Thursday, July 11, 1996
and
Wednesday, August 28, 1996
Noon
Caribou Coffee
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Many of the major writers of 19th-century America treated the subject
of art in their works. Among the scores of novels, short stories, and poems
that treat art and writing are Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Artist of
the Beautiful," Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher,"
Washington Irving's "The Art of Bookmaking" and "The Mutability
of Literature," Henry James' "The Madonna of the Future"
and "The Figure in the Carpet," Frank Norris' The Pit,
Herman Melville's Pierre, and numerous poems by Emily Dickinson,
Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In this meeting, we examined the
way writers defined and defended their careers as creators in a country
where, as Henry James pointed out, "the young man who has not . . .
an office in the business-quarter of the town, with his name painted on
the door, has but a limited place in the social system."
Although John Smith and the Puritans produced literary works that we still
study today, the notion of "American art" did not take hold until
the 19th century. Perhaps, as Benjamin Franklin suggested, America was too
busy getting on with the business of nation building to supply the creators
or audiences for literature, art, and other cultural endeavors. The story,
however, certainly is more complex. For one thing, as David Shields has
pointed out, the mercantile system helped ensure that the American colonists
retained a great deal of their British identity. Such identification, Chris
Goodson, pointed out, was particularly strong in the South, where William
Byrd and others in an English style. In such a society, anyone calling for
an American art would have had to run uphill. Even after the Revolution,
of course, America's first great men of letters looked back at Europe at
least as often as they looked ahead to America. Washington Irving's Geoffrey
Crayon confesses a soft spot for Europe's rich history and crumbling buildings,
and James Fenimore Cooper, while setting his Leatherstocking Tales firmly
on American soil, wrote the kind of fiction that earned him the nickname
"The American Scott."
When Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered "The American Scholar" in 1837,
Oliver Wendell Holmes called the lecture America's "intellectual declaration
of independence." Indeed, American literature exploded in the next
two decades. The works of Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and others gave critics
and readers of the twentieth century a chance to speak of an "American
Renaissance." Emerson's address, Whitman's preface to Leaves of
Grass, Melville's "Hawthorne and His Mosses" and other works
emphasized the intellectual aspects of this new sense of culture, but there
certainly were financial concerns at work, as well. Improved printing technology
and a market for magazines, for example, enabled some American writers to
make money, if not a living, with their pens. Still, because the United
States had no international copyright law, many publishers preferred to
publish British books for free rather than pay American writers to publish
their works. Despite the efforts of the American Copyright Club, which included
William Cullen Bryant and Edgar Allan Poe, the United States would not have
an international copyright law until 1893.
As late as the postbellum period, American artists betrayed feelings of
discomfort about their situation. In particular, Henry James sometimes treats
America as a place that does not nuture artists. In Roderick Hudson,
for example, the patron Rowland Mallett takes the sculptor Roderick Hudson
to Italy because he feels Hudson cannot fulfill his potential in America.
Eventually, of course, James himself became an expatriate, settling in England.
Chris Goodson, Brian, and Mark wound up the discussion by exploring the
question of what James and other American writers felt their country lacked.
While James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow demonstrated
that America could be a rich source of settings, Irving and Poe seemed to
feel that their country simply did not provide the rich history and culture
that they saw in Europe. A more serious problem for the American artist
was the perception that Americans did not appreciate art. Brian pointed
out that James, in The American, draws two Americans who betray a
density about art. Similar characters appear in Frank Norris' The Pit
and William Dean Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham.