PARTISAN REVIEW
life, its implacable nostalgia for the infantile, at once wrongheaded
and somehow admirable. The mythic America is boyhood-and who
would dare be startled to realize that two (and the two most popular,
the two most
absorbed,
I think) of the handful of great books in our
native heritage are customarily to be found, illustrated, on the shelves
of the Children's Library. I am referring of course to
Moby Dick
and
Huckleberry Finn,
splendidly counterpoised in their oceanic complex–
ity and fluminal simplicity, but alike children's books, or more pre–
cisely,
boys'
books.
Among the most distinguished novelists of the American past,
only Henry James escapes completely classification as a writer of
juvenile classics; even Hawthorne, who did write sometimes for
children, must in his most adult novels endure, though not as Mark
Twain and Melville submit to, the child's perusal; a child's version
of
The Scarlet Letter
would seem a rather far-fetched joke
if
it were
not a part of our common experience. On a lower level of excellence,
there are the Leatherstocking Tales of Cooper and Dana's
Two Years
Before the Mast,
books read still, though almost unaccountably in
Cooper's case, by boys. What do all these novels have in common?
As
boys' books we would expect them shyly, guilelessly as it were,
to proffer a chaste male love as the ultimate emotional experience–
and this
is
spectacularly the case. In Dana, it
is
the narrator's melan–
choly love for the
kanaka,
Hope; in Cooper, the lifelong affection of
Natty Bumpo and Chingachgook; in Melville, Ishmael's love for
Queequeg; in Twain, Huck's feeling for Nigger Jim. At the focus of
emotion, where we are accustomed to find in the world's great novels
some heterosexual passion, be it Platonic love or adultery, seduction,
rape or long-drawn-out flirtation, we come instead upon the fugitive
slave and the no-account boy lying side by side on a raft borne by
the endless river towards an impossible escape, or the pariah sailor
waking in the tatooed arms of the brown harpooner on the verge of
their impossible quest. "Aloha, aikane, aloha nui," Hope cries to the
lover who prefers him above his fellow-whites; and Ishmael, in utter
frankness, tells us: "Thus, then, in our heart's honeymoon, lay I and
Queequeg-a cosy, loving pair." Physical it all
is,
certainly, yet of an
ultimate innocence; there is between the lovers no sword but a child–
like ignorance, as if the possibility of a fall to the carnal had not yet
been discovered. Even in the
Vita Nuova
of Dante there is no vision
666
