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In Search of American Character: A Literary Quest
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20644 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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10 / 1992 |
5,437 Words |
| Author
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Charles Vandersee
Charles Vandersee is associate professor of English at the
University of Virginia in Charlottesville and an editor of The
Letters of Henry Adams (Harvard University Press). |
For citizens trying to identify American ideals, there are two crucial questions: Why did immigrants come to America? Why did they and their children stay? The big decision to change countries is not life choosing between fish or fowl at a European town market, or trying a different tailor. Questions of ideals are at stake: the nature of the good life for yourself as an adult, and the kind of place you want to raise children in.
Except for African Americans, people came to America not only willingly but excitedly--English puritans from their Holland sojourn, Irish from blighted potato fields, Russian Jews from the shtetl, Mexicans wet from the Rio Grande, boat people from Vietnam and Haiti.
They stayed because they found the better life: food, jobs, safety, hope, college for their children. It was not just a better life, it was a new life.
In their words and deeds, Americans immigrants plainly tell us they placed value on bread, freedom, and the future. Despite fluctuations in the economy and in political and sexual mores, these fundamental ideals have not changed in three centuries.
"Ubi pains ibi patria," said the most famous of the eighteenth-century writers on America, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur: Where you find enough bread to eat, that place is your true fatherland. "This is that golden land," murmurs a young Jewish mother from central Europe, having heard of the bright future in America. The year is 1907 when she sets foot on Ellis Island, the huge receiving station in New York harbor, in the greatest of our immigrant novels, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep.
To Crevecoeur and Roth, add any number of the familiar names that helped from the literature of North America: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walt Whitman, Henry James. In more recent times, novelists Kurt Vonnegut, Russell Banks, Amy Tan, T. Coraghessan Boyle; poets Louis Simpson, Galway Kinnell, Robert Pinsky, Amy Clampitt. If troubled today by values turning upside down, changing as fast as the temperature on the Great Plains, we find surprising stability as we turn to our writers. They have known what we wanted and what we still want, and while our wants are not always virtuous, and assurance (or sorrow) that changes are not taking place as fast as they seem.
It is not a bad thing to want bread. Perhaps it is a bad thing to crave every weekend a buffet table groaning, as Jay Gatsby's
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