remained
perfectly still.
The grandmother reached up to adjust her hat brim as if she were going to the woods with him but
it came off in her hand. She stood staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the ground. Hiram
pulled Bailey up by the arm as if he were assisting an old man. John Wesley caught hold of his
father's hand and Bobby Lee followed. They went off toward the woods and just as they reached the
dark edge, Bailey turned and supporting himself against a gray naked pine trunk, he shouted, "I'll be
back in a minute, Mamma, wait on me!"
"Come back this instant!" his mother shrilled but they all disappeared into the woods.
"Bailey Boy!" the grandmother called in a tragic voice but she found she was looking at The Misfit
squatting on the ground in front of her. "I just know you're a good man," she said desperately.
"You're not a bit common!"
"Nome, I ain't a good man," The Misfit said after a second as if he had considered her statement
carefully, "but I ain't the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a different breed of dog
from my brothers and sisters. 'You know,' Daddy said, 'it's some that can live their whole life out
without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's
going to be into every- thing!'" He put on his black hat and looked up suddenly and then away deep
into the woods as if he were embarrassed again. "I'm sorry I don't have on a shirt before you
ladies," he said, hunching his shoulders slightly. "We buried our clothes that we had on when we
escaped and we're just making do until we can get better. We borrowed these from some folks we
met," he explained.
"That's perfectly all right," the grandmother said. "Maybe Bailey has an extra shirt in his suitcase."
"I'll look and see terrectly," The Misfit said.
"Where are they taking him?" the children's mother screamed.
"Daddy was a card himself," The Misfit said. "You couldn't put anything over on him. He never got
in trouble with the Authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them."
"You could be honest too if you'd only try," said the grandmother. "Think how wonderful it would
be to settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about some- body chasing you all
the time."
The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his gun as if he were thinking about it.
"Yes'm, somebody is always after you," he murmured.
The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder blades were just behind-his hat because she was
standing up looking down on him. "Do you ever pray?" she asked.
He shook his head. All she saw was the black hat wiggle between his shoulder blades. "Nome," he
said.
There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by another. Then silence. The old lady's
head jerked around. She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long satisfied insuck
of breath. "Bailey Boy!" she called.
"I was a gospel singer for a while," The Misfit said. "I been most everything. Been in the arm
service, both land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict married, been an undertaker, been with
the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a man burnt alive oncet," and he looked
up at the children's mother and the little girl who were sitting close together, their faces white and
their eyes glassy; "I even seen a woman flogged," he said.
"Pray, pray," the grandmother began, "pray, pray . . ."
"I never was a bad boy that I remember of," The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice, "but
somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried
alive," and he looked up and held her attention to him by a steady stare.
"That's when you should have started to pray," she said "What did you do to get sent to the
penitentiary that first time?"
"Turn to the right, it was a wall," The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. "Turn to
the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady.
I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain't recalled it to this day.
Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come."
"Maybe they put you in by mistake," the old lady said vaguely.
"Nome," he said. "It wasn't no mistake. They had the papers on me."
"You must have stolen something," she said.
The Misfit sneered slightly. "Nobody had nothing I wanted," he said. "It was a head-doctor at the
penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in
nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a thing to do with it. He was buried in
the Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard and you can go there and see for yourself."
"If you would pray," the old lady said, "Jesus would help you."
"That's right," The Misfit said.
"Well then, why don't you pray?" she asked trembling with delight suddenly.
"I don't want no hep," he said. "I'm doing all right by myself."
Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling back from the woods. Bobby Lee was dragging a yellow shirt
with bright blue parrots in it.
"Thow me that shirt, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. The shirt came flying at him and landed on his
shoulder and he put it on. The grandmother couldn't name what the shirt reminded her of. "No,
lady," The Misfit said while he was buttoning it up, "I found out the crime don't matter. You can do
one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're
going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it."
The children's mother had begun to make heaving noises as if she couldn't get her breath. "Lady,"
he asked, "would you and that little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and Hiram and join
your husband?"
"Yes, thank you," the mother said faintly. Her left arm dangled helplessly and she was holding the
baby, who had gone to sleep, in the other. "Hep that lady up, Hiram," The Misfit said as she
struggled to climb out of the ditch, "and Bobby Lee, you hold onto that little girl's hand."
"I don't want to hold hands with him," June Star said. "He reminds me of a pig."
The fat boy blushed and laughed and caught her by the arm and pulled her off into the woods after
Hiram and her mother.
Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in
the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must
pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out. Finally she found
herself saying, "Jesus. Jesus," meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it
sounded as if she might be cursing.
"Yes'm," The Misfit said as if he agreed. "Jesus shown everything off balance. It was the same case
with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed
one because they had the papers on me. Of course," he said, "they never shown me my papers.
That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do
and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the
punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't been
treated right. I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit
what all I gone through in punishment."
There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a pistol report. "Does it seem
right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain't punished at all?"
"Jesus!" the old lady cried. "You've got good blood! I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I know you
come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I'll give you all the money I've
got!"
"Lady," The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, "there never was a body that give
the undertaker a tip."
There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey
hen crying for water and called, "Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!" as if her heart would break.
"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have
done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but
thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the
few minutes you got left the best way you can-by killing somebody or burning down his house or
doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become
almost a snarl.
"Maybe He didn't raise the dead," the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and
feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.
"I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't," The Misfit said. "I wisht I had of been there," he said,
hitting the ground with his fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would of
known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I
wouldn't be like I am now." His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared
for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she
murmured, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" She reached out and
touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three
times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began
to clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the
grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a
child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
Without his glasses, The Misfit's eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking. "Take
her off and thow her where you shown the others," he said, picking up the cat that was rubbing
itself against his leg.
"She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.
"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her
every minute of her life."
"Some fun!" Bobby Lee said.
"Shut up, Bobby Lee" The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."

JANE BOWLES (1917-1973)

Introduction

Jane Bowles is one of the most original American fiction writers of the 20
th
Century. Her intense
originality doubtless has contributed to the misunderstanding and neglect of her work. Like the
work of other extremely original and originally underrated American writers, such as Herman
Melville and Emily Dickinson, Bowles work has had to await an audience able to comprehend
its value and meaning and to some extent that audience is still in formation.

Bowles fiction is innately philosophical, like Melvilles, but not in such an obvious manner. Her
characters seem to occupy casual worlds and situations, but they are set apart by the fact that
they instinctively and obsessively question the meaning of their existence, and the implications
of their life-choices.

Bowles self-questioning characters are never predictable, and neither are her stories narratives
and plots. Indeed, from the point of view of most traditional and conventional fiction, her stories
seem almost plot-less. But that is a misapprehension. Rather her stories plots follow the
contours of her characters constantly changing attitudes and emotions. In that sense, Bowles
fiction is ultra-realistic, although her characters often appear weird and strange. But their oddity
is never merely a creative writers affection or exaggeration, but is a legitimate expression of the
complexity and innate contradiction of their intense emotions.

The story Plain Pleasures is centered on that most inexplicable of human emotions, romantic
love and desire. It details the hesitant, contradictory and yet persistent and obsessive manner
in which desire pursues its object. Despite what simplified and idealistic romantic stories
routinely tell us, love is rarely straight-forward and inevitable. Rather it is like life itself
circuitous and deliberative, skeptical and hopeful.

In the last analysis, romantic love is a kind of miracle perhaps the most fundamental miracle of
our unpredictable emotional lives. Bowles fiction is strange and surprising because she is
expressing and describing life at the mysterious level of human emotion.


Plain Pleasures (1945)

ALVA Perry WAS A DIGNIFIED and reserved woman of Scotch and Spanish descent, in her early
forties. She was still handsome, although her cheeks were too thin. Her eyes particularly were
of an extraordinary clarity and beauty. She lived in her uncle's house, which had been
converted into apartments, or tenements, as they were still called in her section of the
country. 'The house stood on the side of a sleep, wooded hill overlooking the main highway. A
long cement staircase climbed halfway up the hill and stopped some distance below the house.
It had originally led to a power station, which had since been destroyed. Mrs. Perry had lived
alone in her tenement since the death of her husband eleven years ago; however, she found
small things to do all day long and she had somehow remained as industrious in her solitude as
a woman who lives in the service of her family.
John Drake, an equally reserved person, occupied the tenement below hers. He owned a truck
and engaged in free-lance work for lumber companies, as well as in the collection and
delivery of milk cans for a dairy.
Mr. Drake and Mrs. Perry had never exchanged more than die simplest greeting in all the
years that they had lived here in the hillside house.
One night Mr. Drake, who was standing in the hull, heard Mrs. Perry's heavy footsteps,
which he had unconsciously learned to recognize. He looked up and saw her coming
downstairs. She was dressed in a brown overcoat that had belonged to her dead husband, and
she was hugging a paper bag to her bosom. Mr. Drake offered to help her with the bag and
she faltered, undecided, on the landing.
"They are only potatoes," she said to him, "but thank you very
much. I am going to hake them out in the Kick yard. I have been meaning to for a long time."
Mr. Drake took the potatoes and walked with a stiff-jointed gait through the back door and
down the hill to A short stretch of level land in back of the house which served as a yard. Here
he put the paper hag on the ground. There was a big new incinerator smoking near the back
stoop and in .the center of the yard Mrs. Perry's uncle had built a roofed-in pigpen faced in
vivid artificial brick. Mrs. Perry followed.
She thanked Mr. Drake and began to gather twigs, scuttling rapidly between the edge of the
woods and the pigpen, near which she was laying her fire. Mr. Drake, without any further
conversation, helped her to gather the twigs, so that when the fire was laid, she quite
naturally invited him to wait and share the potatoes with her. He accepted and they sat in
front of the fire on an overturned box.
Mr. Drake kept his face averted from the fire and turned in the direction of the woods, hoping
in this way to conceal somewhat his flaming-red cheeks from Mrs. Perry. He was a very shy
person and though his skin was naturally red all (he time it turned to such deep crimson
when he was in the presence of a strange woman that the change was distinctly noticeable.
Mrs. Perry wondered why he kept looking behind him, but she did not feel she knew him well
enough to question him. She waited in vain for him to speak and then, realizing that he was
not going to, she searched her own mind for something to say.
"Do you like plain ordinary pleasures?" she finally asked him gravely.
Mr. Drake felt very much relieved (hat she bad spoken and his color subsided. "Yon had
better first give me a clearer notion of what yon mean by ordinary pleasures, and then I'll tell
you how I feel about them," he answered soberly, halting after every few words, for he was
as conscientious as he was shy.
Mrs. Perry hesitated. "Plain pleasures," she began, "like the ones that come without crowds
or fancy food." She searched her brain for more examples. "Plain pleasures like this potato
bake instead of dancing and whisky and bands. . . . Like a picnic but not the kind with a
thousand extra things that get thrown out in a ditch because they don't get eaten up. Ive seen
grown people throw cakes away because they were too lazy to wrap them up and take them
back home. Have you seen that go on?"
"No, / don't t hi nk so," said Mr. Drake.
"They waste a lot," she remarked.
"Well, I do like plain pleasures," put in Mr. Drake, anxious t hat she should not lose the thread of
the conversation.
"Don't you think that plain pleasures are closer to the heart of God?" she asked him.
He was a little embarrassed at her mentioning anything so solemn and so intimate on such, short
acquaintance, and he could not bring himself to answer her. Mrs. Perry, who was ordinarily shut-
mouthed, felt a stream of words swelling in her throat.
"My sister, Dorothy Alvarez," she began without further introduction, "goes to all gala affairs
downtown. She has invited me to go and raise the dickens with her, but 1 won't go. She's the
merriest one in her group and separated from her husband. They take her all the places with
them. She can eat dinner in.a restaurant every night if she wants to. She's crazy about fried fish
and all kinds of things. I don't pay much mind to what 1 eat unless it's a potato bake like this. We
each have only one single life which is our real life, starting at the cradle and ending at the
grave. I warn Dorothy every time 1 see her that if she doesn't watch out her l i fe is going to be
l eft aching and starving on the side of the road and she's going to get to her grave without it. The
farther a man follows the rainbow, the harder it is for him to get back to the lire which he left
starving like an old dog. Sometimes when a man gets older he has a revelation and wants aw-
fully bad to get back to the place where he left his life, but he can't get to that placenot often.
It's always better to slay alongside of your life. 1 told Dorothy that life was not a tree with a
million different blossoms on it." She reflected upon this for a moment in silence and then
continued. "She has a box that she puts pennies and nickels in when she thinks she's running
around too much and she uses the money in the box to buy candles with for church. But that's all
she'll do for her spirit, which is not enough for a grown woman."
Mr. Drake's face was strained because he was trying terribly hard to follow closely what she was
saying, but he was so fearful lest she reveal some intimate secret of her sister's and later regret
it that his mind was almost completely closed to everything else. Me was fully prepared to stop
her if she went too far.
The potatoes were done and Mrs. Perry offered him two of them.
"Have some potatoes?" she said to him. The wind was colder now than when they had first sat
down, and it blew around the pigpen.
"Mow do you feel about these cold howling nights that we have? Do you mind them?" Mrs. Perry
asked.
"I surely do," said [ohn Drake.
She looked intently at his face. "He is as red as a cherry," she said to herself.
"I might have preferred to live in a warm climate maybe," Mr. Drake was saying
very slowly with a dreamy look in his eye, "if I happened to believe in a lot of
unnecessary changing around. A lot of going forth and hack, I mean." He blushed
because he was approaching a subject that was close to his heart.
"Yrs, yes, yes," said Mrs. Perry. "A lot of switching around is no good."
"When I was a younger man I had a chance to go way down south to Florida," he
continued. "I had an offer to join forces with an alligator-farm project, but there was
no security in the alligators. It might not have been a successful farm; it was not the
risk that I minded so much, because I have always yearned to see palm trees and
coconuts and the like. But I also believed that a man has to have a pretty good reason
for moving around. I think that is what finally stopped me from going down to Florida
and raising alligators. It was not the money, because I was not raised to give money
first place. It was just that F felt then the way I do now, that if a man leaves home
he must leave for some very good reasonlike the boys who went to construct the
Panama Canal or for any other decent reason. Otherwise I think he ought to stay in
his own home town, so that nobody can say about him, 'What does he think he can do
here that we can't?' At least that is what I think people in a strange town would say
about a man like myself if I landed there with some doubtful venture as my only
excuse for leaving home. My brother don't feel that way. He never stays in one
place more than three months." He ate his potato with a woeful look in his eye,
shaking his head from side to side.
Mrs. Perry's mind was wandering, so that she was very much startled when he
suddenly stood up and extended his hand to her.
"I'll leave now," he said, "but in return for the potatoes, will you come and have
supper with me at a restaurant tomorrow night?"
She had not received an invitation of this kind in many years, having deliberately
withdrawn from life in town, and she did not know how to answer him. "Do you think
I should do that?" she asked.
Mr. Drake assured her that she should do it and she accepted his invitation. On the
following afternoon, Mrs. Perry waited for the bus at the foot of the short cement
bridge below the house. She needed help and advice from her sister about a lavender
dress which no longer fitted hrr. She herself had never been able to sew well and she
knew little about altering women's garments. She intended to wear her dress
to the restaurant where she was to meet John Drake, and she was carrying it tucked
under her arm.
Dorothy Alvarez lived on a side street in one half of a two-family house. She was seated
in her parlor entertaining a man when Mrs. Perry rang the bell. The parlor was
immaculate but difficult to rest in because of the many bright and complicated patterns
of the window curtains and the furniture covers, not the least disquieting of which was an
enormous orange and black flowerpot design repeated a dozen times on the linoleum
floor covering.
Dorothy pulled the curtain aside and peeked out to see who was ringing her bell. She
was a curly-headed little person, with thick, unequal cheeks that were painted bright
pink.
She was very much startled when she looked out and saw her sister, as she had not been
expecting to see her until the following week.
"Oh!" Dorothy exclaimed.
"Who is it?" her guest asked.
"It's my sister. You better get out of here, because she must have something serious to
talk to me about. You better go out the back door. She don't like bumping up against
strangers."
The man was vexed, and left without bidding Dorothy good-bye. She ran to the door and
let Mrs. Perry in.
"Sit down," she said, pulling her into the parlor. "Sit down and tell me what's new." She
poured some hard candy from a paper bag into a glass dish.
"1 wish you would alter this dress for me or help me do it," said Mrs. Perry. "I want it
for tonight. I'm meeting Mr. Drake, my neighbor, at the restaurant down the street, so I
thought 1 could dress in your house and leave from here. If you did the alteration
yourself. I'd pay you for it."
Dorothy's face fell. "Why do you offer to pay me for it when I'm your sister?"
Mrs. Perry looked at her in silence. She did not answer, because she did not know why
herself. Dorothy tried the dress on her sister and pinned it here and there. "I'm glad
you're going out at last," she-said. "Don't you want some beads?"
"I'll take some beads if you've got a spare string."
"Well 1 hope this is the right guy for you," said Dorothy, with her customary lack of
tact. "1 would give anything for you to be in love,, so you would quit living in that ugly
house and come and live on some street nearby. Think how different everything would
be for me. You'd be jollier too if you had a husband who was dear to you.
Not like the last one. . . . I suppose I'll never stop dreaming and hoping," she added
nervously because she realized, but, as always, a little too late, that her sister hated to
discuss such matters. "Don't think," she began weakly, "that I'm so happy here all the
time. I'm not so serious and solemn as you, of course. . . ."
"I don't know what you've been talking about," said Alva Perry, twisting impatiently.
"I'm going out to have a dinner."
"I wish you were closer to me," whined Dorothy. "I get blue in
this parlor some nights." >. ; ,-'\;t
"I don't think you get very blue," Mrs. Perry remarked briefly.
"Well, as long as you're going out, why don't you pep up?"
"I am pepped up," replied Mrs. Perry.
Mrs. Perry closed the restaurant door behind her and walked the full length of the room,
peering into each booth in search of her escort. He had apparently not yet arrived, so she
chose an empty booth and seated herself inside on the wooden bench. After fifteen
minutes she decided that he was not coming and, repressing the deep hurt that this caused
her, she focused her full attention on the menu and succeeded in shutting Mr. Drake from
her mind. While she was reading the menu, she unhooked her string of bends and tucked
them away in her purse. She had called the waitress and was ordering pork when Mr.
Drake arrived. He greeted her with a timid smile.
"I see that you are ordering your dinner," he said, squeezing into his side of the booth.
He looked with admiration at her lavender dress, which exposed her pale chest. He
would have preferred that she be bareheaded because he loved women's hair. She had on
an ungainly black felt hat which she always wore in every kind of weather. Mr. Drake
remembered with intense pleasure the potato bake in front of the fire and he was much
more excited than he had imagined he would be to see her once again.
Unfortunately she did not seem to have any impulse to commu
nicate with him and his own tongue was silenced in a very short time.
They ate the first half of their meal without saying anything at all to
each other. Mr. Drake had ordered a bottle of sweet wine and after
Mrs. Perry had finished her second glass she finally spoke. "I think
they cheat you in restaurants." , - .
He was pleased she had made any remark at all, even though it was of an ungracious
nature.
"Well, it is usually to be among the crowd that we pay Inrge prices
for small portions," he said, much to his own surprise, lor he had always considered himself a
lone wolf, and his behavior had never belied this. He sensed this same quality in Mrs. Perry, hut
he was moved by a strange desire to mingle with her among the (lock.
"Well, don't you think what I say is true?" he asked hesitantly. There appeared on his face a
curious, dislocated smile and he held his head in an outlandishly erect position which betrayed
his state of tension.
Mrs. Perry wiped her plate clean with a piece of bread. Since she was not in the habit of drinking
more than once every lew years, the wine was going very quickly to her head.
"What time does the bus go by the door here?" she asked in a voice that was getting remarkably
loud.
"I can find out for you if you really want to know. Is there any reason why you want to know
now?"
:. "I've got to get home some time so 1 can get up tomorrow morning."
i : "Well, naturally I will take you home in my truck when you want to go, but I hope you won't
go yet." He leaned forward and studied her face anxiously.
: "1 can get home all right," she answered him glumly, "and it's just as good now as later."
"Well, no, it isn't," he said, deeply touched, because there was no longer any mistaking her
distinctly inimical attitude. He felt that he must at any cost keep her with him and enlist her
sympathies. The wine was contributing to this sudden aggressiveness, for it was not usually in his
nature to make any effort to try to get what he wanted. He now began speaking to her earnestly
and quickly.
"1 want to share a full evening's entertainment with you, or even a week of entertainment," he
said, twisting nervously on his bench. "I know where all the roadside restaurants and dance
houses are situated all through the county. I am master of my truck, and no one can stop me from
taking a vacation if I want to. It's a long time since I took a vacationnot since I was handed out
my yearly summer vacation when I went to school. 1 never spent any real time in any of these
roadside houses, but 1 know the proprietors, nearly all of them, because I have lived here all of
my life. There is one dance hall that is built on a lake. 1 know the proprietor. If we went there,
we could stray off and walk around the water, if that was agreeable to you." His face was a
brighter red than ever and he appeared to be temporarily stripped of the reserved and cautious
demeanor that had so characterized him the evening before. Some quality in Mrs. Perry's nature
which lie had only dimly perceived at first now sounded like a deep hell within himself
hecntise of her anger and he was flung backward into a forgotten and weaker state of being. His
yearning for a word of kindness from her increased every minute.
Mrs. Perry sat drinking her wine more and more quickly and her
resentment mounted with each new glass. U ,';,;; ;
;> '', "I know all the proprietors of dance houses in the county also,"
she said. "My sister Dorothy Alvarez has them up to her house for
beer when they take a holiday. I've got no need to meet anybody new
or see any new places. I even know this place we are eating in from a
long time ago. I had dinner here with my husband a few times." She
looked around her. "I remember him," she said, pointing a long arm
at the proprietor, who had just stepped out of the kitchen.
"How are you after these many years?" she called to him.
Mr. Drake was hesitant about what to do. He had not realized that Mrs. Perry was getting as
drunk as she seemed to be now. Ordinarily he would have felt embarrassed and would have
hastened to lead her out of the restaurant, but he thought that she might be more approachable
drunk and nothing else mattered to him. 'Til stay with you for as long as you like," he said.
His words spun around in Mrs. Perry's mind. "What are you making n bid for, anyway?" she
asked him, leaning back heavily against the bench.
"Nothing dishonorable," he said. "On the contrary, something extremely honorable if you will
accept." Mr. Drake wa,s so distraught that he did not know exactly what he was saying, but Mrs.
Perry took his words to mean a proposal of marriage, which was unconsciously what he had
hoped she would do. Mrs. Perry looked at even this exciting offer through the smoke of her
resentment.
"I suppose," she said, smiling joylessly, "that you would like a lady to mash your potatoes for
yon three times a day. But I am not a mashcd-potato masher and I never have been. I would
prefer," she added, raising her voice, "I would prefer to have him mash my potatoes for me in a
big restaurant kitchen." She nodded in the direction of the proprietor, who had remained
standing in front of the kitchen door so that he could watch Mrs. Perry. This time he grinned
and winked his eye.
Mrs. Perry fumbled through the contents of her purse in search of a handkerchief and, coming
upon her sister's string of beads, she pulled them out and laid them in her gravy. "1 am not a
mashed-potato mnshcr," she repeated, and then without warning she clambered out of the booth
and lumbered down the aisle. She disappeared up a dark



brown staircase at the back of the restaurant. Both Mr. Drake and the proprietor assumed that she was
going to the ladies' toilet.
Actually Mrs. Ferry was not specifically in search of the toilet, bat rather for any place where she could
be alone. She walked down the hall upstairs and jerked open a door on her left, closing it behind her.
She stood in total darkness for a minute, and then, feeling a chain brush her forehead, she yanked at it
brutally, lighting the room from a naked ceiling bulb, which she almost pulled down together with its
fixtures.
She was standing at the foot of a double bed with a high Victorian headboard. She looked around her
and, noticing a chair placed underneath a small window, she walked over to it and pushed the win-
dow open, securing it with a short stick; then she sat down.
"This is perfection," she said aloud, glaring a: the ugly little room. "This is surely a gift from the Lord."
She squeezed her hands together until her knuckles were white. "Oh, how I love it here! How I love it!
How I love it!"
She flung one arm out over the window sill in a gesture of abandon, but she had not noticed that the
rain was teeming down, and it soaked her lavender sleeve in a very short time.
"Mercy me!" she remarked, grinning. "It's raining here. The people at the dinner tables don't get the
rain, but I do and I like it!" She smiled benignly at the rain. She sat there half awake and half asleep
and then slowly she felt a growing certainty that she could reach her own room from where she was
sitting without ever returning to the restaurant. "I have kept the pathway open all my life," she
muttered in a thick voice, "so that I could get back."
A few moments later she said, "I am sitting there." An expression of malevolent triumph transformed
her face and she made a slight effort to stiffen her back. She remained for a long while in the strong-
hold of this fantasy, but it gradually faded and in the end dissolved. When she drew her cold shaking
arm in out of the rain, the tears were streaming down her cheeks. Without ceasing to cry she crept on
to the big double bed and fell asleep, face downward, with her hat on.
Meanwhile the proprietor had come quietly upstairs, hoping that he would bump into her as she
came out of the ladies' toilet. He had been flattered by her attention an'
4
he judged that in her
present drunken state it would b>e easy to sneak a kiss from her and perhaps even more. When he
s?w the beam of light shining under his own bedroom door, he stuck his tongue out over his lower lip
and smiled. Then he tiptoed down the stairs, plotting on the way what he would tell Mr. Drake.
Everyone had left the restaurant, and Mr. Drake was walking up and down the aisle when the
propnetor reached the bottom of the staircase.
"I am worried about my iady friend," Mr. Drake said, hurrying up to him.,"I am afraid that she may
have passed out in the toilet."
"The truth is," the proprietor answered, "that she has passed out in an empty bedroom upstairs. Don't
worry about it. My daughter will take care of her if she wakes up feeling sick. I used to know her
husband. You can't do nothing about her now." He put his hands into his pockets and looked solemnly
into Mr. Drake's eyes.
Mr. Drake, not being equal to such a delicate situation, paid his bill and left. Outside he crawled into
his freshly painted red truck and sat listening desolately to the rain.
The next morning Mrs. Perry awakened a little after sunrise. Thanks to her excellent constitution she did
not feel very sick, but she lay motionless on the bed looking around her at the wails for a long time.
Slowly she remembered that this room she was lying in was above the restaurant, but she-diet not know
how she had gotten there. She remembered the dinner with Mr. Drake, but not much of what he had said
to him. It did not occur to her to blame him for her present circumstance She was
not hysterical at finding herself in a strange bed because, although she was a very tense and nervous
woman, she possessed great depth of emotion and only certain things concerned her personally.
She felt very happy and she thought of her uncle who had passed out at a convention fifteen
years ago. He had walked around the town all the morning without knowing where he was. She smiled.
After resting a little while longer, she got out of bed and clothed herself. She went into the hail and
found the staircase and she descended with bated breath and a fast-beating heart, because she was
so eager to get back down into the restaurant.
It was flooded with sunshine and still smelled of meat and sauce. She walked a little unsteadily down
the aisle between the rows of wooden booths and tables. The cables were all bare and scrubbed
clean. She looked anxiously from one to the other, hoping to select the booth they had sat in, but she
was unable to choose among them. The tables were all identical. In a moment this anonymity served
only to heighten her tenderness.
"'John Drake," she whispered. "My sweet John Drake."
New York, 1945
Chapter 8: Multiculturalism and Social Change in America

Americas Present-Centered Society

It is sometimes said that the only thing that doesnt change is that everything changes. This is
perhaps more true in America even than elsewhere in the modern world. American society is
focused on the present to an extraordinary extent. The propensity of people in America to move
around and to separate themselves from their families and hometowns helps to account for this
emphasis on the present, and devaluation and neglect of the past.

The dominance (some would say tyranny) of the ever-changing present in American lives and
consciousness contributes to a collective sense of disconnectedness and disorientation, often
prompting individual feelings of alienation and isolation. But it also provides an excellent
opportunity for individuals and communities to re-create themselves constantly, as they strive to
fashion new identities and an improved social status.

It would seem to be this freedom of and opportunity for individuals in America rapidly to change
their individual and social identities that makes the country such a popular destination for aspiring
emigrants from more traditional and class-bound societies. The story of the poor immigrant arrival
who, through creativity and hard work, becomes a wealthy and successful person is a crucial part of
the American dream as myth, and there are many historical instances of this success story.

But for every immigrant who has struck it rich in Americas land of opportunity, there are many
more for whom the American dream has not come true, at least not to that extent, and who have
found America to be an aggressive and unfriendly place in which it is very hard to relax and to feel
at home. In this most wealthy country in the world, there are a surprising number of people who are
poor and homeless. In a less mobile and more traditional society, such unfortunate individuals
might be able to rely on an extended family and community network for help and support. But in
American they are all too often on their own, struggling to survive on the margins of a success-
driven society with little interest in or sympathy for failures.


The Great Depression and John Steinbeck

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, millions of Americans found themselves in such a
desperate situation poor, jobless, and even homeless. In addition to the collapse of the economy,
an extended drought in the American Midwest led to the failure of many family farms, leaving
whole communities with little option other than to pack up their belongings and move elsewhere.
Many of them headed to California, which was less affected by the drought, and where a wealth of
natural resources promised a better life.

John Steinbecks classic Depression-era novel, The Grapes of Wrath, tells the story of one such
family from the state of Oklahoma the center of the drought. The excerpt from that novel
included in this chapter provides a detailed and subtle portrait of the American class system in
action and of the sometimes unexpected humanity of human behavior.


African-American Experience: Toni Morrison and Gwendolyn Brooks

African-Americans are the only immigrant population in America that was largely brought to the
country by force in the slave trade rather than of their own free will. Their experience in
American has often been tragic, highlighting some of the most negative aspects of the American
social experiment.

The Nobel Prize-winning contemporary novelist Toni Morrison has written with great emotion and
conviction about the African-American experience in America. In her Nobel Prize acceptance
speech, she considers the social and political aspects of language as a legacy and bond between
generations.

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks is likewise concerned in her work with the continuing tragedy of African-
American experience in America. In the poem, The Boy Died In My Alley, she ponders a
societys collective moral responsibility for the plight of its most unfortunate and endangered
individuals.


The Vietnam War and W. D. Ehrhart

In his moving poems based upon his Vietnam War experience, W. D. Ehrhart is concerned with his
individual responsibility for his military and personal actions while on combat duty in Vietnam, but
implicit in the poems is a questioning of his countrys actions and responsibilities as well. Although
Ehrhart is obviously and admittedly harassed by continuing feelings of moral doubt and remorse, his
poems primary emotional effort is to make peace with himself and others to commemorate and to
console.


Asia and America: Gish Jen

Americas historical experience with East Asia has been fraught with military conflicts in the
Philippines, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. But America today is more likely to be a
destination for the export of Asian products and emigrants, and the place of origin for cultural
material desired by the Asian populace, rather than a national enemy or political foe.

The Chinese-American writer Gish Jen writes of Asian immigrant experience in America with
humor and understanding. In the story His Own Society, she portrays a family whose members
are struggling to accommodate themselves to an alien American cultural climate, while maintaining
a sense of their traditional ethnic values and habits of being.


Jewish American Experience: Bernard Malamud

Asian-Americans who are just beginning to make themselves felt in terms of American society and
culture as a whole might learn a lot from the experience of a generally older emigrant group, the
Jews, most of whom arrived in America in the years between the middle of the 19
th
and 20
th

Centuries. As a group, the Jews experience in America is a remarkable success story. Often
actively discriminated against in terms of business opportunities and cultural-religious practices in
the European countries from which they emigrated, the Jews found in America a more open and
tolerant society in which the freedom of the individual and minority group was more closely
guarded by both law and social ideal. A distinctive ethnic group without a nation of their own (prior
to the founding of Israel after World War II), immigrant Jews adopted America as their homeland,
and thrived in its multicultural environment.

For many of the more culturally and religiously traditional Jewish immigrants, however, the groups
success at assimilating into American culture, business, and society has seemed a threat to the
survival of their ethnic and religious inheritance. Recent Jewish writers, such as Bernard Malamud,
have focused their creative energies on documenting and celebrating the Jewish-American cultural
inheritance. In his story The Magic Barrel, Malamud portrays typical and traditional Jewish
figures the intelligent but unworldly rabbi (a religious figure, like a monk or priest), and the crafty
but good-hearted marriage broker (or matchmaker). Although set in 20
th
-Century Aemrica, the
story is concerned with Jewish life and Jewish traditions outside of a national-political context.


Revisiting the American Dream: Bharati Mukherjee

In her essay, American Dreamer, Bharati Mukherjee questions the wisdom of an immigrant
groups insistence upon maintaining its inherited culture and tradition at the expense of becoming
an active participant in the evolving American community and culture. Mukherjee insists that she is
an American, rather than an Asian-American, and she reasserts the idea of Americas founders that
the country should be a home for individuals from throughout the world who want to participate in
its ongoing social and political experiment in creating a community based not on tradition,
geography, and ethnicity, but upon ideas of equality and individuality, opportunity and freedom.
That such a lofty goal has been continually debased and contradicted by American social-political
practice does not diminish its attraction as a worthwhile ideal to pursue.
JOHN STEINBECK (1902-1968)

Introduction

John Steinbeck is one of Americas most celebrated novelists. A committed social critic, he used his
fictional talents to engage a whole range of disturbing issues in modern American and world
society. In The Grapes of Wrath, which is generally considered his masterpiece, Steinbeck portrays
a family, the Joads, struggling for survival during the days of the Great Depression and of the Dust
Bowl, or drought, in the Midwest. Like many other families, the Joads left their failing farm in the
Midwest and headed for what they hoped would be a better future in California. Their trip is
accompanied by hardship, disappointment, and tragedy, but there are moments of hope and relief,
as well, as in the section of the novel included here.

Steinbecks prose is remarkable for its realism. His stories often border on the melodramatic and
the sentimental, but the clarity of his narrative vision works against escapist emotionalism. Like the
waitress in the excerpt below, his characters are often surprised by their own generous response to
hackneyed experience. Living in our difficult day-to-day world, we are often prone to thinking
about the ways in which we can get the better of life by being clever and careful and scheming, but
if we are lucky, Steinbeck implies, life will get the better of us, opening up unforeseen possibilities
for living and being.


from The Grapes of Wrath (date needed)

TEXT OF STORY

TONI MORRISON (1931- )

Introduction

Toni Morrison is perhaps Americas most celebrated living novelist, and her status as a crucial
modern author was reaffirmed by the awarding of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrisons
fiction is dramatic and eccentric, emotional and didactic. She has taken it upon herself to tell the
story of African immigrants in America.

Morrisons narratives borrow heavily from folklore and myth, and one might contend with descriptive
accuracy that the overall effect of her fiction has been to mythologize the history of African-
Americans so that it might be remembered, cherished, commemorated, celebrated, mourned and,
ultimately, left behind. I say left behind, because Morrisons work recognizes implicitly that the un-
told story of the African-American experience has been a heavy and disabling cultural and
psychological burden, not only for African-Americans, but for the society as a whole. By telling the
story of that history by exposing it in myth she is committing it to cultural and communal memory,
so that its individual inheritors might be allowed to stop reliving the past, and move on into a therefore
richer and different future. The speech below is concerned with this difficult transition from the past
to the future one which every generation must make.


Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)

"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise." Or was it an old man? A guru,
perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the
lore of several cultures.

"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise."
In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a
small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question.
Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in
which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the
intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.

One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her
clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they
enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from
them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and
one of them says, "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead."

She does not answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding living or dead?"
Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison Approaches to Teaching World Literature,
No 59

Still she doesn't answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands.
She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.

The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.

Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know", she says. "I don't know whether
the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in
your hands."

Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have
killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever
the case, it is your responsibility.

For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are
responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to
achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the
instrument through which that power is exercised.

Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always
been attractive to me, but especially so now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that
has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a
practiced writer. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is
handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer
she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but
mostly as agency--as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her: "Is it
living or dead?" is not unrea1 because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure;
certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in
the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead
language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire
its own paralysis. Like static language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it
has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its
own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts
the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it
cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.
Official language smithered to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor
polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is:
dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for
despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence
of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its
demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the
voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned
altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But
she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile
heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to
what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force
obedience.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its
nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does
more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it
limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless
media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven
language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language
designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek--it must
be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks
its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward
the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language--
all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or
encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-
for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There
is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering
in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring,
memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more
diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more
seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like pt -producing
geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of
surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of
millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their
neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of
inferiority and hopelessness.

Underneath the eloquence, the glamour, the scholarly associations, however stirring or
seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all--if the bird is
already dead.

She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not
insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and
representations of dominance required--lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to
cognition for both the excluder and the excluded.

The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That
it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower's failed
architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would
have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of
Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other
languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have
been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven
as post-life.

She would not want to leave her young visitors with the impression that language should be
forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual,
imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in
displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie.
When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and
said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget
what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because
they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing
to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their
"poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it
mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to
life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor
should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the
ineffable.

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is
a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges
toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is
interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are
outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our
difference, our human difference--the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our
lives.

"Once upon a time, . . ." visitors ask an old woman a question. Who are they, these children?
What did they make of that encounter? What did they hear in those final words: "The bird is in
your hands"? A sentence that gestures towards possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps what
the children heard was "It's not my problem. I am old, female, black, blind. What wisdom I have
now is in knowing I cannot help you. The future of language is yours."

They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was only a ruse, a trick
to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have not been before? A chance to interrupt, to
violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent
questions are at stake, including the one they have asked: "Is the bird we hold living or dead?"
Perhaps the question meant: "Could someone tell us what is life? What is death?" No trick at all;
no silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise one. An old one. And if
the old and wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe either, who can?

But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements;
her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity
of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space.

Nothing, no word follows her declaration of transfer. That silence is deep, deeper than the
meaning available in the words she has spoken. It shivers, this silence, and the children,
annoyed, fill it with language invented on the spot.

"Is there no speech," they ask her, "no words you can give us that helps us break through your
dossier of failures? Through the education you have just given us that is no education at all
because we are paying close attention to what you have done as well as to what you have said?
To the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom?

"We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is
the nothing in our hands something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don't you
remember being young when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say,
could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and
demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?

"Do we have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already
fought and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands except what you have imagined is there?
Your answer is artful, but its artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you. Your answer
is indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-for-television script that makes no sense if there is
nothing in our hands.

"Why didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until
you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that
we were baffled about how to get your attention? We are young. Unripe. We have heard all our
short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this
world has become; where, as a poet said, "nothing needs to be exposed since it is already
barefaced." Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only
cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again
with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the
toxin of your past?

"You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives?
No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can
pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking
about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story.
Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if
your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing
is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the
places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly--once and for all. Passion
is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street;
tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to
believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old
woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can:
how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no
names. Language alone is meditation.

"Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the
margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it
is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

"Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a
wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling
snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their
last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as
though is was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn.
The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse's void
steams into the snow beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves.

"The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed.
The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They
pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance
into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look.
They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed."

It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence.

"Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because
you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done--together."

GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917-2000)

Introduction

Gwendolyn Brooks was a committed public poet and an avid spokesperson for the African-
American community. She was greatly influenced by the American Civil Rights movement of the
1960s, led by Martin Luther King, and said that her experience with that movement taught her that
poetry is never merely personal, but is also social and political. In her later years, she used her
position as a world-famous poet to bring poetry to ordinary people, working with public schools and
community organizations to give poetry readings, and arranging for the publication of books of
poems written by school children.

Brooks own best poems are strikingly simple, direct, forceful and emotional. She had a gift for
writing from a personal point of view that also speaks for the community. In The Boy Died In My
Alley, she uses her personal experience as a long-time resident of a violent inner-city
neighborhood of Chicago as a basis for the consideration of the individuals responsibility both to
and for the community. Although she didnt know the boy who was killed in her alley personally,
she knew his case his plight in a world in which he was born into a violence-prone environment
and discriminated against as an African-American male. That he died of this plight while still just a
boy is not only a personal tragedy, but is an indictment of the common world in which we live,
which fosters, allows and condones such a plight through intolerance, inequality, and injustice.
Brooks poem attempts to take responsibility for this world (and implicitly urges the reader to do the
same, and to consider what he or she can do to change it), while mourning its young victim.


THE BOY DIED IN MY ALLEY
(1981)
Without my havi ng known. Policeman said, next morning, "Apparently died Alone." "You
heard a shot?" Pol i ceman said. Shots I hear and Shots I hear. I never see the dead.
The- Shot that killed him yes I heard as I heard the Thousand shots before; careening
tinnily down the nights across my years and arteries.
Policeman pounded on my door.
"Who is it?" POLICE! Policeman yelled.
"A Boy was dying in your alley.
A Boy is dead, and in your alley.
And have you knojwn this Boy befpr'e?"
I have known this Boy before.
I have known this Boy before, who
ornaments my alley.
I never saw his face at all.
I never saw his futurefall.
But I have known this Boy.
I have always heard hi m dead with death. I have always heard the shout, the volley. I have
closed my heart-ears' late and early. And I have killed him ever.
I joined the Wi ld and killed hi m with
knowledgeable unknowing. I saw where
he was going. I saw hi m Crossed. And
seeing, I di d not take hi m down.
lie cried not only "Father!"
but "Mother!
Sister!
Brother."
The cry climbed up the alley.
It went up to the wind. j
It hung upon the heaven
for a long
stretch-strain of Moment.
The re 1 floor of my all ey
is a special speech to me.
:


W. D. EHRHART (1948- )

Introduction

W. D. Ehrhart is a Vietnam War veteran
whose experience as a soldier seems to
have hurt him into poetry, as W. H.
Auden famously remarked of W. B.
Yeats experience in revolutionary
Ireland. Ehrharts moral doubts and
psychological disturbances explicit in
these poems are representative of the
shattered emotions and lives of many
American veterans of the Vietnam War.
Their common complaint is that they did
not know what they were fighting for, so
that their experience of violent combat
often felt like abusive criminal behavior
rather than the natural reaction of
righteous and justified anger.
Furthermore, when they returned to the
United States as combat veterans often
maimed and disfigured they were met
by a populace that did not wholly support
the conflict for which they sacrificed
themselves (and that sometimes actively
resisted and resented it), making their
harrowing experience seem even more
senseless and useless. The psychological
effort of these poems is to transform such
bitter and deforming emotions into
something more endurable and life-
affirming.

The first two poems included here,
Second Thoughts and Sleeping with
General Chi, are set in Vietnam many
years after the war, as Ehrhart revisits
Vietnamese veterans he fought with and
against. The tone of the poems is
propitiatory and consolatory. The aging
veteran and poet seems to be seeking
release from his memories of the violent
conflict he encountered and took part in,
and to insist upon the common humanity
of the one-time foes and combatants.

The third poem, Beautiful Wreckage,
directly invokes the memories of violence
inflicted and endured. It is a disturbing
and beautiful poem, and the most
powerful and effective of the three, as it
asks the hardest questions and insists upon
a response that will be emotionally
satisfying and right, even if historically
wrong. In this poem, the question of
violence and responsibility is not eluded
and avoided, but elicited and evoked.
The effect is emotionally draining and
purgative, and speaks of the healing
power of all honest, ruthless art.


Second Thoughts
for Nguyen Van Hung
You watch with admiration as I roll a
cigarette from papers and tobacco.
Hanoi. The Rising Dragon. 1985. You
can't do what I can do because it takes
two hands
and you have only one, the other lost
years ago somewhere near Laos. I roll
another one for you. You smile, then
shrug, as if deformity from war were just
a minor inconvenience.
Together we discover what we share: Hue
City. Tet. 1968. Sipping Lua Mo/, we walk
again familiar ground when you were whole
and 1 was whole and everything around us
V./
lay in ruins, dead or burning. But not us. Not
you and I. We're partners in that ugly dance
of men who do the killing and the dying and
survive.
Now you run a factory; I teach and write.
You lost your arm, but have no
second thoughts about the war you fought.
I lost a piece of my humanity,
it's absence heavy as a severed arm
but there I go again: those second
thoughts I carry
always like an empty sleeve when you
are happy just to share a cigarette and
Lua
Moi, the simple joy of being with an old
friend.

Sleeping with General Chi
The old general wants me to sleep. He
pats the bed and points to my shoes. His
voice tells me this is a man accustomed
to being obeyed.
After the ride to Tay Ninh in a
sheetmetal box with two flat tires, the
red laterite dust in our lungs so thick you
could hear it bubble,
after the commissar's welcoming speech:
so many wounded, so many homeless, so
many deadeven the general falling
asleep in his chair,
I wanted to walk to the river to sit in the
shade and wash my lungs with the cool
breath of a graceful land of buffalo boys
and herons,
but the guard at the gate spoke
only Vietnamese, and I did not.
Only a boy, he held his weapon
at port arms and tried to smile.
Years ago, in another life,
I had killed young men like him
and they had tried to kill me.
But not today. I'm tired of fighting.
So I turned away and found the general under a fan in tropical heat. I want
to explain what's happened, but the general wants me to sleep.
I've never slept with a general before. Men don't sleep with their officers
and don't take naps together in bed in the afternoon in my country.
But this is not my country.
The general pats my arm and dozes off,
serene as any aging man content
to have his grandchild sleeping near.

Beautiful Wreckage

What if I didn't shoot the old lady or the old
man in the back of the head, running away
from our patrol, or the boy in the
marketplace?
Or what if the boybut he didn't have a
grenade, and the woman in Hue didn't lie in the rain in
a mortar pit with seven Marines
just for food,
Gafrhey didn't get hit in the knee,
Ames didn't die in the river, Ski
didn't die in a medevac chopper
between Con Thien and Da Nang.
In Vietnamese, Con Thien means place of
angels. What if it really was instead of the
place of rotting sandbags, incoming heavy
artillery, rats and mud.
What if the angels were Ames and Ski, or
the lady, the man, and the boy, and they
lifted Gafrhey out of the mud and healed
his shattered knee?
What if none of it happened the way I said?
Would it all be a lie?
Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful?
Would the dead rise up and walk?




GISH JEN (1955- )

Introduction

Chinese-American writer Gish Jens story, His Own Society, is both
humorous and wise. Its wisdom is to treat with humor and tolerance
broad discrepancies between Asian and American cultural norms.
Chinese society, like Asian society in general, is rigidly hierarchical in
structure, but fairly fluid in its handling of rules and behavior. This is
exemplified by the Fathers inclination to compliment the immigration
judge with gifts (reinforcing the hierarchy) in order to win possibly
more favorable attention to his case, and by his insistence upon
treating his employees like servants, but also like family members,
rather than like contract workers (robots he calls them) who are
otherwise social-political equals.

American society is typically less hierarchical than Asian societies, but
also more rigid in its relations to rules, contracts, and agreements. The
individuals place or position within the society is apt to be more free
and mobile than in the Asian model, but his social behavior is often
proscribed within more certain limits not subject to negotiation.
Jens first-person narrator-daughter recognizes this when she suggests
that her father hire a lawyer an expert on the specifics and limits of
rules and laws to deal with the immigration issue of his employees,
and not waste his time trying to influence the judge personally.

On the other hand, there are areas of American social life that are
entirely tied to personal and group favor such as admission into a
social or country club. The Mothers desire to belong to this club is
thwarted by social forces beyond her knowledge or control forces
dealing with racial, class, and cultural prejudice and privilege. It is
clear from the narrative context that this club like many such social
organizations in America even today is all white: that is, non-
Jewish, non-African-American, non-Asian-American, etc. The
Fathers instinct to give the judge gifts to gain influence, which is
misguided and perhaps even counter-productive and dangerous in an
American legal context, would be more appropriate for the task of
trying to gain admittance into the country club, which by virtue of
being a private organization is not bound by the equal
opportunity rules and laws that are supposed to prevent public
institutions from favoring or discriminating against any individual or
group.

The title of Jens story is obviously ironic, as a society, by its very
definition and nature, is necessarily communal and social, and not
individual. Although human societies are always in some manner
frustrating of individual freedom, they offer us the best hope for
individual and collective happiness. American society, which is both
challenged and enriched by its multi-cultural make-up, offers the
world a glimpse of what a global society of the future might look like.
One thing is certain: such a society will be more enabling and
rewarding the more that we can enter into it as individuals with
tolerance, understanding, and humor.


His Own Society (1999)

When my father took over the pancake house, it was to send my little sister Mona
and me to college. We were only in junior high at the time, but my father believed
in getting a jump on things. "Those Americans always saying it." he told us. "Smart
guys thinking in advance." My mother elaborated, explaining that businesses took
bringing up, like children. They could take years to get going, she said, years.
In this case, though, we got rich right away. Al two months we were breaking
even, and at four, those same hotcakes that could barely withstand the weight of
butter and syrup were supporting our family with ease. My mother bought a station
wagon with air conditioning, my father an oversized, red vinyl recliner for'the back
room; and as time went on and the business continued to thrive, my father started
to talk about his grandfather and the village he had reigned over in Chinathings
my father had never talked about when he worked for other people. He told us
about liie bags of rice his f ami l y would give out lo i li e poor al New Year's, and about
t he people who came to be);, on t hei r hands and knees, l or his grandf at her to inter-
ci'de for the more wayward of t hei r relatives. "Like t hai (i odl' at her in (lie movie," he
would t el l us as, his f eel up, he di s t r i but ed paychecks. Sometimes an employee
would get t wo green envelopes i nst ead of one, which meant t h a t Jimmy needed a
tooth pulled, say, or t hat Tiffany' s husband was in t he clinker again.
"It's nothing, nothing," he would insist, si nki ng back i nt o his chair. "Who else is
going to t ake care of you people?"
My mother would mostly j ust sigh about it. "Your f at her t hi nks t hi s is China,"
she would say, and t hen she would go back to her mendi ng. Once in a while, t hough,
when my f at her had given away a part i cul arl y large sum, she would exclaim, out-
raged, "Rut t hi s here is t he U-S-of-A!"- -t hi s apparent l y having been what she used
to t el l immigrant st ock boys when t hey came in l at e.
She di dn' t work at t he super mar ket anymore; but she had made it to t he r nnk
of manager before she l eft , and t hi s had given her not only new words and phrases,
but new ideas about hersel f, and about America, and about what was what in gen-
eral. She had opi ni ons, now, on how downtown shoul d be x.oncd; she could pump
her own gas and check her own oil; and for all she vi sed to chi de Mona and me for
being "copycats," she herself was now i nt erest ed in espadrilles, and wallpaper, and
most recently, t he town country club.
"So join already," said Mona, (ti cki ng a f l y off her knee.
My mother enumerated t he problems as she sliced up a quar t er round of water-
melon: There was the cost. There was t he wai li ng list. There was the fact that no one
in our family played ei t her t enni s or golf.
"So what'.'" said Mona.
"It would be waste," said my mother.
"Me and Callie can swim in t he pool?'
"Plus you need t hat recommendation l et t er from a member."
"Come on," said Mona. "Annie' s mom'd writ e you a lett er in XPC."
My mother's kni f e gl i nt ed in t he earl y summer sun. I spread some more news-
paper on the picnic table,
"/'/IK you have to eat t here tv. ice a mont h. You know what t h at means." My
mother cut another, enormous slice of frui t .
"No, I don't know what t hat means," said Mona.
"It means Dad would have to wear a jacket, dummy," I said.
"Oh! Oh! Oh!" said Mona, clasping tier hand to her breast. "Oil! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!"
We all laughed: my father had no use for nice clothes, and would wear only ten-
year-old shirts, wit h grease-spotted pants, to show how l i t t l e lie cared what anyone
thought.
"Your fattier doesn' t believe in joining t he Ameri can society," said my mother.
"He wants to have hi s own society."
"So go to dinner without him." Mona shot her seeds out in long arcs over the
lawn. "Who cares what he thinks?"
Hut of course we al l di d care, and knew my mot her coul d not simply up and do
as she pleased. For in my l at he; 's mi nd, a fami l y owed i t s head a degree of l oyalt y
t ha t l ef t no room for di ssent . To embrace what he embraced was to love; and to
embrace somet hi ng Hse was to bet ray him.
l i e demanded a si mi l ai s u i t nf l oval u of hi s wi vl i ' i s, whom he t r eat ed more
like servants t han empUn ees. \'<>i in i In- heni nni uj ; , ol < mu se. In ihe beginning all
he wanted was lor them lo keep on doing what (hey used to do, and to
that end he concentrated mostly on leaving them alone. As the
months passed, though, ho expected more a/id more ol them, \ \ i t h (he
result that lor all his largesse, he began to have trouble keeping
help. The cooks and busboys complained t hat he asked them to fix
radiators and trim hedges, not only at the restaurant, but at our
house; the waitresses i hal he sent t hem on errands and made them
chauffeur him around. Our head waitress, "Gertrude,
claimed' ' that he once even asked her to scratch his back.
"It's not just the blacks don't believe in slavery," she said when she
quit. My father never quite registered her complaint, though, nor
those of the others who left, liven after lileanor (|uii, then Tiffany,
then Gerald, and Jimmy, and even his best cook, turcka Andy, for whom
he had bought new glasses, he remained mostly convinced t hat t he f aul t
l ay wi t h t hem.
"All t hey under st and is t hat assembl y line," he l ament ed. "Robots,
t hey are. They want to be robots."
There were occasions when t he clear runni ng t r ut h seemed to
eddy, when he would pinch the si nyl of his ( hai r up into little peaks
and wonder if he was doing things right. But with time lie would always
smooth the peaks back down; and when business started to slide in the
spring, he kept on like a horse in his ways.
By the summer our dishboy was overwhelmed wi t h scraping. It
wa>; no longer just the hashbrowns that people were leaving for trash,
and the service was as bad as the food. The waitresses served up
i
;
rench pancakes instead of German, apple juice instead of orange,
spill things on laps, on coals. On the fourth of July some greenhorn
sent an entire side of fries slaloming down a lady's massi/'cen-Irale.
Meanwhile in the back room, my fat her labored through articles
on the economy.
"What is housing starts:'" he pu/./.led. "What is GNP?"
Mona and I did what we could, filling in as busgirls and
bookkeepers and, one afternoon, st uffi ng the comments box t hai
hung by t he cashier's desk. That was Moria's idea. We rustled up a
variety of pens and pencils, checked boxes for an hour, smeared the
cards up wi t h coffee and grease, and waited. It took a few clays for my
father to notice that the box was full, and he didn't say anything
about it for a few days more. Finally, though, he started to complain of
fatigue; and then he began to complain that the staff was not what 11
could be. We encouraged him in thispointing out, for instance, how
many dishes got chipped but in the end all that happened was that,
for the first lime since we took over the restaurant, my father got it
into his head to fire someone. Skip, a ski nny busboy who was saving
up for a sportscar, said nothing as my father mumbled on about (he
price of dishes. My father's hands shook as he wrote out (lie
severance check; and he spent! the rest of the day napping in his chair
once il was over.
As it was going on midsummer, Skip wasn't easy lo replace. We
hung a sign in
the window and advertised in the paper, bui no one called the first
weyk, and the
person who called the second didn't show up for his interview. The
third week, my
lather phoned Skip to see if he would come back, but a friend of his
liad already
sold him a Corveite for cheap. ',
'Finally a Chinese guy named Hooker turned up. Me couldn't have
been,more than thirty, and was wearing a lightheartect seersucker
suit, but he looked as though life had him pinned: his eyes were
bloodshot and his chest sunken, and the jiuiscles of his neck seemed lo
strain wi t h the effort of holding his head up. In a'jsingle dry
breath lie told us t hnt ho had never bussed tabl es hui was willing to learn, and t hat he was
on the lain from the deport at i on aut hori ti es.
"1 do not waul to lie to you." he kepi saying, l i e had come to t he Uni ted Sl at es on a
sIndent vi sa, had run oul ol mone>, and was now in a bind. I le was l oat h l <i go bark to
Taiwan, as il happened he l ooked up at t hi s point, to be sure my father wasn' t pro-KMT-
but all lie had was a phony social securi t y card and a willingness lo absorb all blame,
should anylhi nj ; unt oward come to pass.
"I do not think, anyway, t hat it is agai nst law to hire me, only to be me," he said, smiling
faintly.
Anyone else would have examined him on thi s, but my f at her conceived of laws as
speed humps r at her than curbs. He wiped t he count er wi t h his sleeve, and t ol d Hooker to
report t he next morning.
"I will be good worker," said Hooker.
"Ciood," sairl my f at her.
" Anyt hi ng you want me to do, I will do."
My f at her nodded.
Hooker seemed to si nk i nto hi msel f for a moment. "Thank you." he said finally. "1 am
appreci at e your help. I am very, very appreci at e for everyt hi ng. " Me reached out to shake
my f at her' s hand.
My father looked at him. "Did you eat today?" he asked in Mandarin.
Hooker pulled al t he hem of his j acket .
"Sit down," said my f at her. "Please, have a seat."
My f at her di dn' t t el l mv mot her about Hooker, and my mot her di dn' t tell my f at her
about t he count ry club. She would never have applied, except t hat Mona, while over at
Annie's, hail lei it drop t hat our mot her want ed to join. Mrs. I.ardner came by the very
next day.
"Why, I'd be honored and del i ght ed to wri t e you people a l et t er, " she said. Her ski rt
billowed around her.
"Thnnk you so much." sai d my mother. "Hut i t ' s t oo much trouble for you, and also
my husband is . . . "
"Oh, i t' s .no trouble at all, no troubl e at all I tel l \ <ni . " She leaned forward so that her
chest freckles showed. "I know j ust how il is. I t ' s a secret of course, but you know, my
natural lather was Jewish. Can you see il? Just look at my skin."
"My husband," said rny mother.
"I'd be honored and delighted," said Mrs. I.ardner wi t h a l i t t l e wave of her hands.
"Just honored and delighted."
Moua was triumphant. "See, Mom," she said, wai t / i ng around the kitchen when Mrs.
I.ardner l ef t . "What did I t el l v
)|]
? 'I'm j ust honored and delighted, j ust honored and
delighted.'" She waved her hands in t he air.
"You know, the Chinese have a saying," said my mother. "To do nothing is bet t er
than lo overdo. You mean well, but yon tell me now what will happen."
'I'll t al k Dad into il." said Moua. st i l l wai t /i ng. "(>r I bet Callie can. He'll do anyt hi ng
C' al i i e says."
"I can try. anyway," I said.
"Did you he,T' what I said'
1
" sai d my mother. Mona bumped into the broom closet
door. "You' re not going to t al k amihini
1
.; uni ' vc al ready made enough trouble." She
s t a r t ed on t he dishes ui t h a cl al l ci .
Mona poked di f f i dent l y at a mop.
1 sponged off the counter. "Anyway," I ventured. "1 bet
our name'll never even come up."
"That's if we're lucky," said my mother.
"There's all these people waiting," I said.
"Good," she said. She started on a pot.
I looked over ai Mona, who was still cowering in the
broom closet. "In fact, there's some black family's been
waiting so long, they're going 10 sue," 1 said.
My mother lurried off the water. "Where'd you hear that?"
Tatty told me."
She turned ihe watci back on, started to wash a dish, then
put it back clown and shut the faucet.
"I' m sorry," said Mona.
"forget it," said my mother, "just forget it."
Booker turned out to be a model worker, whose boundless
gratitude translated
into a willingness to do anything. As he also learned quickly,
he soon knew not only
how to bus, but how to cook, and how to wait table, and how
to keep the books, fie
fixed the walk-in door so that it stayed shut, reupholstered
the lorn seats in the din
ing room, and devised a system for tracking inventory. 1 he
only stone in the rice was
that he tended to be sickly; but, reliable even in illness, he
would always send a friend
to take his place. In this way we got to know Ronald, l.ynn,
Uirk, and Cedric, all of
whom, like Booker, had problems with their legal status and
were anxious to please.
They weren't all as capable as Booker, though, wi t h the
exception of Cedric, whom
my father often hired even when Hooker was well. A round
wag of a man who called
Mona and me shou houskinny monkeyshe was a
professed non-smoker who was
nevertheless always begging drags off of other people's
cigarettes. This last habit
drove our head cook, Fernando, crazy, especially since, when
refused a hit, Cedric
would occasionally snitch one. Winking impishly at Mona and
me, he would steal up
to an ashtray, take a quick pul l , and then break out
laughing so that the smoke
came rolling out of his mouth in a great incriminatory cloud.
Fernando accused him
of stealing fresh cigarettes loo, even whole packs.

;
"Why else do you think he's weaseling around in the back
of the store all the time," he said. His lace was blotchy with
anger. "The man is a frigging thjef."
Other members of the s t af f supported him in this
contention and joined in on an "Operation Identification,"
which involved numbering and initialing their cigarettes-even
though what they seemed to fear for wasn't so much their
cigarettes as their jobs. Then one of the cooks quit; and
rather than promote someone, my fattier hired Cedric for the
position. Rumors Hew that he was taking only half the
normal salary, that Alex had been pressured to resign, and that
my father was looking for a position with which to placate
Booker, who had been bypassed because of his health.
The result was thai Fernando categorically refused to work
with Cedric.
"The only way I'll cook wi t h that piece of slime," he said,
shaking his huge tattooed fist, "is if it's his ass frying on the
grill."
My father cajoled and cajoled, to no avail, and in the end
was simply forced to put them on different schedules.
The next week Fernando got caught stealing a carton of
minute steaks. My father would not t el l even Mona and me
how he knew to be standing by t he back door when
Fernando was on his way out, bul everyone suspected
Booker. liveryone but Fernando, that is, who was sine Cedric
had been the tip-oil'. My father held a staff
mo.elinj; in which he t r i ed in reassure everyone
1
t h ; i t Ale.x had l ef t on his
own, and dial lie had no i nt ent i on of f i r i n g amui i e. Hut t hough he was
can.'lul not lo ment i on Fernando, e\
r
eryone \vas so ama/ ed di al lie was
bei ii ); al l owed to s t ay t h a t Fernando was incensed noneth<

less.
"Don'1 you al l be p u l l i n g your bug eyes on me," he sai d, "lie' s t he
f r i ggi ng crook." l i e grabbed Cedri c by t h e col l ar.
Cedri c raised an eyebrow. "Cook, you mean, " lie sai d.
Al t hi s Fernando punched Cedri c in t he mo ut h; a n d t he words he had
j us t ut t er ed not wi t hst andi ng, my f at her fired hi m on t he spoi.
Wi t h ever yt hi ng t ha i was happeni ng, Mona and I were ready lo be
get t i ng out of t he restaurant. It was almost lime: t he days were st i l l stuffy
with summer, but our window shade had st art ed (l appi ng in t he eveni ng
as if geari ng up to go out. That year t he brce/.es were f ul l of sal t , as t hey
sometimes were when t hey came in from die f ast , and t hey blew anchors
and docks through my mi nd like so many tumble-weeds, Ti l l i ng my dreams
wi t h wherri es and l obst ers and grainy-faced men who squinted, day in
and day out, at t he sky.
It was t i me for a change, you coul d feel i t ; and yet t he pancake
house was t he same as ever. The day before si hool st arter! my f a t h e r
came home wi t h bad news.
"Fernando called police," he said, wiping his hand on his pant leg.
My mot her nat ur al l y wauled to know what police; and so wi t h much
coughing and hawing, the long story began, the latest i nst all ment of which
had the police calling immigration, and i mmi grat i on sending an
investigator. My mother sat st i ff as whalebone as my l at her described
how t he man summari l y refused l unch on t he house and How my f at her
had admi t t ed, under pressure, di al he knew there were "things" about
his workers.
"So now what happens'
1
'
My fat her di dn' t know. "Hooker and Cedric- went wi t h hi m to the
jail," lie said. "But me, here 1 am." He laughed uncomfortably.
The next day my f at her posted bail for "his boys" and wai t ed
apprehensively for something to happen. The day af t er t hat he waited
again, and t he day after t hat he cal l ed our neighbor's law st udent son,
who suggested my father call the immigrat i on department under an alias.
My f at her t ook hi s advice; and it was thus t hat he discovered l hat Hooker
was ri ght : it was i l l egal f o r al i ens to work, but it wasn't to hi re them.
In t he happy i nt erval t hat ensued, my f at her apologi/.ecl to my
mother, who in turn confessed about the country cl ub, for which my f at her
had no choice but to forgive her. Then he t ur ned his at t ent i on back to "his
boys."
My mother dicln'l see t hat t here was anyt hi ng to do.
"I like to t al ki ng to t he judge," said my fat her.
"This is not China," said my mother.
"I' m oulv t al ki ng to him. I' m not give hi m money unless he want s it."
' You' re going to land up in jail."
"So what else I shoul d do?" My f at h e r t hr ew up his hands. "Those are
my boys."
"Your boys!" exploded my mot her. "What about your famil y? What
about your wife''"'
My l a t h e r l n < > k a l o n g s i p of l ea. " > o u know, " he s ai d f i n al l y. "In
t he war my f a t h e r sent our cook lo di e S' l l di i ' i
1
' ; lo use. l i e al"- av-, s ai d il
di e pr ovi nce comes before t h e l i mn, di e t o \ \ n comes bef or e t h e f a mi l y . "
"A restaurant is not a town," said my mother.
My l at her sipped at Ins tea again. '">ou know, uhen 1 lirst come to Il i e
Uni t ed States, I also had to hide-and-seek wi t h those deport at i on guys.
II' people di d not helping me, I'm no! here today."
My mother scruiini/.ed her hem.
After a minute I vol unt eered t hat before seeing a .judge, he might t r y a
lawyer.
He turned. "Since'when di d you become so at rai d li ke your mother?"
I st art ed to say t hat it wasn't a mai l er of fear, but he cut me off.
"What 1 need today," lie said, "is a son." '
My l at her and I spent t he bet t er pai l of t he next day st andi ng in
lines at t he immigration office. He did not get 10 speak to a judge, but wi t h
much persistence he managed to speak to a judge' s clerk, who t ri ed to
persuade hi m t hat ; it was not her place to extend him advice. My fatti er,
(hough, siiamele.ssly plied her, wi t h compliments and offers of Tree
pancakes unt i l she fi nal l y conceded t hai she personally doubted anything
would happen to ei t her L'edric or Hooker.
"Especially if t hey' re 'needed workers,' " she said, rubbi ng at t he red
marks her glasses l eft on her nose. She yawned. "Have yo u t hought about
sponsoring t hem to become permanent residents?"
Could he do t hat ? My fat t i er uas overjoyed. And uhal il he saw to it
right away? Would she perhaps put in a good word wi t h t he judge?
She yawned again, her nostrils Daring. "Don't worry," she said. "They'll
get a fair hearing."
My father returned jubilant. Hooker and C'edric hailed him as (heir
savior, their Buddha incarnate. He was like a f at her to them, t hey said;
and laughing and clapping, they made hi m tell the story over and over,
sorting over the details like jewels. And how old was t he assistant judge?
And what did she say?
That evening my father l i pped t he paperboy a dol lar and bought a pot
of mums for my mother, who suffered t hem to be placed on t he dining
room table. The next night he took us al l out to dinner. Then on
Saturday' , Mona found a l et t er on my father's chair at t he restaurant.
Dear Mr. Chang,
You are t he grat boss. But , we do not like to t ri al , so will riming
away now. Plese to excus us. People sayi ng t he law in America is
fears li ke dragon. Here is onl y $140. We hope some day we can pay
back t he rest bale. You will get t i ng i nt rest , as you di servi ng, so
gr at a boss y o u are. Thank you for every thing. In next life you \ si l l
be burn in rich f ami l y, wi t h no more pancaks.
Yours
truley,
Hooker +
Cedric
In t he weeks t hai followed my l at her went to t he pancake house for
crises, but otherwise hung around our house, f i ddl i ng i dl y wi t h t he sump
pump and boil er in an eff ort , he said, to get ready for wi nt er. It was as
t hough he had gone i nt o ret i rement, except t hat inst ead of moving soul h,
lie had moved to t he basement. He even took to showering my mot her willi
l i t t l e at t enti ons, and lo calling her "old girl," and when we finally heard
t hat t he club had entertained all the applications il could for the year, he
was so sympat het i c t hat lie seemed more disappointed t han my mother.

BERNARD MALAMUD (1914-1986)

Introduction

For most of his fiction, Bernard Malamud took as his subject
the life of Jews in America. Malamud was born and raised in
New York City, which may well claim to be the center of
American Jewish culture, and which is the setting for much of
Malamuds fiction, including The Magic Barrel.

The Jews are an anomaly in Western history and culture.
Their religious and philosophical tradition, from which
Christianity partially arose (Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, if an
unusual one), is central to the Western tradition. But as an
ethnic group, they were marginalized by the very success of
Christianity as a universal religion that grew to include non-
Jews, and which the Jews as a group largely repudiated. In
addition, soon after the time of Christ, the Jews who rebelled
continually against the control of their country by the Roman
empire were forced to leave their homeland by an angry
Roman emperor who decided to end their rebellion once and
for all by forcing the entire population into permanent exile.

For nearly two thousand years (until the formation of Israel
after World War II), the Jews lived without a homeland, in
exile within other cultural, ethnic, and national community
groups. Even today, far more Jews live in other countries than
in Israel; although, in this sense, they are similar to many other
ethnic groups in the mobile modern world (there are far more
Irish-Americans, for instance, than there are inhabitants of
Ireland). During this two thousand year history of exile, the
Jews living mostly in Christian and Muslim countries were
often actively discriminated against. But they stubbornly and
successfully clung to their religious beliefs and rituals, ethnic
identities, and cultural practices.

Malamuds story, The Magic Barrel, is concerned with one
such Jewish cultural practice the use of a community
matchmaker to arrange marriages a practice that is
decidedly out of place in a modern American context. The
matchmaker, Salzman, and the religious student, Finkle, are
both stereotypical Jewish figures, representing different
aspects of the Jewish cultural tradition. Finkle is sensitive and
unworldly, serious and introspective, earnest and painfully
self-conscious. In his studies, and by his nature, he is
concerned with morality and tradition. Salzman, by contrast, is
a typical salesman (if seemingly not a very successful one).
He is crafty and demonstrative, a worldly man and an
inveterate purveyor of folk wisdom. As a salesman, he is
obviously not to be trusted and yet the entire story hinges on
the suspicion that he is more wise in his clever evasions and
obvious machinations than the earnest young Rabbinical
student with all of his intellectual knowledge and spiritual
profundity.

There is some evidence in the story that Salzman is a figure
with magical and mystical qualities and powers, and many
critics have expounded on this possibility. But there is no
reason to believe that he is anything other than profoundly
versed in the mysteries of the human heart, and in the vagaries
and inconsistencies of human desire. For all of its strange
properties, the story is in some essential sense a simple (if
unusual) love story, with a happy ending. When the unworldly
but prematurely jaded religious student looks into the eyes
filled with desperate innocence of the all-too worldly
matchmakers daughter, we are reminded that love is no less
necessary for human happiness than it is an inexplicable
mystery for the human intellect.


The Magic Barrel (1958)

Not long ago there lived in uptown New York, in a small
almost meager room, though crowded with books, Leo Finkle,
a rabbinical student in the Yeshivah University. Finkle, after
six years of study, was to be ordained in June and had been
advised by an acquaintance that he might find it easier to win
himself a congregation if he were married. Since he had no
present prospects of marriage, after two tormented days of
turning it over in his mind, he called in Pinye Salzman, a
marriage broker whose two line advertisement he had read in
the Forward.
The matchmaker appeared one night out of the dark fourth-
floor hallway of the graystone rooming house where Finkle
lived, grasping a black, strapped portfolio that had been worn
thin with use. Salzman, who had been long in the business, was
of slight but dignified build, wearing an old hat, and an
overcoat too short and tight for him. He smelled frankly of fish,
which he loved to eat, and although he was missing a few
teeth, his presence was not displeasing, because of an amiable
manner curiously contrasted with mournful eyes. His voice,
his lips, his wisp of beard, his bony fingers were animated, but
give him a moment of repose and his mild blue eyes revealed
a depth of sadness, a characteristic that put Leo a little at ease
although the situation, for him, was inherently tense.
He at once informed Salzman why he had asked him to come,
explaining that his home was in Cleveland, and that but for his
parents, who had married comparatively late in life, he was
alone in the world. He had for six years devoted himself almost
entirely to his studies, as a result of which, understandably, he
had found himself without time for a social life and the
company of young women. Therefore he thought it the better
part of trial and errorof embarrassing fumblingto call in an
experienced person to advise him on these matters. He
remarked in passing that the function of the marriage broker
was ancient and honorable, highly approved in the jewish
community, because it made practical the necessary without
hindering joy. Moreover, his own parents had been brought
together by a matchmaker. They had made, if not a financially
profitable marriagesince neither had possessed any worldly
goods to speak ofat least a successful one in the sense of
their everlasting devotion to each other. Salzman listened in
embarrassed surprise, sensing a sort of apology. Later,
however, he experienced a glow of pride in his work, an
emotion that had left him years ago, and he heartily approved
of Finkle.
The two went to their business. Leo had led Salzman to the
only clear place in the room, a table near a window that
overlooked the lamp-lit city. He seated himself at the
matchmakers side but facing him, attempting by an act of will
to suppress the unpleasant tickle in his throat. Salzman eagerly
unstrapped his portfolio and removed a loose rubber band from
a thin packet of much-handled cards. As he flipped through
them, a gesture and sound that physically hurt Leo, the student
pretended not to see and gazed steadfastly out the window.
Although it was still February, winter was on its last legs, signs
of which he had for the first time in years begun to notice. He
now observed the round white moon, moving high in the sky
through a cloud menagerie, and watched with half-open mouth
as it penetrated a huge hen, and dropped out of her like an egg
laying itself. Salzman, though pretending through eyeglasses
he had just slipped on, to be engaged in scanning the writing on
the cards, stole occasional glances at the young mans
distinguished face, noting with pleasure the long, severe
scholars nose, brown eyes heavy with learning, sensitive yet
ascetic lips, and a certain almost hollow quality of the dark
cheeks. He gazed around at shelves upon shelves of books and
let out a soft, contented sigh.
When Leos eyes fell upon the cards, he counted six spread out
in Salzmans hand.
So few? he asked in disappointment.
You wouldnt believe me how much cards I got in my office,
Salzman replied. The drawers are already filled to the top, so
I keep them now in a barrel, but is every girl good for a new
rabbi?
Leo blushed at this, regretting all he had revealed of himself in
curriculum vitae he had sent to Salzman. He had thought it best
to acquaint him with his strict standards and specifications, but
in having done so, felt he had told the marriage broker more
than was absolutely necessary.
He hesitantly inquired, Do you keep photographs of your
clients on file?
First comes family, amount of dowry, also what kind
promises, Salzman replied, unbuttoning his tight coat and
settling himself in the chair. After comes pictures, rabbi.
Call me Mr. Finkle. Im not yet a rabbi.
Salzman said he would, but instead called him doctor, which he
changed to rabbi when Leo was not listening too attentively.
Salzman adjusted his horn-rimmed spectacles, gently cleared
his throat and read in an eager voice the contents of the top
card:
Sohpie P. Twenty four years. Widow one year. No children.
Educated high school and two years college. Also real estate.
On the mothers side comes teachers, also one actor. Well
known on Second Avenue.
Leo gazed up in surprise. Did you say a widow?
A widow dont mean spoiled, rabbi. She lived with her
husband maybe four months. He was a sick boy she made a
mistake to marry him.
Marrying a widow has never entered my mind.
This is because you have no experience. A widow, especially
if she is young and healthy like this girl, is a wonderful person
to marry. She will be thankful to you the rest of her life.
Believe me, if I was looking now for a bride, I would marry a
widow.
Leo reflected, then shook his head.
Salzman hunched his shoulders in an almost imperceptible
gesture of disappointment. He placed the card down on the
wooden table and began to read another:
Lily H. High school teacher. Regular. Not a substitute. Has
savings and new Dodge car. Lived in Paris one year. Father is
successful dentist thirty-five years. Interested in professional
men. Well Americanized family. Wonderful opportunity.
I knew her personally, said Salzman. I wish you could see
this girl. She is a doll. Also very intelligent. All day you could
talk to her about books and theater and what not. She also
knows current events.
I dont believe you mentioned her age?
Her age? Salzman said, raising his brows. Her age is thirty-
two years.
Leo said after a while, Im afraid that seems a little too old.
Salzman let out a laugh. So how old are you, rabbi?
Twenty-seven.
So what is the difference, tell me, between twenty-seven and
thirty-two? My own wife is seven years older than me. So what
did I suffer? Nothing. If Rothschilds a daughter wants to
marry you, would you say on account her age, no?
Yes, Leo said dryly.
Salzman shook off the no in the yes. Five years dont mean a
thing. I give you my word that when you will live with her for
one week you will forget her age. What does it mean five
yearsthat she lived more and knows more than somebody
who is younger? On this girl, God bless her, years are not
wasted. Each one that it comes makes better the bargain.
What subject does she teach in high school?
Languages. If you heard the way she speaks French, you will
think it is music. I am in the business twenty-five, and I
recommend her with my whole heart. Believe me, I know what
Im talking rabbi.
Whats on the next card? Leo said abruptly.
Salzman reluctantly turned up the third card;
Ruth K. Nineteen years. Honor student. Father offers thirteen
thousand cash to the right bridegroom. He is a medical doctor.
Stomach specialist with marvelous practice. Brother-in-law
owns own garment business. Particular people.
Salzman looked as if he had read his trump card.
Did you say nineteen? Leo asked with interest.
On the dot.
Is she attractive? He blushed, pretty?
Salzman kissed his finger tips. A little doll. On this I give you
my word. Let me call the father tonight and you will see what
means pretty.
But Leo was troubled. Youre sure shes that young?
This I am positive. The father will show you the birth
certificate.
Are you positive there isnt something wrong with her? Leo
insisted.
Who says there is wrong?
I dont understand why an American girl her age should go to
a marriage broker.
A smile spread over Salzmans face.
So for the same reason you went, she comes.
Leo flushed. I am pressed for time.
Salzman, realizing he had been tactless, quickly explained.
The father came, not her. He wants she should have the best,
so he looks around himself. When we will locate the right boy
he will introduce him and encourage. This makes a better
marriage than if a young girl without experience takes for
herself. I dont have to tell you this.
But dont you think this young girl believes in love? Leo
spoke uneasily.
Salzman was about to guffaw but caught himself and said
soberly, Love comes with the right person, not before.
Leo parted dry lips but did not speak. Noticing that Salzman
had snatched a glance at the next card, he cleverly asked,
How is her health?
Perfect, Salzman said, breathing with difficulty. Of course,
she is a little lame on her right foot from an auto accident that
it happened to her when she was twelve years, but nobody
notices on account she is so brilliant and also beautiful.
Leo got up heavily and went to the window. He felt curiously
bitter and upbraided himself for having called in the marriage
broker. Finally, he shook his head.
Why not? Salzman persisted, the pitch of his voice rising.
Because I detest stomach specialists.
So what do you care what is his business? After you marry her
do you need him? Who says he must come every Friday night
in your house?
Ashamed of the way the talk was going, Leo dismissed
Salzman, who went home with heavy, melancholy eyes.
Though he had felt only relief at the marriage brokers
departure, Leo was in low spirits the next day. He explained it
as arising from Salzmans failure to produce a suitable bride
for him. He did not care for his type of clientele. But when Leo
found himself hesitating whether to seek out another
matchmaker, one more polished than Pinye, he wondered if it
could behis protestations to the contrary, and although he
honored his father and motherthat he did not, in essence,
care for the matchmaking institution? This thought he quickly
put out of his mind yet found himself still upset. All day he ran
around in the woodsmissed an important appointment, forgot
to give out his laundry, walked out of a Broadway cafeteria
without paying and had to run back with the ticket in his hand;
had even not recognized his landlady in the street when she
passed with a friend and courteously called out, A good
evening to you, Doctor Finkle. By nightfall, however, he had
regained sufficient calm to sink his nose into a book and there
found peace from his thoughts.
Almost at once there came a knock on the door. Before Leo
could say enter, Salzman, commercial cupid, was standing in
the room. His face was gray and meager, his expression
hungry, and he looked as if he would expire on his feet. Yet
the marriage broker managed, by some trick of the muscles, to
display a broad smile.
So good evening. I am invited?
Leo nodded, disturbed to see him again, yet unwilling to ask
the man to leave.
Beaming still, Salzman laid his portfolio on the table, Rabbi, I
got for you tonight good news.
Ive asked you not to call me rabbi. Im still a student.
Your worries are finished. I have for you a first-class bride.
Leave me in peace concerning this subject. Leo pretended
lack of interest.
The world will dance at your wedding.
Please, Mr. Salzman, no more.
But first must come back my strength, Salzman said weakly.
He fumbled with the portfolio straps and took out of the leather
case an oily paper bag from which he extracted a hard, seeded
roll and a small, smoked white fish. With a quick motion of his
hand he stripped the fish out of its skin and began ravenously
to chew. All day in a rush, he muttered.
Leo watched him eat.
A sliced tomato you have maybe? Salzman hesitantly
inquired.
No.
The marriage broker shut his eyes and ate. When he had
finished he carefully cleaned up the crumbs and rolled up the
remains of the fish, in the paper bag. His spectacled eyes
roamed the room until he discovered, amid some piles of
books, a one-burner gas stove. Lifting his hat he humbly asked,
A glass tea you got, rabbi?
Conscience-stricken, Leo rose and brewed the tea. He served
it with a chunk of lemon and two cubes of lump sugar,
delighting Salzman.
After he had drunk his tea, Salzmans strength and good spirits
were restored.
So tell me, rabbi, he said amiably, you considered some
more the three clients I mentioned yesterday?
There was no need to consider.
Why not?
None of them suits me.
What then suits you?
Leo let it pass because he could give only a confused answer.
Without waiting for a reply, Salzman asked, You remember
this girl I talked to youthe high school teacher?
Age thirty-two?
But, surprisingly, Salzmans face lit in a smile. Age twenty-
nine.
Leo shot him a look. Reduced from thirty-two?
A mistake, Salzman avowed. I talked today with the dentist.
He took me to his safety deposit box and showed me the birth
certificate. She was twenty-nine years last August. They made
her a party in the mountains where she went for her vacation.
When her father spoke to me the first time I forgot to write the
age and I told you thirty-two, but now I remember this was a
different client, a widow.
The same one you told me about? I thought she was twenty-
four?
A different. Am I responsible that the world is filled with
widows?
No, but Im not interested in them, nor for that matter, in
school teachers.
Salzman pulled his clasped hands to his breast. Looking at the
ceiling he devoutly exclaimed, Yiddishe kinder, what can I
say to somebody that he is not interested in high school
teachers? So what then you are interested?
Leo flushed but controlled himself.
In what else will you be interested, Salzman went on, if you
not interested in this fine girl that speaks four languages and
has personally in the bank ten thousand dollars? Also her
father guarantees further twelve thousand. Also she has a new
car, wonderful clothes, talks on all subjects, and she will give
you a first-class home and children. How near do we come in
our life to paradise?
If shes so wonderful, why hasnt she married ten years ago?
Why? said Salzman with a heavy laugh. Why? Because she
is partikiler. This is why. She wants the best.
Leo was silent, amused at how he had entangled himself. But
Salzman had aroused his interest in Lily H., and he began
seriously to consider calling on her. When the marriage broker
observed how intently Leos mind was at work on the facts he
had supplied, he felt certain they would soon come to an
agreement.
Late Saturday afternoon, conscious of Salzman, Leo Finkle
walked with Lily Hirschorn along Riverside Drive. He walked
briskly and erectly, wearing with distinction the black fedora
he had that morning taken with trepidation out of the dusty hat
box on his closet shelf, and the heavy black Saturday coat he
had thoroughly whisked clean. Leo also owned a walking stick,
a present from a distant relative, but quickly put temptation
aside and did not use it. Lily, petite and not unpretty, had on
something signifying the approach of spring. She was au
courant, animatedly, with all sorts of subjects, and he weighed
her words and found her surprisingly soundscore another for
Salzman, whom he uneasily sensed to be somewhere around,
hiding perhaps high in a tree along the street, flashing the lady
signals with a pocket mirror; or perhaps a cloven-hoofed Pan,
piping nuptial ditties as he danced his invisible way before
them, strewing wild buds on the walk and purple grapes in their
path, symbolizing fruit of a union, though there was of course
still none.
Lily startled Leo by remarking, I was thinking of Mr.
Salzman, a curious figure wouldnt you say?
Not certain what to answer, he nodded.
She bravely went on, blushing, I for one am grateful for his
introducing us. Arent you?
He courteously replied, I am.
I mean, she said with a little laughand it was all in good
taste, or at least gave the effect of being not in baddo you
mind that we came together so?
He was not displeased with her honesty, recognizing that she
meant to set the relationship aright, and understanding that it
took a certain amount of experience in life, and courage, to
want to do it quite that way. One had to have some sort of past
to make that kind of beginning.
He said that he did not mind. Salzmans function was
traditional and honorablevaluable for what it might achieve,
which, he pointed out, was frequently nothing.
Lily agreed with a sigh. They walked on for a while and she
said after a long silence, again with a nervous laugh, would
you mind if I asked you something a little bit personal?
Frankly, I find the subject fascinating. Although Leo
shrugged, she went on half embarrassedly, How was it that
you came to your calling? I mean was it a sudden passionate
inspiration?
Leo, after a time, slowly replied, I was always interested in
the Law.
You saw revealed in it the presence of the Highest?
He nodded and changed the subject. I understand that you
spent a little time in Paris, Miss Hirschorn?
Oh, did Mr. Salzman tell you, Rabbi Finkle? Leo winced but
she went on, It was ages ago and almost forgotten. I
remember I had to return for my sisters wedding.
And Lily would not be put off. When, she asked in a tremble
voice, did you become enamored of God?
He stared at her. Then it came to him that she was talking not
about Leo Finkle, but of a total stranger, some mystical figure,
perhaps even passionate prophet that Salzman had dreamed up
for herno relation to the living or dead. Leo trembled with
rage and weakness. The trickster had obviously sold her a bill
of goods, just as he had him, whod expected to become
acquainted with a young lady of twenty-nine, only to behold,
the moment he laid eyes upon her strained and anxious face, a
woman past thirty-five and aging rapidly. Only his self control
had kept him this long in her presence.
I am not, he said gravely, a talented religious person, and
in seeking words to go on, found himself possessed by shame
and fear. I think, he said in a strained manner, that I came to
God not because I loved Him, but because I did not.
This confession he spoke harshly, because its unexpectedness
shook him.
Lily wilted. Leo saw a profusion of loaves of bread go flying
like ducks high over his head, not unlike the winged loaves by
which he had counted himself to sleep last night. Mercifully,
then, it snowed, which he would not put past Salzmans
machinations.
He was infuriated with the marriage broker and swore he
would throw him out of the room the minute he reappeared.
But Salzman did not come that night, and when Leos anger
had subsided, an unaccountable despair grew in its place. At
first he thought this was caused by his disappointment in Lily,
but before long it became evident that he had involved himself
with Salzman without a true knowledge of his own intent. He
gradually realizedwith an emptiness that seized him with six
handsthat he had called in the broker to find him a bride
because he was incapable of doing it himself. This terrifying
insight he had derived as a result of his meeting and
conversation with Lily Hirschorn. Her probing questions had
somehow irritated him into revealingto himself more than
herthe true nature of his relationship to God, and from that it
had come upon him, with shocking force, that apart from his
parents, he had never loved anyone. Or perhaps it went the
other way, that he did not love God so well as he might,
because he had not loved man. It seemed to Leo that his whole
life stood starkly revealed and he saw himself for the first time
as he truly wasunloved and loveless. This bitter but
somehow not fully unexpected revelation brought him to a
point of panic, controlled only by extraordinary effort. He
covered his face with his hands and cried.
The week that followed was the worst of his life. He did not
eat and lost weight. His beard darkened and grew ragged. He
stopped attending seminars and almost never opened a book.
He seriously considered leaving the Yeshivah, although he was
deeply troubled at the thought of the loss of all his years of
studysaw them like pages torn from a book, strewn over the
cityand at the devastating effect of this decision upon his
parents. But he had lived without knowledge of himself, and
never in the Five Books and all the Commentariesmea
culpahad the truth been revealed to him. He did not know
where to turn, and in all this desolating loneliness there was no
to whom, although he often thought of Lily but not once could
bring himself to go downstairs and make the call. He became
touchy and irritable, especially with his landlady, who asked
him all manner of personal questions; on the other hand,
sensing his own disagreeableness, he waylaid her on the stairs
and apologized abjectly, until mortified, she ran from him. Out
of this, however, he drew the consolation that he was a Jew
and that a Jew suffered. But gradually, as the long and terrible
week drew to a close, he regained his composure and some
idea of purpose in life to go on as planned.
Although he was imperfect, the ideal was not. As for his quest
of a bride, the thought of continuing afflicted him with anxiety
and heartburn, yet perhaps with this new knowledge of himself
he would be more successful than in the past. Perhaps love
would now come to him and a bride to that love. And for this
sanctified seeking who needed a Salzman?
The marriage broker, a skeleton with haunted eyes, returned
that very night. He looked, withal, the picture of frustrated
expectancyas if he had steadfastly waited the week at Miss
Lily Hirschorns side for a telephone call that never came.
Casually coughing, Salzman came immediately to the point:
So how did you like her?
Leos anger rose and he could not refrain from chiding the
matchmaker: Why did you lie to me, Salzman?
Salzmans pale face went dead white, the world had snowed
on him.
Did you not state that she was twenty-nine? Leo insisted.
I give you my word
She was thirty-five, if a day. At least thirty-five.
Of this dont be too sure. Her father told me
Never mind. The worst of it was that you lied to her.
How did I lie to her, tell me?
You told her things about me that werent true. You made me
out to be more, consequently less than I am. She had in mind a
totally different person, a sort of semimystical Wonder Rabbi.
All I said, you was a religious man.
I can imagine.
Salzman sighed. This is my weakness that I have, he
confessed. My wife says to me I shouldnt be a salesman, but
when I have two fine people that they would be wonderful to
be married, I am so happy that I talk too much. He smiled
wanly. This is why Salzman is a poor man.
Leos anger left him. Well, Salzman, Im afraid thats all.
The marriage broker fastened hungry eyes on him.
You dont want any more a bride?
I do, said Leo, but I have decided to seek her in a different
way. I am no longer interested in an arranged marriage. To be
frank, I now admit the necessity of premarital love. That is, I
want to be in love with the one I marry.
Love? said Salzman, astounded. After a moment he
remarked, For us, our love is our life, not for the ladies. In the
ghetto they
I know, I know, said Leo. Ive thought of it often. Love, I
have said to myself, should be a by-product of living and
worship rather than its own end. Yet for myself I find it
necessary to establish the level of my need and fulfill it.
Salzman shrugged but answered, Listen, rabbi, if you want
love, this I can find for you also. I have such beautiful clients
that you will love them the minute your eyes will see them.
Leo smiled unhappily. Im afraid you dont understand.
But Salzman hastily unstrapped his portfolio and withdrew a
manila packet from it.
Pictures, he said, quickly laying the envelope on the table.
Leo called after him to take the pictures away, but as if on the
wings of the wind, Salzman had disappeared.
March came. Leo had returned to his regular routine. Although
he felt not quite himself yetlacked energyhe was making
plans for a more active social life. Of course it would cost
something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when
there were no corners left he would make circles rounder. All
the while Salzmans pictures had lain on the table, gathering
dust. Occasionally as Leo sat studying or enjoying a cup of tea,
his eyes fell on the manila envelop, but he never opened it.
The days went by and no social life to speak of developed with
a member of the opposite sexit was difficult, given the
circumstances of his situation. One morning Leo toiled up the
stairs to his room and stared out the window at the city.
Although the day was bright his view of it was dark. For some
time he watched the people in the street below hurrying along
and then turned with a heavy heart to his little room. On the
table was the packet. With a sudden relentless gesture he tore
it open. For a half-hour he stood by the table in a state of
excitement, examining the photographs of the ladies Salzman
had included. Finally, with a deep sigh he put them down.
There were six, of varying degrees of attractiveness, but look
at them long enough and they all became Lily Hirschorn: all
past their prime, all starved behind bright smile, not a true
personality in the lot. Life, despite their frantic yoohooings,
had passed them by; they were pictures in a brief case that
stank of fish. After a while, however, as Leo attempted to
return the photographs into the envelope, he found in it
another, a snapshot of the type taken by a machine for a
quarter. He gazed at it a moment and let out a cry.
Her face deeply moved him. Why, he could at first not say. It
gave him the impression of youthspring flowers, yet agea
sense of having been used to the bone, wasted; this came from
the eyes which were hauntingly familiar, yet absolutely
strange. He had a vivid impression that he had seen her before,
but try as he might he could not place her although he could
almost recall her name, as if he had read it in her own
handwriting. No, this couldnt be; he would have remembered
her. It was not, he affirmed, that she had an extraordinary
beautyno, though her face was attractive enough; it was that
something about her moved him. Feature for feature, even
some of the ladies of the photographs could do better; but she
leaped forth to his hearthad lived or wanted tomore than
just wanted, perhaps regretted how she had livedhad
somehow deeply suffered. It could be seen in the depths of
those reluctant eyes, and from the way the light enclosed and
shone from her, and within her, opening realms of possibility:
this was her own. Her he desired. His head ached and eyes
narrowed with the intensity of his gazing, then as if an obscure
fog had blown up in the mind, he experienced fear of her and
was aware that he had received an impression, somehow, of
evil. He shuddered saying softly, it is thus with us all. Leo
brewed some tea in a small pot and sat sipping it without sugar,
to calm himself. But before he had finished drinking, again
with excitement he examined the face and found it good: good
for Leo Finkle. Only such a one could understand him and help
him seek whatever he was seeking. She might perhap, love
him. How she had happened to be among the discards in
Salzmans barrel he could never guess, but he knew he must
urgently go find her.
Leo rushed downstairs, grabbed up the Bronx telephone book,
and searched for Salzmans home address. He was not listed,
nor was his office. Neither was he in the Manhattan book. But
Leo remembered having written down the address on a slip of
paper after he had read Salzmans advertisement in the
personal column of the Forward. He ran up to his room and
tore through his papers, without luck. It was exasperating. Just
when he needed the matchmaker he was nowhere to be found.
Fortunately Leo remembered to look in his wallet. There on a
card he found his name written and a Bronx address. No phone
number was listed, the reasonLeo now recalledhe had
originally communicated with Salzman by letter. He got on his
coat, put a hat on over his skullcap and hurried to the subway
station. All the way to the far end of the Bronx he sat on the
edge of his seat. He was more than once tempted to take out
the picture and see if the girls face was as he remembered it,
but he refrained, allowing the snapshot to remain in his inside
coat pocket, content to have her so close. When the train
pulled into the station he was waiting at the door and bolted
out. He quickly located the street Salzman had advertised.
The building he sought was less than a block from the subway,
but it was not an office building, nor even a loft, nor a store in
which one could rent office space. It was a very old tenement
house. Leo found Salzmans name in pencil on a soiled tag
under the bell and climbed three dark flights to his apartment.
When he knocked, the door was opened by a thin, asthmatic,
gray-haired woman, in felt slippers.
Yes? she said, expecting nothing. She listened without
listening. He could have sworn he had seen her, too, before but
knew it was an illusion.
Salzmandoes he live here? Pinye Salzman, he said, the
matchmaker?
She stared at him a long minute. Of course.
He felt embarrassed. Is he in?
No. Her mouth, though left open, offered nothing more.
The matter is urgent. Can you tell me where his office is?
In the air. She pointed upward.
You mean he has no office? Leo asked.
In his socks.
He peered into the apartment. It was sunless and dingy, one
large room divided by a half-open curtain, beyond which he
could see a sagging metal bed. The near side of a room was
crowded with rickety chairs, old bureaus, a three-legged table,
racks of cooking utensils, and all the apparatus of a kitchen.
But there was no sign of Salzman or his magic barrel, probably
also a figment of the imagination. An odor of frying fish made
Leo weak to the knees.
Where is he? he insisted. Ive got to see your husband.
At length she answered, So who knows where he is? Every
time he thinks a new thought he runs to a different place. Go
home, he will find you.
Tell him Leo Finkle.
She gave no sign she had heard.
He walked downstairs, depressed.
But Salzman, breathless, stood waiting at his door.
Leo was astounded and overjoyed. How did you get here
before me?
I rushed.
Come inside.
They entered. Leo fixed tea, and a sardine sandwich for
Salzman. As they were drinking he reached behind him for the
packet of pictures and handed them to the marriage broker.
Salzman put down his glass and said expectantly, You found
somebody you like?
Not among these.
The marriage broker turned away.
Here is the one I want. Leo held forth the snapshot.
Salzman slipped on his glasses and took the picture into his
trembling hand. He turned ghastly and let out a groan.
Whats the matter? cried Leo.
Excuse me. Was an accident this picture. She isnt for you.
Salzman frantically shoved the manila packet into his portfolio.
He thrust the snapshot into his pocket and fled down the stairs.
Leo, after momentary paralysis, gave chase and cornered the
marriage broker in the vestibule. The landlady made hysterical
outcries but neither of them listened.
Give me back the picture, Salzman.
No. The pain in his eyes was terrible.
Tell me who she is then.
This I cant tell you. Excuse me.
He made to depart, but Leo, forgetting himself, seized the
matchmaker by his tight coat and shook him frenziedly.
Please, sighed Salzman. Please.
Leo ashamedly let him go. Tell me who she is, he begged.
Its very important for me to know.
She is not for you. She is a wild onewild, without shame.
This is not a bride for a rabbi.
What do you mean wild?
Like an animal. Like a dog. For her to be poor was a sin. This
is why to me she is dead now.
In Gods name, what do you mean?
Her I cant introduce to you, Salzman cried.
Why are you so excited?
Why, he asks, Salzman said, bursting into tears. This is my
baby, my Stella, she should burn in hell.
Leo hurried up to bed and hid under the covers. Under the
covers he thought his life through. Although he soon fell asleep
he could not sleep her out of his mind. He woke, beating his
breast. Though he prayed to be rid of her, his prayers went
unanswered. Through days of torment he endlessly struggled
not to love her; fearing success, he escaped it. He then
concluded to convert her to goodness, himself to God. The idea
alternately nauseated and exalted him.
He perhaps did not know that he had come to a final decision
until he encountered Salzman in a Broadway caferia. He was
sitting alone at a rear table, sucking the bony remains of a fish.
The marriage broker appeared haggard, and transparent to the
point of vanishing.
Salzman looked up at first without recognizing him. Leo had
grown a pointed beard and his eyes were weighted with
wisdom.
Salzman, he said, love has at last come to my heart.
Who can love from a picture? mocked the marriage broker.
It is not impossible.
If you can love her, then you can love anybody. Let me show
you some new clients that they just sent me their photographs.
One is a little doll.
Just her I want, Leo murmured.
Dont be a fool, doctor. Dont bother with her.
Put me in touch with her, Salzman, Leo said humbly.
Perhaps I can be of service.
Salzman had stopped eating and Leo understood with emotion
that it was now arranged.
Leaving the cafeteria, he was, however, afflicted by a
tormenting suspicion that Salzman had planned it all to happen
this way. Leo was informed by letter that she would meet him
on a certain corner, and she was there one spring night, waiting
under a street lamp. He appeared, carrying a small bouquet of
violets and rosebuds. Stella stood by the lamppost, smoking.
She wore white with red shoes, which fitted his expectations,
although in a troubled moment he had imagined the dress red,
and only the shoes white. She waited uneasily and shyly. From
afar he saw that her eyesclearly her fatherswere filled
with desperate innocence. He pictured, in her, his own
redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky. Leo
ran forward with flowers outthrust.
Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted
prayers for the dead.




BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1940- )

Introduction

Bharati Mukherjee is an American writer of Asian decent,
having been born and raised in an upper-middle-class Hindu
family in Calcutta, India. She refuses the designation Asian-
American and wonders why it is that only non-white American
immigrants and their descendants are hyphenated Americans
(Asian-American, African-American, etc.), while Americans of
European lineage are plain Americans.

Such a linguistic practice suggests a tension in American cultural
and political identity a refusal of the majority white, European-
based culture fully to accommodate and adjust itself to other
ethnic and cultural identities, and a reluctance, as well, on the
part of the non-white population groups to assimilate themselves
into the cultural majority. And yet, as Mukherjee indicates, the
very idea of America as a nation of voluntary immigrants
engaged in a social and political experiment implies that these
various groups must seek to come together into a workable
whole that does not so much eradicate and invalidate individual
and cultural identities and histories as it connects and weaves
them together into something new and different.

As Mukherjee explains, most modern nations are made up of
more or less homogenous ethnic identity groups living in
traditional territories. (Poland is populated largely by ethnic
Poles, as Vietnam is inhabited mostly by the ethnic Vietnamese.)
But America was founded as a nation in which voluntary
immigrants from whatever ethnic and cultural background could
come and join in an experiment in forming a society and nation
based upon ideas of individual freedom and political liberty.

Americas founding fathers could not foresee that American
would one day be the home and destination for immigrants
from throughout the world including from many cultures and
places that they had never even heard of. Nineteenth-Century
American poet Walt Whitman, however, foresaw such a
destiny for America, and he celebrated its possibilities for the
improved future of human society, which he assumed would be
multicultural and trans-national. Mukherjees essay proves her
to be Whitmans heir when he writes:
Passage to India!
Lo, soul, seest thou not Gods purpose from the first?
The earth to be spannd, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in
marriage,
The oceans to be crossd, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.
Passage to India, which is also the poems title, refers to
Christopher Columbuss intention to find a cross-ocean sea-
route from Europe to Asia, for which he was searching when
he discovered America the New World. Whitman believed
that it is Americas particular destiny to bind together, bridge,
and merge the Old World cultures of Europe and Asia and
the New World cultures of the Americas into one diverse unity.
As Mukherjees essay indicates, this is a destiny that is still in
the making.


American Dreamer (1997)

By Bharati Mukherjee
January/February 1997 Issue


The United States exists as a sovereign nation. "America," in
contrast, exists as a myth of democracy and equal opportunity to live
by, or as an ideal goal to reach.
I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born
citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited
citizenship. What I didn't have to disclose was that I desired
"America," which to me is the stage for the drama of self-
transformation.
I was born in Calcutta and first came to the United States -- to Iowa
City, to be precise -- on a summer evening in 1961. I flew into a small
airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the
two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left
Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa
Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom
he selected for me from our caste and class.
In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were
provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The
neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-
speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or
disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my
future.
When I landed in Iowa 35 years ago, I found myself in a society in
which almost everyone was Christian, white, and moderately well-off.
In the women's dormitory I lived in my first year, apart from six
international graduate students (all of us were from Asia and
considered "exotic"), the only non-Christian was Jewish, and the only
nonwhite an African-American from Georgia. I didn't anticipate then,
that over the next 35 years, the Iowa population would become so
diverse that it would have 6,931 children from non-English-speaking
homes registered as students in its schools, nor that Iowans would be
in the grip of a cultural crisis in which resentment against immigrants,
particularly refugees from Vietnam, Sudan, and Bosnia, as well as
unskilled Spanish-speaking workers, would become politicized enough
to cause the Immigration and Naturalization Service to open an
"enforcement" office in Cedar Rapids in October for the tracking and
deporting of undocumented aliens. {publish-page-break}
In Calcutta in the '50s, I heard no talk of "identity crisis" -- communal
or individual. The concept itself -- of a person not knowing who he or
she is -- was unimaginable in our hierarchical, classification-obsessed
society. One's identity was fixed, derived from religion, caste,
patrimony, and mother tongue. A Hindu Indian's last name
announced his or her forefathers' caste and place of origin. A
Mukherjee could only be a Brahmin from Bengal. Hindu tradition
forbade intercaste, interlanguage, interethnic marriages. Bengali
tradition even discouraged emigration: To remove oneself from Bengal
was to dilute true culture.
Until the age of 8, I lived in a house crowded with 40 or 50 relatives.
My identity was viscerally connected with ancestral soil and genealogy.
I was who I was because I was Dr. Sudhir Lal Mukherjee's daughter,
because I was a Hindu Brahmin, because I was Bengali-speaking, and
because my desh -- the Bengali word for homeland -- was an East
Bengal village called Faridpur.
The University of Iowa classroom was my first experience of
coeducation. And after not too long, I fell in love with a fellow student
named Clark Blaise, an American of Canadian origin, and impulsively
married him during a lunch break in a lawyer's office above a coffee
shop.
That act cut me off forever from the rules and ways of upper-middle-
class life in Bengal, and hurled me into a New World life of scary
improvisations and heady explorations. Until my lunch-break
wedding, I had seen myself as an Indian foreign student who intended
to return to India to live. The five-minute ceremony in the lawyer's
office suddenly changed me into a transient with conflicting loyalties
to two very different cultures.
The first 10 years into marriage, years spent mostly in my husband's
native Canada, I thought of myself as an expatriate Bengali
permanently stranded in North America because of destiny or desire.
My first novel, The Tiger's Daughter, embodies the loneliness I felt but
could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's
land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.
Shaped by memory, textured with nostalgia for a class and culture I
had abandoned, this novel quite naturally became an expression of the
expatriate consciousness.
It took me a decade of painful introspection to put nostalgia in
perspective and to make the transition from expatriate to immigrant.
After a 14-year stay in Canada, I forced my husband and our two sons
to relocate to the United States. But the transition from foreign student
to U.S. citizen, from detached onlooker to committed immigrant, has
not been easy.
The years in Canada were particularly harsh. Canada is a country that
officially, and proudly, resists cultural fusion. For all its rhetoric about
a cultural "mosaic," Canada refuses to renovate its national self-image
to include its changing complexion. It is a New World country with Old
World concepts of a fixed, exclusivist national identity. Canadian
official rhetoric designated me as one of the "visible minority" who,
even though I spoke the Canadian languages of English and French,
was straining "the absorptive capacity" of Canada. Canadians of color
were routinely treated as "not real" Canadians. One example: In 1985 a
terrorist bomb, planted in an Air-India jet on Canadian soil, blew up
after leaving Montreal, killing 329 passengers, most of whom were
Canadians of Indian origin. The prime minister of Canada at the time,
Brian Mulroney, phoned the prime minister of India to offer Canada's
condolences for India's loss.
Those years of race-related harassments in Canada politicized me and
deepened my love of the ideals embedded in the American Bill of
Rights. I don't forget that the architects of the Constitution and the Bill
of Rights were white males and slaveholders. But through their
declaration, they provided us with the enthusiasm for human rights,
and the initial framework from which other empowerments could be
conceived and enfranchised communities expanded.
I am a naturalized U.S. citizen and I take my American citizenship very
seriously. I am not an economic refugee, nor am I a seeker of political
asylum. I am a voluntary immigrant. I became a citizen by choice, not
by simple accident of birth.
Yet these days, questions such as who is an American and what is
American culture are being posed with belligerence, and being
answered with violence. Scapegoating of immigrants has once again
become the politicians' easy remedy for all that ails the nation. Hate
speeches fill auditoriums for demagogues willing to profit from stirring
up racial animosity. An April Gallup poll indicated that half of
Americans would like to bar almost all legal immigration for the next
five years.
The United States, like every sovereign nation, has a right to formulate
its immigration policies. But in this decade of continual, large-scale
diasporas, it is imperative that we come to some agreement about who
"we" are, and what our goals are for the nation, now that our
community includes people of many races, ethnicities, languages, and
religions.
The debate about American culture and American identity has to date
been monopolized largely by Eurocentrists and ethnocentrists whose
rhetoric has been flamboyantly divisive, pitting a phantom "us" against
a demonized "them."
All countries view themselves by their ideals. Indians idealize the
cultural continuum, the inherent value system of India, and are
properly incensed when foreigners see nothing but poverty,
intolerance, strife, and injustice. Americans see themselves as the
embodiments of liberty, openness, and individualism, even as the
world judges them for drugs, crime, violence, bigotry, militarism, and
homelessness. I was in Singapore in 1994 when the American teenager
Michael Fay was sentenced to caning for having spraypainted some
cars. While I saw Fay's actions as those of an individual, and his
sentence as too harsh, the overwhelming local sentiment was that
vandalism was an "American" crime, and that flogging Fay would deter
Singapore youths from becoming "Americanized."
Conversely, in 1994, in Tavares, Florida, the Lake County School Board
announced its policy (since overturned) requiring middle school
teachers to instruct their students that American culture, by which the
board meant European-American culture, is inherently "superior to
other foreign or historic cultures." The policy's misguided implication
was that culture in the United States has not been affected by the
American Indian, African-American, Latin-American, and Asian-
American segments of the population. The sinister implication was
that our national identity is so fragile that it can absorb diverse and
immigrant cultures only by recontextualizing them as deficient.
Our nation is unique in human history in that the founding idea of
"America" was in opposition to the tenet that a nation is a collection of
like-looking, like-speaking, like-worshiping people. The primary
criterion for nationhood in Europe is homogeneity of culture, race, and
religion -- which has contributed to blood-soaked balkanization in the
former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union.
America's pioneering European ancestors gave up the easy
homogeneity of their native countries for a new version of utopia.
Now, in the 1990s, we have the exciting chance to follow that tradition
and assist in the making of a new American culture that differs from
both the enforced assimilation of a "melting pot" and the Canadian
model of a multicultural "mosaic."
The multicultural mosaic implies a contiguity of fixed, self-sufficient,
utterly distinct cultures. Multiculturalism, as it has been practiced in
the United States in the past 10 years, implies the existence of a central
culture, ringed by peripheral cultures. The fallout of official
multiculturalism is the establishment of one culture as the norm and
the rest as aberrations. At the same time, the multiculturalist emphasis
on race- and ethnicity-based group identity leads to a lack of respect
for individual differences within each group, and to vilification of those
individuals who place the good of the nation above the interests of
their particular racial or ethnic communities.
We must be alert to the dangers of an "us" vs. "them" mentality. In
California, this mentality is manifesting itself as increased violence
between minority, ethnic communities. The attack on Korean-
American merchants in South Central Los Angeles in the wake of the
Rodney King beating trial is only one recent example of the tragic side
effects of this mentality. On the national level, the politicization of
ethnic identities has encouraged the scapegoating of legal immigrants,
who are blamed for economic and social problems brought about by
flawed domestic and foreign policies.
We need to discourage the retention of cultural memory if the aim of
that retention is cultural balkanization. We must think of American
culture and nationhood as a constantly re-forming, transmogrifying
"we."
In this age of diasporas, one's biological identity may not be one's only
identity. Erosions and accretions come with the act of emigration. The
experience of cutting myself off from a biological homeland and
settling in an adopted homeland that is not always welcoming to its
dark-complexioned citizens has tested me as a person, and made me
the writer I am today.
I choose to describe myself on my own terms, as an American, rather
than as an Asian-American. Why is it that hyphenation is imposed only
on nonwhite Americans? Rejecting hyphenation is my refusal to
categorize the cultural landscape into a center and its peripheries; it is
to demand that the American nation deliver the promises of its dream
and its Constitution to all its citizens equally.
My rejection of hyphenation has been misrepresented as race
treachery by some India-born academics on U.S. campuses who have
appointed themselves guardians of the "purity" of ethnic cultures.
Many of them, though they reside permanently in the United States
and participate in its economy, consistently denounce American ideals
and institutions. They direct their rage at me because, by becoming a
U.S. citizen and exercising my voting rights, I have invested in the
present and not the past; because I have committed myself to help
shape the future of my adopted homeland; and because I celebrate
racial and cultural mongrelization.
What excites me is that as a nation we have not only the chance to
retain those values we treasure from our original cultures but also the
chance to acknowledge that the outer forms of those values are likely
to change. Among Indian immigrants, I see a great deal of guilt about
the inability to hang on to what they commonly term "pure culture."
Parents express rage or despair at their U.S.-born children's forgetting
of, or indifference to, some aspects of Indian culture. Of those parents
I would ask: What is it we have lost if our children are acculturating
into the culture in which we are living? Is it so terrible that our
children are discovering or are inventing homelands for themselves?
Some first-generation Indo-Americans, embittered by racism and by
unofficial "glass ceilings," construct a phantom identity, more-Indian-
than-Indians-in-India, as a defense against marginalization. I ask:
Why don't you get actively involved in fighting discrimination? Make
your voice heard. Choose the forum most appropriate for you. If you
are a citizen, let your vote count. Reinvest your energy and resources
into revitalizing your city's disadvantaged residents and
neighborhoods. Know your constitutional rights, and when they are
violated, use the agencies of redress the Constitution makes available
to you. Expect change, and when it comes, deal with it!
As a writer, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America
has transformed me. It does not end until I show that I (along with the
hundreds of thousands of immigrants like me) am minute by minute
transforming America. The transformation is a two-way process: It
affects both the individual and the national-cultural identity.
Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new
place as a loss, the loss of communal memory and the erosion of an
original culture. I want to talk of arrival as a gain.
Chapter 9: Challenges for the Future

America as a Test Society

The early 20
th
Century American writer Gertrude Stein
claimed that America is the oldest country in the modern
world. She explained that, although England was the earliest
industrialized country, America was the first country to
experience the full effects of industrialization with the
mechanized horrors of the American Civil War. Thus, she
reasoned, America entered the modern age first and is the
worlds oldest modern country.

Partly because of its uniqueness as a country that has served as
a destination and haven for immigrants from throughout the
world, and partly because of its wealth of natural resources,
America has continued to lead the way forward into the
modern age. In many respects, Americas society, economy,
and culture operate as a sort of testing and proving ground for
the advance and progress of modern civilization. In that sense,
Americas societal conditions and crises may serve as useful
warnings and lessons for the world in general as it becomes
increasingly modernized.


Neil Postman on the Media

The essays in this chapter address two areas of grave concern
for the future and history of human civilization in the modern
world. In the first essay, Future Shlock, Neil Postman
contends that citizens in American society have become so
obsessed with and immersed in the visual stimulation of
electronic media that they can no longer distinguish between
matters of vital political and societal importance which
might require action and reaction and material that is
designed to be passively consumed as entertainment.


Rachel Carson on the Environment

In the second essay, The Obligation to Endure, influential
American environmental activist Rachel Carson warns of the
grave dangers for the continuation of human life itself caused
by our constant tampering with and willful sabotaging of our
home in nature. Carson contends that modern human societies
must begin thinking past the short term if they are to survive in
the long term.

Both Postman and Carson stress that, as human control of our
living environment becomes more pervasive and invasive, it is
of vital importance that we exercise discretion, caution, and
wisdom in shaping our world and future. The fate of the
human species, and perhaps even of life on Earth, depends
upon it.

NEIL POSTMAN (1931-2003)

Introduction

Neil Postman is a social critic who has focused his attention on
the effect of the electronic media on modern societies and
social-political consciousness. In the influential essay, Future
Shlock, he considers the social, political, and psychological
effect of the American populaces infatuation with television.
Most Americans (like most of the world these days) get their
news of the community, nation, and world from television. But
television news, as Postman points out, is primarily concerned
with providing visual entertainment and stimulus, and is very
poor at providing intellectual analysis and historical context.

A population that receives its information of itself and of the
world almost wholly from television naturally will possess
strong opinions prompted by the mediums emotionally stirring
images. But a mature and responsible community requires
more than merely strong emotional opinions in order to operate
soundly. It requires a great breadth and depth of knowledge, a
capacity for dispassionate analysis, and a dedication to reason,
all of which television does not and perhaps cannot, by the
nature of its visual-emotional medium provide an adequate
forum for.

Postman contends that there are two ways by which modern
societies can become oppressive of individual freedom and
thought, and destructive of responsible political communities.
They can overtly and actively repress individual freedom and
political expression like the Fascist government of Nazi
Germany. Or they can amuse and distract themselves to such
an extent that entertainment becomes an end in itself, rather
than a pleasant relief from the cares and responsibilities (but
also freedoms and opportunities) of the real world.

The second mode of oppression oppression by pleasure,
rather than by fear is the more insidious of the two, in that it
is not generally experienced as oppressive, and provides the
illusion of freedom. But what is felt as the free choice to
consume entertainment endlessly is actually a compulsion and
an addiction, which are enforced by the whole machinery of
the pleasure-addicted consumerist society.

Postman does not offer a cure for the society that suffers from
oppression by pleasure, but he alerts us to the existence of this
condition, and warns us of its danger for the future of civil
society, and perhaps for the future of civilization itself.


Future Shlock (1988)

Future Shlock
Neil Postman has distinguished himself as a critic, writer,
educator, and communications theorist since the 1960s. His early
work focused on language and education; with such books as
Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969) and The Soft
Revolution: A Student Handbook for Turning Schools Around
(1971), both coauthored with Charles Weingartner, he became
known as an advocate of radical education reform. For ten
years he was editor of Et Cetera, the journal of general
semantics. As television has played an increasingly central role
in American culture, Postman has critically analyzed its impact
not only on what information is available but on how we receive
and understand information. 1 lis book Amusing Ourselves to
Death (1986) explores these questions; so does "Future Shlock,"
which comes from his 1988 book Conscientious Objections:
Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Education.
Postman is currently chair of the Department of Communication
Arts and Sciences at New York University; he also serves on the
editorial board of TAe Nation magazine. He lives in Flushing,
New York.
Sometime about the middle of 1963, my colleague Charles
\\cingartner and 1 delivered in tandem an address to the National
Council of leachers of English. In that address we used the
phrase /ufure s/iock as a way of describing the social paralysis
induced by rapid technological change. Ib my knowledge,
Weingartner and 1 were the first people ever to use it in a public
fomm. Of course, neither Weingartner nor I had the brains to write
a book called Future S/ioc&, and all due credit must go to Alvin
'loftier tor having recognized a good phrase when one came along.
1 mention this here not to lament lost royalties but to explain why
1 now feel entitled to subvert the phrase. Having been among the
first to trouble the public about future shock, I may be permitted to
be among the first to trouble the public about future shlock.
Future s/i/ock is the name 1 give to a cultural condition
characterized by the rapid erosion of collective intelligence.
Future shlock is the aftermath of future shock. Whereas future
shock results in confused, indecisive, and psychically uprooted
people, future shlock produces a massive class of mediocre people.
^
Human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It
doesn't take much to distract it, suppress it. or even annihilate it. In this
century, we have had some lethal examples of how easily and quickly
intelligence can be defeated by any one of its several nemcses: ignorance,
superstition, moral fervor, cruelty, cowardice, neglect. In the late 1920s, for
example, Germany was, by any measure, Hie most literate, cultured nation in
Hie world. Its legendary scats of learning attracted scholars from even" corner.
Its philosophers, social critics, and scientists were of the first rank: its humane
traditions an inspiration to less favored nations. Rut by the mid-1930s that
is. in less than ten years this cathedral of human reason had been
transformed into a cesspool oi barbaric irrationality. Many of the most
intelligent products of German culture were forced to Ace for example,
Kinslein, Krcud, Karl Jaspers, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig. Even worse,
those who remained were either forced to submit their minds to the
sovereignty of primitive superstition, or worse still willingly did so:
Konrad Lorcn/., \\^rncr Hciscnbcrg, Martin Heidegger, Gcrhardt
Hauptmann. On May 10, 1933, a huge bonfire was kindled in Berlin and the
books of Marcel Proust, Andrd Gide, Emilc Zola, Jack London, Upton
Sinclair, and a hundred others were committed to the flames, amid shouts of
idiot delight. By 1936, Joseph Paul Goebbels. Germany's minister of
propaganda, was issuing a proclamation which began with the following
words: "Because this year has not brought an improvement in art criticism, I
forbid once and for all the continuance of art criticism in its past form,
effective as of today." By 1936, there was no one left in Germany who had the
brains or courage to object.
Exactly why the Germans banished intelligence is a vast and largely
unanswered question. I have never been persuaded that the desperate
economic depression thai afflicted Germany in the 1920s adequately explains
what happened, 'lo quote Aristotle: "Men do not become tyrants in order to
keep warm." Neither do they become stupid at least not (Aaf stupid. But
the matter need not trouble us here. I offer the German case onlv as the
most striking example of the fragility of human intelligence. My focus here is
the United States in our own time, and I wish to worry you about the rapid
erosion of our own intelligence. If you are confident that such a thing cannot
happen, your confidence is misplaced, 1 believe, but it is understandable.
After all. the United States is one of the few countries in the world
founded by intellectuals men of wide learning, of extraordinary rhetorical
powers, of deep faith in reason. And although we have had our moods of
anti-intellectualism, few people have been more generous in support of
intelligence and learning than Americans. It was the United States that
initiated the experiment in mass education that is, even today, the en\v of the
world. It was America's churches that laid the foundation
of our admirable system of higher education; it \vas the Land-Grant Act -of
1862 that made possible our great state universities; and it is to America that
scholars and writers have fled when freedom of the intellect became
impossible in llicir own nations. This is why the great historian ot American
civilization Henry Steele Commager called America "the Empire of
Reason." But Commager was referring to the United States of the eighteenth
and ni neteenth centuries. What term he would use for America today, I
cannot say. Yet he has observed, as others have, a change, a precipitous
decline in our valuation of intelligence, in our uses of l anguage, in the
disciplines of logic and reason, in our capacity to attend to complexity.
Perhaps he would agree with me that the Empire of Reason is, in fact, gone,
and that the most apt term for America today is the Empire of Shlock.
In any case, this is what I wish to call to your notice; the frightening
displacement of serious, intelligent public discourse in American culture
by the imagery and triviality ot what may be called .show business. I do
not see the decline of intelligent discourse in AmericlTleading to the
barbarisms that flourished in Germany, of course. No scholars. I believe,
will ever need to flee America. There wil l be no bonfires to burn books.
And I cannot imagine any proclamations forbidding once and for all art
criticism, or any other ki nd of criticism. But t hi s is not a cause tor
complacency, let alone celebration. A culture does not have to torce
scholars to lice to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn
books to assure that they will not be read. And a culture docs not need
a minister of propaganda issuing proclamations to silence criticism. I here
are other ways to achieve stupidity, and it appears t hat , as in so many
other things, there is a distinctly American way.
To explain what 1 am getting at, 1 find it helpful to refer to two films.
which taken together embody t he main lines ol my argument. '1 he first
film is of recent vintage and is called 'I'he Goc/s Must Be Crucv. It is about
a tribal people who live in the Kalahari Desert plains ot southern .\triea.
and what happens to thei r culture when it is invaded by an emptv
Coca-Cola bottle tossed from the window ol a small plane passing oxer-
head. The bottle lands in t he middle of the village and is construed by
these gentle people to be a gift from the gods, tor they not onl y have
never seen a bottle before but have never seen glass either. The people
are almost immediately charmed by the gilt, and not only because ot its
novelty. The bottle, it turns out, has multiple uses, chief among them the
intriguing music it makes when one blows into it.
But gradually a change takes place in t he tribe. The bottle becomes
an ijresistible preoccupation. Looking at it, holding it, t hi nking of things
to do \vith it displace other activities once thought essential. But more
than tliis. the Coke bottle is Hie only thing these people have ever seen
ot which there is only one of its kind. And so those who do not have it
try to get il from the one who does. And the one who does refuses to give
it up. jealousy, greed, and even violence enter the scene, and come very
clo.iL- to destroying the harmony that has characterized their culture for
a thousand years. The people hcgin to love their bottle more than they
love themselves, and arc saved only \vhen the leader of the tribe, con-
vinced t hai t he gods must be crazy, returns the bottle to the gods by
throwing it off the top of a mountain.
i he hi m is great fun and it is also wise, mainly because it is about a
subject as relevant to people in Chicago or Los Angeles or New York as
it is to those of the Kalahari Desert. It raises two questions of extreme
importance to our situation. How docs a culture change when new
technologies are introduced to it? And is it always desirable for a culture
to accommodate itself to the demands of new technologies? The leader
ot the Kalahari tribe is forced to confront these questions in a way that
Americans have refused to do. And because his vision is not obstructed
by a belief in what Americans call "technological progress," he is able
with minimal discomfort to decide that the songs of the Coke bottle are
not so alluring that they arc worth admitting envy, egotism, and greed to
a serene culture.
The second film relevant to my argument was made in 1%7. It is Mel
Brooks's first Rim. T/;c Pm(/i/cers. T/ze Producers is a rather raucous com-
edy that has at its center a painful joke: An unscrupulous theatrical
producer has figured out that it is relatively easy to turn a buck by
producing a play that fails. All one has to do is induce dozens of backers
to invest in the play by promising them exorbitant percentages of its
profits. When the play fails, there being no profits to disperse, the pro-
ducer walks away with thousands of dollars that can never be claimed.
Of course, the central problem he must solve is to make sure that his play
is a disastrous failure. And so he hits upon an excellent idea: He will take
the most tragic and grotesque story of our century the rise of Adolf
Hitler and make it into a musical.
Because the producer is only a crook and not a fool, he assumes that
the stupidity of making a musical on this theme will be immediately
grasped by audiences and that they will leave the theater in dumbfounded
rage. So he calls his play S/?rmg(ime /or H;Y/er, which is also the name
of its most important song. The song begins with the words:
Springtime for Hitler and Germany;
Winter for Poland and France.
The melody is catchy, and when the song is sung it is accompanied 10
by a happy chorus line. (One must understand, of course, that Springtime for
Hitler is no spoof of Hitler, as was, for example, Charlie Chaplin's The Great
Dictator. The play is instead a kind ol denial of Hitler in song and dance; as if
to say, it was all in fun.)
The ending of the movie is predictable. The audience loves the play
and leaves the theater humming Springtime /or Hitler. The musical
becomes a great hit. The producer ends up in jail, his joke having turned
back on him. But Brooks's point !s that the joke is on us. Although Hie
Rim was made years before a movie actor became president of the United
States, Brooks was making a kind of prophecy about that namely, that
the producers of American culture will increasingly turn our historv,
politics, religion, commerce, and education into forms of entertainment,
and that we will become as a result a trivial people, incapable of coping
with complexity, ambiguity, uncertainly, perhaps even reality. \\e will
become, in a phrase, a people amused into stupidity.
For those readers who arc not inclined to take Mcl Brooks as seriousl\ as
I do, let me remind you that the prophecy 1 attribute here to Brooks
was, in fact, made many years before by a more formidable social critic
than he. I refer to Aldous Huxley, who \\rote Orm'c ,\etc \\br/J at the
time that ihe modern monuments to intellectual stupidity were taking
shape: naxism in Cermany, fascism in Italy, communism in Russia. But
Huxley was not concerned in his book with such naked and crude lonns of
intellectual suicide. He saw beyond them, and mostly, I must add. he saw
America, lo be more specific, he toresa\v that the greatest threat to the
intelligence and humane creativity of our culture would not come from
Big Brother and ministries of propaganda, or gulags and concentration
camps. He prophesied, if 1 may pul it this \vay. that there is tyranny
lurking in a Coca-Cola bottle; that we could be ruined not by what \ve
fear and hate but by what we welcome andjavc_by_wjiat \\c construe to .
be a gift from the gods.
And in case anyone missed his point in 1932, Huxley wrote Brm*e .\ew
\W)r/d Revisited twenty years later. By then. George Orwell's J964 had
been published, and it was inevitable that Huxley would compare Or-
well's book with his own. The difference, he said, is that in Orwclls book
people arc controlled by inflicting pain. In Orm'g A'eu' \\br/J. they arc
controlled by inflicting pleasure.
The Coke bottle that has fallen in our midst is a corporation of
dazzling technologies whose forms turn all serious public business into a
kind of S/mngbme /or Hi(/er musical, television is the principal instrument
of this disaster, in part because it is the medium Americans most
dearly love, and in part because it has become the command center of
our culture. Americans turn to television not only for their light enter-
tainment but for their news, their weather, their politics, their religion,
their history all of which may be said to be their serious entertainment.
The light entertainment is not the problem. The least dangerous things
on television are its junk. What I am talking about is television's preemp-
tion of our culture's most serious business. It would be merely banal to
say that television presents us with entertaining subject matter. It is
quite another thing to say that on television all subject matter is
presented as entertaining. And that is how television brings ruin to any
intelligent understanding of public affairs.
Political campaigns, for example, are now conducted largely in the i
form of television commercials. Candidates forgo precision, complexity,
substance in some cases, language itself for the arts of show business:
music, imagery, celebrities, theatrics. Indeed, political figures have become
so good at this, and so accustomed to it, that they do television commercials
even when they are not campaigning. . . . Even worse, political figures
appear on variety shows, soap operas, and sit-coms. George McGovcrn,
Ralph Nacler, Ed Koch, and Jesse Jackson have all hosted "Saturday Night
Live." Henry Kissinger and former president Gerald Ford have clone cameo
roles on "Dynast)'." [Former Massachusetts officials] Tip O'Ncill and
Governor Michael Dukakis have appeared on "Cheers." Richard Nixon did a
short stint on "Laugh-In." The late senator from Illinois, Everctt Dirksen,
was on "What's My Line?," a prophetic question if ever there was one. What
is the line of these people? Or, more precisely, where is the l i ne that one
ought to be able to draw between politics and entertainment? I would suggest
that television has annihilated T it. . . .
But politics is only one arena in which serious language has been
displaced by the arts of show business. We have all seen how religion is
packaged on television, as a kind of Las Vegas stage show, devoid of ritual,
sacrality, and tradition. Today's electronic preachers are in no way like
America's evangelicals of the past. Men like Jonathan Edwards, Charles
Finney, and George Whiteside were preachers of theological depth,
authentic learning, and great expositor,' power. Electronic preachers such
a> Ji mmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Jerry Falwcll are merely performers
who exploit television's visual power and thei r own charisma for the
greater glory of themselves.
We have also seen "Sesame Street" and other educational shows in
whi ch the demands of entertainment take precedence over the rigors of
learning. And we well knew how American businessmen, working under rj
the assumption that potential customers require amusement rather than
facts, use music, dance, comedy, cartoons, and celebrities to sell their
products.
Even our daily news, which for most Americans means television news, is
packaged as a kind of show, featuring handsome news readers, exciting
music, and dynamic Rim footage. Most especially, him footage. When there
is no film footage, there is no story. Stranger still, commercials may appear
anywhere in a news story before, after, or in the middle. This reduces all
events to trivialities, sources of public entertainment and little more. After all,
how serious can a bombing in Lebanon be it it is shown to us prefaced by a
happy United Airlines commercial and summarized by a Calvin Klein jeans
commercial? Indeed, television newscasters have added to our grammar a
new part of speech what mav be called the "Now . . . this" conjunction, a
conjunction that does not connect two things but disconnects them. When
newscasters say. "Xow . . . mis. they mean to indicate that what you have just
heard or seen has no relevance to what you are about to hear or see. There is
no murder so brutal, no political blunder so costly, no bombing so
devastating that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying.
"Xow . . . tins." He means that you have thought long enough on the matter
(l et us xiv. for forty seconds) and you must now give your attention to a
commercial. Such a situation is not "the news." It is merely a daily version ol
S/;m HirYer, and in my opinion accounts for the t act that American are the
most ill-informed people in the world. Ib be sure. we know n/ manv things;
but we know /)oi;/ very little.
Ib provide some verification of this, I conducted a survev a few vcars back
on the subject of the Iranian hostage crisis. 1 cho\v Ihis subject because it was
alluded to on television nx/M &;v /or more /;\m tj vt'<jr. I did not ask my
subjects for their opinions about the hostage \ituation. I am not interested in
opinion polls; 1 am interested in knowledge polls. The questions I asked were
simple and did not require deep knowledge. For example, Where is Iran? What
language do the Iranians speak? Where did the Shah come Irom? What
religion do me Iranians practice, and what are its basic tenets? What does
Aw/o/A;/; mean? I tound that almost everybody knew practically nothing about
Iran. And those \vho did know something said they had learned it Irom
XnrMt'ee^ or Time or the New Ybr& T;'mes. 'television, in other words, is not
the great information machine. It is the great disinformation machine. A most
nerve-wracking confirmation of this came some time ago during an interview
with the producer and the writer of the 'IV mini-series "Peter the Great."
Defending the historical inaccuracies in the drama which included a fabri-
cated meeting between Peter and Sir Isaac Xewton the producer said
that no one would watch a dry, historically faithful biography. The writer
added that it is better for audiences to learn something that is untrue, if
it is entertaining, than not to learn anything at all. And just to put some
icing on Hie cake, the actor who played Peter, Maximilian Schell, rc-
markcd t hat he does not believe in historical truth and therefore sees no
reason to pursue it.
I do not mean to say t hat the triviali/.ation of American public dis-
course ib all accomplished on television. Rather, television is the para-
digm tor all our attempts at public communication. It conditions our
mind> to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces
other media to orient themselves in that direction. You know the standard
question we put to people who have difficult}' understanding even simple
language: \\c ask them impatient!}, "Do I have to draw a picture for you?"
\\ell, it appears that, like it or not, our culture will draw pictures for us,
will explain the world to us in pictures. As a medium for conducting
public business, language has receded in importance; it lias been moved
to the periphery of culture and has been replaced at the center by the
entertaining visual image.
Please understand that 1 am making no criticism of the visual arts in
general. That criticism is made by God, not by me. You will remember
that in His Second Commandment, God explicitly states that "Thou shalt
not make unto thcc any graven image, nor any likeness of anything that
is in I leaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or the waters beneath
the earth." I have always felt that God was taking a rather extreme position
on this, as is His way. As for myself, I am arguing from the standpoint of a
symbolic relativist. Korms of communication arc neither good nor bad in
themselves. Thev become good or bad depending on their relationship to
other symbols and on the functions they are made to serve within a social
order. When a culture becomes overloaded with pictures; when logic and
rhetoric lose their binding authority; when historical truth becomes
irrelevant; when the spoken or written word is distrusted or makes
demands on our attention that we are incapable of giving; when our
politics, history, education, religion, public infomiation, and commerce
arc expressed largely in visual imagery rather than words, then a culture
is in serious jeopardy.
Neither do I make a complaint against entertainment. As an old song
has it. life is not a highway strewn with Rowers. The sight of a few
blossoms here and there may make our journey a trifle more endurable.
But in America, the least amusing people are our professional entertain-
ers. In our present situation, our preachers, entrepreneurs, politicians,
teachers, and journalists are committed to entertaining us through media
that do not lend themselves to serious, complex discourse. But these
producers of our culture are not to be blamed. 'Hiey, like the rest of us. believe
in the supremacy of technological progress. It has never occurred to us that the
gods might be crazy. And even if it did, there is no mountaintop from which
we can return what is dangerous to us.
Wz would do well to keep in mind that there arc two ways in which the spirit
of a culture may be degraded. In the hrst the Onvcllian culture becomes a
prison. This was the way of the Nazis, and it appears to be the way of the
Russians.' In the second the Huxleyan culture becomes a burlesque. This
appears to be the way of the Americans. What Huxley teaches is that in the Age
of Advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an
enemy with a smiling countenance than from one whose face exudes suspicion
and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy. Big Brother docs not watch us, by his
choice; \ve watch him, by ours. When a culture becomes distracted by trivia:
when political and social life arc redefined as a perpetual round of entertain-
ments; when public conversation becomes a form of baby talk; when a people
become, in short, an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then
Huxley argued a nation finds itself at risk and culture-death is a clear
possibility. I agree.

RACHEL CARSON (1907-1964)

Introduction

Rachel Carson was an early contributor to and member of the modern
environmental movement in America. When America was first settled
by Europeans, its wealth of natural resources seemed limitless. Early
American President and social theorist Thomas Jefferson predicted
that it would take at least one thousand years for the huge country
even to be thoroughly explored and settled by human inhabitants. But
in the course of only a few centuries, the country has been not only
settled, but also exploited and abused to the point that many of its
natural resources have been depleted and exhausted, while others
have been strained to the breaking point.

Such exploitation and abuse of the natural environment by human
inhabitants is a world-wide phenomenon that may threaten our very
survival as human populations rapidly increase. Many plant and
animal species some of which have not even been catalogued, much
less studied or used are being quietly forced into extinction by
human expansion. At the same time, un-renewable natural resources
such as mineral and petroleum deposits are being depleted at an
alarming rate, and arable land is being over-farmed and transformed
into man-made wastelands. This is not a new phenomenon in the
comparatively brief course of human history. Vast areas of the Middle
East, Northern Africa, Southern Europe, and Central Asia that once
were agricultural centers of ancient human civilizations are now
largely unfertile partially as a result of human over-use, and of an
over-reliance on short-sighted agricultural methods.

As our land resources are threatened from abuse and exploitation, so
the air we breathe has become increasingly contaminated and polluted,
leading to global warming that threatens to make large portions of
heavily populated areas of the Earth uninhabitable in the relatively
near future, as the glaciers and ice caps melt and ocean levels rise,
submerging low-lying coastal areas.

The root of the various environmental dangers and approaching
catastrophes is human ignorance, avarice, and short-sightedness, as
Carson points out in her essay, The Obligation to endure, in which
she is largely concerned with the foolhardy over-use of man-made
chemicals in modern agriculture. For too long, as Carson contends,
humans have thought of nature as an enemy to be overcome and also
as a simple resource to be manipulated and used. But nature is far
more complex than we have imagined, and our various efforts at
improving and harnessing nature have created more intractable
problems and hidden dangers than we know.

Carson urges her readers to adopt a longer view of progress and of
human civilization, and to try to consider nature as a textbook for our
own survival rather than as a dumb tool for profit and exploitation.
Otherwise we risk destroying ourselves and our environment before
having had the chance to learn natures secret of endurance. For, in
terms of the long eons of life on Earth, humans are still a recent
arrival, and if we are not very careful and humble (much more so than
heretofore), our stay is likely to be all too brief.


The Obligation to Endure (1962)
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living
things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the
habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the en-
vironment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in
which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only
within the moment of time represented by the present century has one
speciesmanacquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.
During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of
disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all
man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers,
and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for
the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only .in the
world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part
irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment,
chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in
changing the very nature of the worldthe very nature of its life.
Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes
to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the
grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in
the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly,
chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil,
entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain
of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground
streams unt i l they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and
sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and
work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells. As
Albert Schweitzer has said, "Man can hardly even recognize the devils
of his own creation."
It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now
inhabits the eartheons of time in which that developing and evolving
and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its
surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the
life it supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as
supporting. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even within the
light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were
shortwave radiations with power to injure. Given timetime not in
years but in millennialife adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For
time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no
time.
The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are
created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the
deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background
radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the
sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is
now the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom. The
chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer
merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals
washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the
synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories,
and having no counterparts in nature.
To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is
nature's; it would require not merely the years of a man's life but the life
of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would
be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an
endless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual
use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its
implications are not easily grasped500 new chemicals to which the
bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year,
chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.
Among them are many that are used in man's war against nature.
Since the mid-1940's over 200 basic chemicals have been created tor use
in killing insects,
626
weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern
vernacular as "pests"; and they are sold under several thousand
different brand names.
These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost
universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homesnonseleclive
chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the
"bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to
coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soilall this
though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can
anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons ovi
the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should
not be called "insecticides," but "biocides."
The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless spiral.
Since DOT was released for civilian use, a process of escalation has
been going on in which ever more toxic materials must be found. This
has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin's
principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races
immune to the particular insecticide used, hence a deadlier one has
always to be developedand then a deadlier one than that. It has
happened also because, for reasons to be described later, destructive
insects often undergo a "flareback," or resurgence, after spraying in
numbers greater than before. Thus the chemical war is never won, and
all life is caught in its violent crossfire.
Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear
war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the
contamination of man's total environment with such substances of
incredible potential for harmsubstances that accumulate in the tissues
of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter
the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future
depends.
Some would-be architects of our future look toward a time when it
will be possible to alter the human germ plasm by design. But we may
easily be doing so now by inadvertence, for many chemicals, like
radiation, bring about gene mutations. It is ironic to think that man
might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the
choice of an insect spray.
All this has been riskedfor what? Future historians may well be
amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent
beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that
contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease
and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have
done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment
we examine them. We are told that the enormous and expanding use of
pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real
problem not one of overproduction? Our farms, despite measures to
remove acreages from production and to pay farmers not to produce,
have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the American
taxpayer in 1962 is paying out more than one billion dollars a year as the
total carrying cost of the surplus-food storage program. And is the
situation helped when one branch of the Agricul ture Department tries
to reduce production while another states, as it did in 1958, "It is
believed generally that reduction of crop acreages under provision--
of the Soil Bank will stimulate interest in use of chemicals to obtain maximum
production on the land retained in crops."
All this is not to say there is no insect problem and no need of control. I am 12
saying, rather, that control must be geared to realities, not to mythical situations,
and that the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along
with the insects.
The problem whose attempted solution has brought such a train of disaster in 13
its wake is an accompaniment of our modern way of life. Long before the age of
man, insects inhabited the eartha group of extraordinarily varied and adaptable
beings. Over the course of time since man's advent, a small percentage of the
more than half a million species of insects have come into conflict with human
welfare in two principal ways: as competitors for the food supply and as carriers
of human disease.
Disease-carrying insects become important where human beings are 14
crowded together, especially under conditions where sanitation is poor, as in
times of natural disaster or war or in situations of extreme poverty and depri-
vation. Then control of some sort becomes necessary. It is a sobering fact, however,
as we shall presently see, that the method of massive chemical control has had
only limited success, and also threatens to worsen the very conditions it is
intended to curb.
Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect prob- 15
lems. These arose with the intensification of agriculturethe devotion of im-
mense acreages to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for explosive
increases in specific insect populations. Single-crop farming does not take ad-
vantage of the principles by which nature works; it is agriculture as an engineer
might conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape,
but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in
checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds. One im-
portant natural check is a limit on the amount of suitable habitat for each
species. Obviously then, an insect that lives on wheat can build up its population
to much higher levels on a farm devoted to wheat than on one in which wheat is
intermingled with other crops to which the insect is not adapted.
The same thing happens in other situations. A generation or more ago, the ie
towns of large areas of the United States lined their streets with the noble elm
tree. Now the beauty they hopefully created is threatened with complete de-
struction as disease sweeps through the elms, carried by a beetle t hat would
have only limited chance to build up large populations and to spread from tree to
tree if the elms were only occasional trees in a richly diversified planting.
Another factor in the modern insect problem is one that must be viewed i?
against a background of geologic and human history: the spreading of thousands
of different kinds of organisms from their native homes to invade new
territories. This worldwide migration has been studied and graphically de-
scribed by the British ecologist Charles Elton in his recent book The Ecology of
Invasions. During the Cretaceous Period, some hundred million years ago,
flooding seas cut many land bridges between continents and living things
found themselves confined in what Elton calls "colossal separate nature re-
serves." There, isolated from others of their kind, they developed many new
species. When some of the land masses were joined again, about 15 million
years ago, these species began to move out into new territoriesa movement
that is not only still in progress but is now receiving considerable assistance
from man.
The importation of plants is the primary agent in the modern spread of is
species, for animals have almost invariably gone along with the plants, quarantine
being a comparatively recent and not completely effective innovation. The United
States Office of Plant Introduction alone has introduced almost 200,000 species and
varieties of plants from all over the world. Nearly half of the 180 or so major insect
enemies of plants in the United States are accidental imports from abroad, and
most of them have come as hitchhikers on plants.
In new territory, out of reach of the restraining hand of the natural enemies T>
that kept down its numbers in its native land, an invading plant or animal is able
to become enormously abundant. Thus it is no accident that our most troublesome
insects are introduced species.
These invasions, both the naturally occurring and those dependent on 20
human assistance, are likely to continue indefinitely. Quarantine and massive
chemical campaigns are only extremely expensive ways of buying time. We are
faced, according to Dr. Elton, "with a life-and-death need not just to find new
technological means of suppressing this plant or that animal"; instead we need the
basic knowledge of animal populations and their relations to their surroundings
that will "promote an even balance and damp down the explosive power of
outbreaks and new invasions."
Much of the necessary knowledge is now available but we do not use it. We 21
train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our governmental
agencies but we seldom take their advice. We allow the chemical death rain to
fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our
ingenuity could soon discover many more if given opportunity.
Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable 22
that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to
demand that which is good? Such thinking, in the words of the ecologist Paul
Shepard, "idealizes life with only its head out of water, inches above the limits of
toleration of the corruption of its own environment. . . . Why should we tolerate a
diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances
who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to
prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?"
Yet such a world is pressed upon us. The crusade to create a chemically ster- 2.1
ile, insect-free world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of
many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies. On every hand there
is evidence that those engaged in spraying operations exercise a ruthless power.
"The regulatory entomologists .. . function as prosecutor, judge and
jury, tax assessor and collector and sheriff to enforce their own orders/' said Connecticut
entomologist Neely Turner. The most flagrant abuses go unchecked in both state and federal
agencies.
It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do 24 contend that we
have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons
largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of
people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge. If
the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons
distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our
forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.
I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals to be used 25 with little or no
advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man himself. Future generations
are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world thai
supports all life.
There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era 26 of specialists,
each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it
fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is
seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging
results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an
end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being
asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it
wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.
In the words of Jean Rostand, "The obligation to endure gives us the right to know."