PARTISAN REVIEW
guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried ,things, to break a
path in the new world that is ours." But Melville also lived to write
the crushing epitaph to this dream: Ishmael surviving the wreckage of
the
Pequod
by clinging to his own coffin. Later, it is Gatsby floating
dead in the swimming pool. He, too, believed "in the orgastic future
that year by year recedes before us." He, too, believed in the Platonic
conception of America which "eluded us then" as Gatsby's "Platonic
conception of himself' suffered shipwreck on the shores of reality. "To–
morrow we will run faster," it is true; but what makes Sammy run?
What's he running away from? From Jacob Gatz, of course, i.e.,
from the image of his European, Jewish origin. It is a familiar theme
of criticism that the American mind suffers from a divided, unhappy
consciousness, torn between high ideals and catchpenny realities and
split in its allegiance to the past and to the future, to the 'Old World
and to the New. From Goethe and Chateaubriand to Kafka and Auden,
"the European imagination," as Mr. Levin says, "has looked toward the
western horizon whenever it turned from the citadels of constraint and
artifice back to nature or forward to Utopia"; and the American
ima–
gination, in turn, has looked back to the old continent as a symbol of
poverty and tyranny, privilege and exploitation, military entanglements
and deceit. But there is another image as well, a nostalgic memory that
has haunted the American 'Odyssey, an image of Europe as home, roots,
and a sense of belongingness and identity which were lost in the restless
pursuit of an unknown future. Europe was also a symbol of cultural
pastures which were never cultivated in the new Jerusalem. It was
Cooper who first drew up a list of magic symbols of the past which he
missed in America: "No costume for the peasant, no wig for the judge,
no baton for the general, no diadem for the chief magistrate." And no
native European could have been more nostalgic and more snobbish than
Henry James in his famous sequel to Cooper's complaints: "No sovereign,
no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church ... no country
gentlemen, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins, nor
abbeys, nor little Norman churches ..." ; and so it goes until we get,
via 'Oxford and Eton, to the bottom of the list, "no Epsom nor A:scot."
James rightly asked himself "what was left" after enumerating these
"items of high civilization . . . which are absent from the texture of
American life."
Thus the American Odyssey ill Janus-faced and frustrating from
the start. It is a movement away from and back to civilization, away
from and back to Europe, away from and back to the past. Again, it
was Fenimore Cooper who first created the pastoral myth in American
