WORLDS OF STYLE
513
vented rather than encouraged serious consideration of the American
obsession with inventing environments that permit unhampered free–
dom of consciousness. Obsession is not too strong a word
if
English
fiction is brought in for contrast. One of the first English novels com–
parable to the American fiction of civilization and the frontier is
Robinson Crusoe,
but it is indicative of the American emphases of
Cooper, of Mark Twain, of Thoreau (though Thoreau gives a whole
chapter of
Walden
to bourgeois considerations of economy) that De–
foe's novel is a sort of idyllic parable of man's gaining merely econom–
ic control over an environment out of which he
could
try to make any–
thing he chose. A true born Englishman, he has no interest whatever
in the merely visionary possession of landscape. This comparison
suggests what is, for other reasons, too, an inescapable conclusion:
the strangeness of American fiction has less to do with the environ–
ment in which a novelist finds himself than with the environment he
tries to create for his hero, usually his surrogate.
There is an evident reluctance on the part of American writers
to admit that they intend to promote eccentricity both in the heroes
of their works and in the environments provided for them. It is as
if
our writers wanted, in commenting on their own work and on the
works of one another, to hide what they most wanted to do, and to
hide their true intentions under disingenuous complaints that they are
victims of historical necessity. They ask us to believe that the strange
environments they create are a consequence not of their distaste for
social, economic and biological realities but of the fact that these
aren't abundant enough in American life. Cooper, Hawthorne, James,
and commentators who follow them,
all
suggest that they would be
happier if the social "texture" of American life were "thicker" even
while they make every sort of literary effort to escape even the sup–
posedly thin "texture" which American society does provide. In the
passage from Hawthorne, in similar passages from Cooper and James,
the talk about "romance" is always connected with the supposition
that America could not provide an environment which sustained
American novelists. "This country," Cooper writes in his Preface to
Home as Found,
"in its ordinary aspects, probably presents as barren
a field to the writer of fiction, and to the dramatist, as any other on
earth; we are not certain we might not say the most barren.... It
would be indeed a desperate undertaking, to think of making anything
interesting in the way of a
Roman de Societe
in this country." And it
