AMERICAN
ODYSSEY
447
literature, Leatherstocking as the silent, solitary sentinel at the edge of
the primeval forest; but this early vision of Gary Cooper in
High Noon
was dreamt in the midst of high society in Paris. Leatherstocking is a
romantic figure, all right, and an enduring literary symbol, as Mr.
Parkes has shown, but he is not only a fugitive from the civilization of
Europe; he is also the first exile in America. American literature is full
of images of moving and running; but this theme of mobility is not
only a running away from the old life, not only a westward movement
or a northwest passage, nor only a creative response to the opportunities
and the freedom of America; it also signifies a sense of
deracinement
in
the New World, a running away and a withdrawal from the American
scene itself. Classic American literature is a salutary reminder of the
fact that this movement of withdrawal, this inner displacement of
its
creative minds, this romantic rejection of reality reaches back deep
into the last century. Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson shut themselves
off, for years, from the outside world in their rooms in Salem and
Amherst. Together with Poe, Thoreau, Melville or Henry Adams, they
form the first wave of an inner emigration in the modem world. Henry
James, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, and Henry Miller constitute the
second wave of outright escape and expatriation from America.
Displacement, dissociation, and disillusionment are, again, familiar
themes in criticism. Says Mr. Rahv: "To my mind, the principal theme
of this (i.e., the modem American) novel, from Dreiser and Anderson
to Fitzgerald and Faulkner, has been the discrepancy between the high
promise of the American dream and what history has made of it."
If
Dreiser, according to Mr. Kazin, "committed the one sin that a writer
can commit in our country: he would not accept this society itself as
wholly real," this is the original sin of every authentic voice in America.
It has always said
no;
"for all men who say
yes
lie," as Melville wrote.
The
Americ~n
novel, as Mr. Chase shows, has always explored the
"aesthetic possibilities of alienation, contradiction, and disorder." It has
always succumbed to "the power of blackness," which Mr. Levin has
chosen as the unifying theme for his study of Hawthorne, Poe, and
Melville. It has never subscribed to a liberal imagination, not even in
the case of Whitman who was a great yea-sayer: "the United States
are essentially the greatest poem"; but who also felt the power of doubt
and disillusion in
Democratic Vistas.
So did Thomas Wolfe, ano,ther
partial yea-sayer, who confessed "that we are all lost in America, but
I believe we shall be found" and who clung to this hope as "America's
everlasting, living dream." For this hope was again the dream of an
orgastic future. "I think the life which we have fashioned in America,
