The American Writer

Part I

Morning Thoughts

Perfectly normal storytellers, as they advance in age, begin writing nonfiction. I’ve watched it happen to at least a dozen of my elders, who, after a lifetime of yarning, departed from tale spinning to deliver messages reading: What I really meant to say was . . .

I would read their words, shake my head in knowing manner, smile most kindly, and say: These writers fought the good fight. If one of them now wishes to reminisce about the old Brooklyn Dodgers, or another wishes to write a history of women in South Dakota, surely we have no reason to quarrel. Then, and with only a tiny ray of unconcealed pride, I would murmur: Of course, I shall never do such a thing. I was a good deal younger in those days.

Because, I discover that my elders were doing what writers and artists always seem to do: trying a new way (for them it’s new) to infuse the world with another jolt of good sense. They may have a broad point of view, or a narrow one, but we can pretty well trust it as unique and earned.

My point of view sees a world where the young are hard-pressed, but still hold the idealism and beauty of youth. I see young writers and artists alight with inner vision, yet beset by confusions. They are not wrong to be confused. It’s tough enough to be young and talented in this noisy world at the end of the twentieth century. Add to the noise the chaos of a growing and changing society, and it’s wonderful that most stay reasonably sane.

Yet, writers and artists have traditionally gone eyeball-to-eyeball with situations so confused as to seem senseless. Creating order in the midst of chaos is one part of the job. I see these young ones’ situation as holding great opportunity, but also know their lives will not be easy.

Perhaps, I tell myself, I can make their task a little easier, while paying back a bit of what I’ve received. Writing has been awfully good to me, as have art, theater, and music, together with writers and other artists.

This book, then, is written as a road map for young writers, artists, and other creative minds. It deals in the context of storytelling for two very good reasons. I know more about storytelling than anything else.

I could add little about art since Ben Shahn wrote The Shape of Content and Sam Hunter wrote Modern American Painting and Sculpture. In theater, Arthur Miller’s introduction to his Collected Plays, in combination with Act One, Moss Hart’s autobiography, gives most of the insights we need in theory and practice of theater.

The young writer or artist already knows, or will soon discover, there’s not much difference in the way honest artists and writers go about matters. Painters use paint, sculptors use stone, writers use words, playwrights use the three dimensions of a stage; but the basic problems and attitudes required by all arts are much the same. It’s those problems and attitudes, the demands they make, and where they originate, that are chief subjects of this book.

Literature and art in America operate under influences as old as the times of Puritans and Pilgrims. Our literature also rises from legends and myths of other countries because few nations have had the numbers and varieties of immigration enjoyed by America. It is commonly said, and rightly, that we are a nation of immigrants.

Equally, we are a nation that, from its beginnings, has searched for a utopia we will never find. We won’t find utopia because, at base, America is still an idealistic nation. Idealists never fully achieve their ideals because their ideals stand too high for a democracy to handle. (This assertion sounds obscure and abstract, but will seem less so as we go along.) The glory of America is that we have a nation that keeps hungering for, and striving after, ideals, even though many ideals are often offended.

I offer this book to young minds on the assumption that it is much easier to work on behalf of the American people if one understands what formed our society. The young writer’s and artist’s problem, and mine, is that society traditionally loves easy answers, while art and literature give complete answers; and blamed few of those answers are easy.

This book tells things I wish someone had told me. We won’t deal with techniques (for many books about techniques of writing and art are available), but with basic assumptions about storytelling, and thus art in general. We’ll then follow main highways of thought, explore some byways not generally thought of as polite places to be seen, and ask only that those byways serve as context for young genius.

We’ll watch the American writer putting together a written culture on which we of the twentieth century have largely depended; and we’ll see the need for a new mythology. A lot of wonderful words, plus a lot of pure foolishness, prepared the stage on which we tread.

One caution seems necessary. What you read here is a single opinion, although an educated one. Goodspeed, and trust your own judgment.

The Story

LET’S START BY thinking of what stories do for people, because stories function in different ways at different times. We’ll look at the story as:

Entertainment and news

Giving identity

Imparting integrity

Creating myths on which a civilization depends¹

Entertainment and News

Back in the Dark Ages of Europe (dark for most people, although learning and discovery were still alive), storytellers abounded. They could not write. If they could, they would not have copied their stories down. Their stories were their stock in trade.

In those old, dark days, night came without apology or interference. Darkness surrounded, cut only by illumination from camp or lodge fires, or the moon. Storytellers went from camp to camp, or, later, on the coasts, from ship to ship. They were always welcomed. They received food, lodging, and, sometimes, sex. Nothing about the commercial aspect of the business has changed.

In return, the storyteller brought news and entertainment. There were no books, radio, television, operas, or symphonies; although there were jugglers, clowns, and sometimes traveling actors who performed morality plays.

Generally, though, there were only the storytellers. As storytellers ourselves, we can imagine some directions in which they drifted; because, as you have doubtless already discovered, it is wrong to allow facts to get in the way of the story:

I’ve come from a far country many leagues beyond the sea. . . . (He actually came from a kingdom in the next valley, twenty miles away, over a range of high hills from which ran a stream he had to jump across.) . . . a land of rare spices and great castles where a just king has heretofore ruled over a loyal and happy kingdom . . . (Most kings in those days had a principality of about ten thousand acres, and were sufficiently civilized to make Macbeth look like a holy saint.) But, alas, of late they have been having dragon problems. A dragon named Loathsome has been devouring maidens. (In those societies a maiden was a girl under age twelve.) The king has reserved the hand of his daughter, the princess, who is of beauty beyond belief. . . . (In this sort of storytelling, it is illegal to have a princess who is a bowser.) . . . and her hand will be given in marriage to the warrior who slays the dragon. . . . (Nobody ever asks the princess for her opinion because she might give it.) Many and many a stalwart knight has sallied forth to engage Loathsome in battle. The knights carried swords tempered with magic by a guy named Merlin. No knights have returned. Dragon magic defeats human magic. . . . (The tension mounts. The kingdom is clearly in a dreadful fix if it faces superior magic.) But still there is hope. The king has recruited a new boy named Lancelot, who is nine-and-oh against dragons. . . . (And at this point our storyteller wraps up the story, because the next time he comes through town, he’ll be more than welcome. His audience will be all sweaty to see how things turned out.)

In later days, this sort of storytelling would be called a serial, and, in my youth, would star Tom Mix, or Sergeant Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

On this level the story largely entertains, although the storytellers did mix local news in with their tales. They might tell of births and deaths among the aristocracy, or gossip surrounding a local parish.

What the storyteller did then, and does now, is enlist the audience. The audience commits itself to the story, and to the people in the story. As the story goes on and becomes elaborate, people in the audience do their own creating. On a subconscious level, they say, I am afraid of dragons. I love my daughter, who is a maiden. I wish I were someone brave and strong who could defeat dragons. This Lancelot is a hero, and I want to be as much like him as possible. Some listeners/readers will use a lot of creativity, and some will use little; but, either way, the story functions on the level of entertainment, not amusement. There is an important difference.

The story is different from simple amusement because amusement requires nothing from the audience. For example: one may feel obligated to laugh at a joke, but one is not obligated to become a part of the joke. Or, ask yourself how much you remember of what was reported on yesterday’s television news. The vast part that you don’t remember amounts only to amusement.

Stories generally entertain, and generally should. However, there are other important functions of the story.

Identity

The story is probably as old as language, and is certainly as old as the cave paintings in northern Spain and southern France; which is to say, twenty thousand years. Painting and language are tied so closely that it’s probably impossible to have one without the other. In this business of giving identity, stories and paintings even function in much the same ways.

The story gives people a sense of themselves, a past and a future. This is true of the story in all languages and nations. Because of the story, people are not trapped in themselves, nor are they trapped in the present.

Here are two examples. The first complex:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

So begins the Hebrew Bible, and even the gravest doubter must admit it is one whale of an opening sentence. It is only when we look at the full record that we realize the genius of those old Hebrew storytellers.

They had a nation of people who could be pretty feisty and capable of scrapping among themselves. They were a tribal culture. In tribal cultures, infighting often proves deadly.²

The Hebrew people may have been largely illiterate in those days, but they were not simple. Their storytellers did not come up with short and easy answers for a nation that could divide and break apart. Instead, they dealt with history. The books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers tell how the world was made, how it was peopled, and how the Hebrews were anointed by God. The books tell of mistakes, of captivity, of exodus, of battle. In other words, they create an entire world from which the Hebrews derive. Those four books are a workup to the great book of Deuteronomy.

In Deuteronomy, the Hebrews finally get a complete sense of who they are, because Deuteronomy is a book of definitions. (It looks, at first, like only a book of rules.) If seen as the logical result of the first four books, then the business of definition for the Hebrews becomes obvious. A complex people learned of themselves through a complex set of tales.

Different peoples need different mixtures of stories. Our second creation-story deals with tribal people who lived at a later time than the ancient Hebrews, although they derived from origins at least twelve thousand years old. They were forest Indians, and their context was more than a little mystical.

Here is the Cherokee story of creation:³

How the World Was Made

The earth is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock. When the world grows old and worn out, the people will die and the cords will break and let the earth sink down into the ocean, and all will be water again. The Indians are afraid of this.

When all was water, the animals were above in Galunlati, beyond the arch; but it was very much crowded, and they were wanting more room. They wondered what was below the water, and at last Dayunisi, Beaver’s Grandchild, the little Water beetle, offered to go and see if it could learn. It darted in every direction over the surface of the water, but could find no firm place to rest. Then it dived to the bottom and came up with some soft mud, which began to grow and spread on every side until it became the island which we call the earth. It was afterward fastened to the sky with four cords, but no one remembers who did this.

At first the earth was flat and very soft and wet. The animals were anxious to get down, and sent out different birds to see if it was yet dry, but they found no place to alight and came back again to Galunlati. At last it seemed to be time, and they sent out the Buzzard and told him to go and make ready for them. This was the Great Buzzard, the father of all the buzzards we see now. He flew all over the earth, low down near the ground, and it was still soft. When he reached the Cherokee country, he was very tired, and his wings began to flap and strike the earth. When the animals saw this, they were afraid that the whole world would be mountains, so they called him back, but the Cherokee country remains full of mountains to this day.

When the earth was dry and the animals came down, it was still dark, so they got the sun and set it in a track to go every day across the island from east to west, just overhead. It was too hot this way, and Tsiskagili, the Red Crawfish, had his shell scorched a bright red, so that his meat was spoiled: and the Cherokee do not eat it. The conjurers put the sun another hand-breadth higher in the air, but it was still too hot. They raised it another time, and another, until it was seven handbreadths high and just under the sky arch. Then it was right, and they left it so. This is why the conjurers call the highest place Gulkwagine Oigalunlatiyun, the seventh height, because it is seven hand-breadths above the earth. Every day the sun goes along under this arch, and returns at night on the upper side to the starting place.

There is another world under this, and it is like ours in everything—animals, plants, and people—save that the seasons are different. The streams that come down from the mountains are the trails by which we reach this underworld, and the springs at their heads are the doorways by which we enter it, but to do this one must fast and go to water and have one of the underground people for a guide. We know the seasons in the underworld are different from ours, because the water in the springs is always warmer in winter and cooler in summer than the outer air.

When the animals and plants were first made—we do not know by whom—they were told to watch and keep awake for seven nights, just as young men now fast and keep awake when they pray to their medicine. They tried to do this, and nearly all were awake through the first night, but the next night several dropped off to sleep, and the third night others were asleep, and then others, until, on the seventh night, of all the animals only the owl, the panther, and one or two more were still awake. To these were given the power to see and to go about in the dark, and to make prey of the birds and animals which must sleep at night. Of the trees only the cedar, the pine, the spruce, the holly, and the laurel were awake to the end, and to them it was given to be always green and to be greatest for medicine, but to the others it was said: Because you have not endured to the end you shall lose your hair every winter.

Men came after the animals and plants. At first there were only a brother and a sister until he struck her with a fish and told her to multiply, and so it was. In seven days a child was born to her, and thereafter every seven days another, and they increased very fast until there was danger that the world could not keep them. Then it was made that a woman should have only one child in a year, and it has been so ever since.

As with the Hebrew story, the Cherokee story is accompanied by other stories in the mythology: the first fire, how the moon and sun came into being, how evil entered the world, et cetera. The difference between the stories is the difference between groups.

The patriarchal Hebrew society needed clear and definite answers. It had to be in control because it existed in a harsh land that did not forgive mistakes. The Cherokee society, living in a much easier land, did not need to be as precise. In the Cherokee stories there is more room for mystery, and for individual interpretations of the world. Still, those stories do for the Cherokee exactly what the books of the Bible did for the Hebrews.

Integrity

Our storytellers have done the same thing as did Hebrew and Cherokee storytellers. Since we are American storytellers, let us take a quick look at our first American storytellers and a snapshot from American history. The first writers we see as fully American were born within a generation or so after the Revolution: roughly 1780 through 1820. In this group are Thoreau, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and one of our best, Nathaniel Hawthorne. John Greenleaf Whittier was born in those days, as were Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Walt Whitman was born then, as were Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.

These were the first fully American writers for the reason that their few predecessors were English colonists. From 1607 (the founding of the Jamestown colony) until the American Revolution in 1775, our writers thought of themselves as loyally English.

Even among the generation born after the American Revolution, that English way of thinking carried some influence. Washington Irving was a fine writer and an able historian, but he mostly followed English literary models. James Fenimore Cooper believed and behaved like an English squire. Still, and in spite of a tendency to overstate everything to the point of contradiction, he produced some very American books. Those first American writers were raised on their parents’ tales of the American Revolution. They read poetry by hotshots like John Trumbull, the poet of the Revolution. They discussed the brilliant and revolutionary thought of Thomas Paine. They came from a background where writing had become intense, always important, and generally defiant.

Recall that in those days the way of life was not so different from five hundred years before. In outlying areas, night still descended like black drapes. In cities, houses held oil-burning lamps, but a lot of illumination came from the fireplace around which families gathered; parents, children, grandparents, uncles, and aunts.

People had spare time in evenings and on Sunday afternoons. Main entertainments were talk, reading, tracing family history, and a certain amount of bulling around that has gone on since the invention of language—and in every nation.

Those young writers, sitting and listening, were among the first people on these shores to know themselves as completely American. As they grew and began telling stories, their stories sought to show an American identity, not British. They had a great deal of new material to work with, material no English writer owned: the frontier, issues of Indian/white/black, and an overreaching (and fairly humorless) religious heritage. In addition, they had the romance of the American land. Now we arrive at the process by which our early storytellers helped civilization gain integrity and become honorable. It can be done by comparing the problems of Thomas Jefferson in 1807 with the problems of Daniel Webster in 1850. Jefferson enjoyed little American identity. Webster would enjoy a lot.

During his second term, in 1807, Jefferson faced tough opposition. Federalists, and plenty of others, were convinced that Jefferson would destroy this newly formed nation. They howled in absolute frenzy. Powerful groups acted in savage opposition. In one of our first dirty political campaigns, opponents spread a tale that Jefferson sired children by his slaves; a story that has since been greatly generalized among those motivated by politics or prejudice.⁴

Jefferson did stand for questionable national policies, and he never got completely clear on the issue of slavery. As president he made some mistakes. England reigned as the major world power on the seas. France fielded the major armies on land. Jefferson attempted to juggle both facts, and caused people to say the country would soon be at war with both nations. When Jefferson embargoed trade in an attempt to avoid war, he pretty well wrecked the economy in northern seaports. At the same time, Jefferson cut the U.S. Navy back to a minor force. Later, during the War of 1812, the nation could have used a bigger navy. Tumult popped around Jefferson’s ears. Some of his friends began to desert him.

We need now ask what Jefferson had going:

He had his personal integrity as a Southern gentleman. He had the integrity of his thought. He had a few friends, and that was the whole cake. He had no great sense of an American identity, although he had memory of a revolutionary presence. In fact, he was one big portion of what American identity then existed. When he fought back and ran a sometimes brilliant administration, he seems to have done it largely on nerve.

Now we’ll reel history ahead to 1850, and here comes Daniel Webster, one of the most respected, and even well-loved, men of his generation. He would die owning the hatred of great numbers of people. In 1850, Congress already knew that the Union could crack in a civil war. Texas had been annexed after the Mexican War. A congressional battle ensued over the extension of slavery to Texas, to California, and to the New Mexico and Utah territories. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky introduced a compromise bill, partly the creature of Stephen A. Douglas, senator from Illinois.

Unfortunately, one provision of Clay’s compromise was known as the Fugitive Slave Act, which returned escaped slaves to the South. In spite of the powerful Stephen A. Douglas, the Northern states were going to have nothing to do with that compromise unless it was backed by a great statesman. Webster, who had spent a good part of his life opposing Clay, saw that the only way to save the Union was to support Clay.

Tired and ill, Webster, then a man of sixty-eight years, delivered his greatest speech in behalf of the compromise. The compromise passed. Webster gave his life in behalf of the Union.

His speech drove Northern intellectuals, abolitionists, and writers to a point of frenzy.⁵ They gave incendiary speeches. They damned Webster in the press, the least nasty word used being traitor. They achieved a sort of mindless howl where facts, motives, and reasons meant nothing. There is no possible way to know, but had the Northern intellectuals and writers remained rational—and had Southern slave hunters not trotted north, inflaming the situation—men of good will might well have ended slavery and avoided the Civil War.⁶

The hated compromise would hold for ten years. Meanwhile, Webster’s nerve and conscience passed from the scene. There had been no way for him to delude himself. He knew his speech would not simply make him dead politically, but would kill him. He died in less than two years, during which he served as secretary of state.⁷

Now we may ask what Daniel Webster had going.

He had an American presence. He was completely American, a child of revolution, but not an English revolutionary. Webster had the congregated voices of two generations of American writers, and those voices were explaining what it meant to be an American. A lot of those voices would come to hate Daniel Webster, but that is not the point. Those voices gave Webster his identity as an American statesman. In part, they allowed him to make his decision.

He had other American voices. He had the emerging Hudson River School of painting. Those fine artists were explaining the romance of America, a nation that often runs on romance, albeit sometimes darkly. Webster had two generations of American theologians behind his understanding. (Theology remained important in the country until after the Civil War.) Webster had an emerging American music, and though much of it derived from slavery in the form of the minstrel show, nearly all of it was better than the tunes of the Revolution.

We cannot know how much strength came to Daniel Webster because of his American identity; but when we compare his problems to those of Thomas Jefferson, we get this business of integrity in perspective.

Jefferson made a tough, uphill fight. During the American Revolution, he had pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor. There is no reason to doubt he would have given his life and fortune for America. There is plenty of reason to doubt he would ever have taken much of a chance with his sacred honor. After all, honor was nearly his whole source of identity.

Webster gave his life. He took a chance with his honor—or, rather, with being misunderstood. He died in dishonor. We honor him today through the comfortable gauze of history. We can also know he had such courage because of a complete American identity, and with it the strength of a moral man.

Working Myths

Every nation, and every people, own mythology. When the myths are working, people and society get along pretty well. When the myths no longer work, people and society find themselves in a world of hurt. A good bit of the trouble you see in our present society comes because we’re trying to run a twentieth-century urban world on a nineteenth-century rural mythology.

You, the young and talented, are among this nation’s best hopes for survival as an enviable civilization. You can do what national leaders will not, and probably cannot; you can create a new mythology.

Here are a few of the old myths:

The frontier, with Conestoga wagons, Indian wars, cowboys, loggers, railroad building; pioneer and the settler, the notion of growing up with the country, and the great love of the American land. Heroes: Lewis and Clark, trail bosses, Paul Bunyan, John Henry.

Writers from James Fenimore Cooper to Zane Grey helped build this myth, and pulp writers also contributed. Popular painters like Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell helped as well. The myths rose from stories told on the trail, and many rose from popular music.

There are also farm myths expressing love for the land. As Steinbeck’s character George puts it in Of Mice and Men,

. . . Someday—we’re gonna get the jack together and we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres . . . we’ll have a big vegetable patch and a rabbit hutch and chickens. And when it rains in the winter, we’ll just say the hell with goin’ to work, and we’ll build up the fire in the stove and set around it an’ listen to rain comin’ down on the roof. . . .

Southern myths centered around English traditions, and arose from the plantation system. The myths for white people are best seen as expressions of English country life. As we’ll later see, myths for black people held all sorts of magic. The mythology of slavery was rural, and its music would be both rural and religious. A lot of Southern music helped form myths. Stephen Foster’s minstrel songs are one example, the spiritual is another.

The nation had other mythologies, from songs of the Erie Canal to Western adventures by Bret Harte to riverboat stories by Mark Twain. The point is that our nation’s mythology centers around places where most Americans no longer live, because these days most Americans live in cities. Specifically, fifty years ago, half of our people lived on farms or in towns of under ten thousand. Today only 5 percent of our population lives in those places.

Perhaps the strongest myth is that of the American individualist; rough, woolly, going-his-own-way, and finally being elected judge or president, or appointed general of an army because he didn’t pay attention to anyone but himself. In this category we traditionally see people of the caliber of Thomas Edison, Teddy Roosevelt, and Henry Ford.

Mythmakers, Young Writers and Artists

You can understand the problem. The nation has a mythology symbolized by cowboys and individualism, while needing a mythology that allows people of many cultures to live happily cheek by jowl.

You can measure your own importance by the size of the task. You can also measure your importance as you read further and see what other creators before you faced, and what they accomplished. This business of working in literature and art is one of the toughest, but most rewarding, jobs in the world. I hasten to explain:

The mythic voice rising from literature and art allows us to be humane. We are not humane because of political power, or education, or even religion. We are humane because we recognize the humanity of others. The writer and the artist appeal to that humanity. For that reason, literature and art are the bones of civilization.

Here is a demonstration that you can understand with your heart, but not necessarily with your logic; although on a deep level it is completely logical:

Assume, as legislatures and senators and citizens’ committees and PTAs sometimes do assume, that literature and art are useless. They have no practical purpose. They put no beans on the plate. No one wants his child to be a writer or an artist, because many writers and artists cannot even make a living unless they take a secondary job. Let us put the writer and the painter—also the musician, the actor, the composer, and the sculptor—back into the workforce. Let’s rid the world of these unprofitable endeavors.

First, let us burn all the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Let us take Nefertiti from the Berlin Museum and sink her back in the Nile. Let us finish the job the Turkish and Greek armies started, and blow up the remains of the Parthenon. Let us raid the museums of Europe, burning the Mona Lisa, the Rembrandts, the Renoirs.

We do that. We lift our heads and look around. Civilization still proceeds. The cars still run, the highways function, and the trains are nearly on time.

Good. Now let us destroy every recording by Louis Armstrong, Keely Smith, Janis Joplin. Let’s get rid of Rhapsody in Blue. Burn the works of Beethoven, and turn all the guitars in the world into planters for geraniums. We will burn the paintings of Rubens and the novels of Dostoyevsky. We will dispose of Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, Martin Anderson Nexo. We will get rid of Shohi Ooka, Nikos Kazantzakis.

We do this. We lift our head. Nothing has changed. The trains still run almost on time.

Let us torch the work of Auden, cummings, Frost, Arnold, Amy Lowell, Donne, Emily Dickinson. Let us take the Elgin marbles and use them for the foundation of a motel. Let us renovate the Sistine Chapel, turning it into a useful place for the sale of merchandise. Let us ban dancing in Hawaii, ban dancing in China and Japan and Austria. Let us murder the work of Abram Tertz.

We do this. We lift our heads. Something has changed. Somewhere, at some time in the destruction, something awful happened. We stopped our forward move toward being humane, and are slipping quickly backward to the state of animals.

The trains still run nearly on time, but we do not. What sustained our hearts and hopes is gone.

The story, the painting, the play, and the song are single bones in the intricate skeleton of a civilization composed of yea-sayers and nay-sayers. The nay-sayers enjoy bombs, superficial power, tons of wealth and influence.

The yea-sayers like humanity. They tell their joys and griefs with stories, plays, music, painting, theology, and pure science. They are not afraid of design, and they are not afraid of content. You are one of them.

1. Later, at an appropriate point, we’ll also see the story as a form of history.

2. Tribal culture is generally insular, secluded, and argumentative. For example, in Klawock, Alaska, a Tlingit gentleman once told me: If we heard that an army was coming to kill our children, we’d let it happen because we’d be too busy arguing. Elements of tribal culture exist wherever one finds insularity, be it the contemporary Middle East or early America.

3. As taken from The Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of The Smithsonian Institution, 1897-98, by J. W. Powell, director.

4. Jefferson may very well have sired children with Sally Hemings, who was a slave. Recent DNA findings show a high probability that this is true, and a near certainty that some man in that gene pool was involved. Studies of Jefferson have troubled over the question since the early nineteenth century. The greatest likelihood says that Thomas and Sally engaged in a love affair of many years.

5. The only decent piece of writing from the affair—or at least the only one I’ve found—is Ichabod, a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier that compares Webster to Noah after the biblical flood. (Noah kind of deteriorated after that flood. He became a drunk, and had some good times and gray times.)

6. Except in the South, anyone who thought about matters could see slavery was dying. English mills already tried to get away from dependence on Southern cotton. Slavery was becoming economically impractical, as the sharecropping system would soon demonstrate.

7. This is the historic picture of Webster. If you would like to meet the real flesh and-blood hero, read The Devil and Daniel Webster, by Stephen Vincent Benét.

The American Writer in World Literature

I TEACH AT a small university in America’s Northwest. My beloved university is happily peopled by multitudes of Norwegians, together with representatives of about every other nationality and ethnic group; but the preponderance is Norwegian. Norwegians are not shy about telling jokes on themselves, and one story they favor tells of the traditional standoff between Norwegians and Swedes:

Once there was an international conference on The Elephant. Representatives of all the nations got together and wrangled. After two weeks of infighting, no one could come to any conclusions. The nations voted to suspend the conference. They agreed that at the end of a year, each nation would submit a book about the elephant. These books would form the basis for a new conference.

The year passed. The books came in. This is how it went: The British book was bound in royal blue with eighteen karat-gold-embossed title: The Elephant as an Emblem in Heraldry. The German book was three volumes; large, heavy tomes in thick covers of black and royal purple titled: Tactical and Strategic Uses of the Elephant in Land Waifare.

The French book was a slim volume bound in limp leather, and with a little ribbon for use as a bookmark. It was titled: The Love Life of the Elephant.

The American book was in practical, green library