America
“I do not invent my literary ancestors. If anything, they invented me.”
—Gore Vidal
A Note from the Reagan Generation
Rolling Stock, 1987
The forgotten Frank Norris, realist poet of wheat, predicted the emergence of an earthy and true muse for American novelists of the future. “Believe me,” he declared, “she will lead you far from the studios and the aesthetes, the velvet jackets and the uncut hair, far from the sexless creatures who cultivate their little art of writing as the fancier cultivates his orchid. . . . She will lead you—if you are humble with her and honest with her—straight into a World of Working Men, crude of speech, swift of action, strong of passion, straight to the heart of a new life, on the borders of a new time.”
See the borders recede and fall ignominiously over the horizon! The tyranny of the upper-crust white literati and denigration of the populist vision continues today, virulent as in brash old Norris’s time. How I gag upon the “voice of a new generation” encomia that greet Ellis, Leavitt, Janowitz, McInerny, and the hive of detached young avatars, boldly sketching the generational angst, piquant in their tales of aimless youth, numbed by ludes, Alfa Romeos, and a surfeit of unfelt sex.
What is this Voice of a Generation bullshit? Did Hemingway and F. Scott and those fine old coxcombs speak for my grandfather, wiping his brow with axle grease while the Lost Generation drank from European carafes and got Parisian blowjobs? Did the Beats, sainted souls though they were, speak for my dad, surveying for the Iron Horse that Ginsberg rode first class to the Wichita love-in? Do our coke-besotted disaffected authors of Vintage paperbacks embody the dreams and aspirations of my pals, stocking shelves with Tide and chugging Twelve Horse ale to forget that it’s the 220-pound wife they’ll be banging tonight?
Hell no. With each cocaine contract and sale of movie rights to Judd Nelson we drift from Whitman’s noble admonition to speak of the “mass of men, so fresh and free, so loving and so proud.”
“Democracy is waiting for its poet,” Frederick Jackson Turner confidently told his classmates a millennium ago. She waits still, patiently, though poetry has long since discarded her democratic vistas.
Where in American letters are the authentic voices of the mass of men and women, so fresh, so free, so loving, so proud, who invigorate the heartland? Our cultural ruling class damns a generation for the sins of its affluent—those noxious coastal yuppies who compose the audience for the anointed Generational Voices. We are bombarded with smug attacks on Today’s Youth, delivered by paunchy old hypocrites who begrudge the children of the petty bourgeoisie the right to own a VCR.
I’m so bored with the antiyouth whining of the mildly discontented culturati: you know who you are, splitting grapefruit in bed with wifey, reading the elitist wedding page of the Sunday Times. Merle Haggard hit the right note: “Stop rolling downhill like a snowball that’s headed for hell.” And you know that if some rube dared put on a Merle record at one of your artyparties you’d laugh, derisively, do mock hillbilly sounds, then put on better haircuts like the Pet Shop Boys.
Merle was right. A Cold War and a paternalistic state have sapped our manly energy, left us a pitiful, bullying nation whose belleslettrists resemble the limp villains sketched so acidulously by Populist hero Tom Watson: “lolly-pops, vegetarians, grape-juicers, and sissy-boys.” Go fist yourselves.
Partisans of Thomas Wolfe have been amply warned to hibernate these days. Wolfe, the ravenous descendant of Whitman in the American bardic tradition, instructed the aboriginal writer to “make somehow a new tradition for himself, derived from his own life and from the enormous space and energy of American life.”
The presence of the frontier, the awareness of space and sprawling open lands, shaped the American character and instilled in us the craving for freedom, Frederick Jackson Turner argued in his definitive essay. For Wolfe, as with others in the American bardic tradition, that frontier was a double-edge sword: it offered endless opportunity for redemption, yet it attenuated the ties that ought to bind us to family, community, hometown.
At one point in Of Time and the River he despairs, “We are so lost, so naked and lonely in America. Immense and cruel skies bend over us, and all of us are driven on forever and we have no home. . . . For America has a thousand lights and weathers and we walk the streets, we walk the streets forever, we walk the streets of life alone.” Two paragraphs later, America’s naked possibilities transport him: “It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country. . . .”
Try to imagine the pallid and weary ironists, self-conscious crucified Jesuses of my generation, Wolfe-like with thick and effusive love/hate for America. Or for anything beyond the poisonous vials and pink teenage asses their dentist/psychiatrist/arbitrager daddies spring for via the unspoken trust fund.
Gore Vidal, whose mordant Mugump historical novels impress me as beautiful expressions of elegant Americanism in the only admirable and indigenous sense of that haughty adjective—the Henry Adams tendency—says that “Wolfe was to prose what Walt Whitman was to poetry.” Yes! A free Transcendentalist man of open spaces for whom unexceptional incidents of deracination unleash torrents of American longings, smack dab in the turbulent main current.
One sees, in the New Visions of our privileged oracles, no fascination with, or awareness of, the vastness and awful empty beauty of America. Gone is the enchantment with open spaces—even the freeway is a fetter. Gone is the sense of liberating freedom and terrible loneliness that our continent’s amplitude inspired. The disappearance of Turner’s frontier is indisputable fact for the wealthy young. The glorious Roman candle Kerouac, who sought to redefine the frontier in order to revive it, is irrelevant in Greenwich and Hollywood, and in those ivy enclaves barred forever to the Visigoths of Middle America.
One of your better hippie bands, Jefferson Airplane, requested yesterday’s UMCs to “tear down the wall, motherfucker.” Never mind that the group ended up tearing down the wall separating protest rock and corporate rock (“turning rebellion into money,” as the sell-outs of my generation, The Clash, so presciently put it). There’s nothing wrong with the destructive (and implicitly reconstructive) sentiment. And that, God willing, is exactly what we’re gonna do.
Tear down the complacent, effete walls that all you goddam Lionel Trilling epigoni built. Resentment ain’t unhealthy for sharpening the writer’s eye—just ask Vernon Parrington, if you haven’t flushed Oklahoma U’s greatest football coach-English prof down the memory hole.
There are a thousand new American songs on the tips of provincial tongues, ready to resume the glorious chronicling of Norris, of Whitman, of Wolfe, of Kerouac, of Garland, of London, of our forefathers. A regeneration is at hand, a rebirth of revolutionary spirit that will take us far beyond the narrow, constricted boundaries of the neurasthenic rich and into the verdant, fertile fields of new realism.
Politics be damned, but call us the Reagan Generation if you like, our formative years spent under his rule. Or don’t call us anything. I ask just one favor, dear reader: Do not call sexually confused collegiate velvet jackets the Voice of My Generation. That voice screams unheard in Fargo, in Anniston, in Batavia, and if you uncover your ears the clamor begins.
Frank ’n Nat
The American Enterprise, 2001
In the summer of 1821, two young men met on a stagecoach bound for Bowdoin College and struck up a fast friendship that would last throughout their lives. Fourteen-year-old Henry Wadsworth Longfellow may have impressed his classmates as Bowdoin’s
