“To be an American… is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inhabit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.”
- Leslie Fiedler, Cross the Border – Close the Gap (1972)
Almost exactly a year before his death, the Harvard professor and scholar of nineteenth-century literature Francis Otto Matthiessen, who did more than almost any other academic to establish American Studies as a respectable discipline, was libeled in an April 1949 edition of Life Magazine as being among a worthy coterie of “Dupes and Fellow Travelers” that “Dress Up Communist Fronts.” The immediate cause of the accusation was a gathering of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, to which various Soviet artistic luminaries (including composer Dimitri Shostakovich) met with American colleagues. An exchange that conservative publisher Henry Luce would, inevitably, deem as un-American. The unsigned article mocked intellectuals like Matthiessen as at best “gentle souls” who were a “little bewildered by the world outside their… textbooks,” though concluding that figures like writer Dorothy Parker, playwright Arthur Miller, composer Aaron Copeland, physicist Albert Einstein, poet Langston Hughes, and conductor Leonard Bernstein had “associated themselves with a Communist-front organization… [to] lend it glamor, prestige, or the respectability of American liberalism.”
In the magazine, Matthiessen appears between the engineer Walter Rautenstrauch and the writer Donald Ogden Stewart in a small black-and-white square, his receding hairline and tired eyes making him look far older than his 47-years. Life, that paragon of middle-class, middle-brow, post-war culture, included in that issue such all-American commercial copy as “To every wife who sighs over bills… Canon Percale Sheets, now they’re Combspun,” and Basil Rathbone asking, “May I tell you why you’ll like smoking the NEW Fatima?” while accusing Matthieson – who in his 1940 classic American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman enthused about the spiritual “devotion to the possibilities of democracy” – of being a Russian stooge. Though Matthiessen was never a member of the Communist Party, infiltrator Henry Philbrick told the FBI that the professor was a prominent activist, while with the rise of McCarthyism a few months earlier it was understood that the scholar was soon-to-be targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Despondent both over the heart-attack death of his lover of two-decades Russell Cheney a year before, and over the increasingly illiberal slide of the United States itself, Matthiessen booked a room on the twelfth-floor of the Hotel Manger in north Boston, with his hand that had once annotated Hawthorne and Melville wrote a note that read “I am a Christian and a Socialist… I am depressed over world conditions,” and then opened the window and jumped to his death.
A risk in making an allegory out of that suicide, though it’s hard not to see a foreboding in Matthiessen’s death wherein a man so responsible for not just studying America, but indeed arguing for the seriousness of America as a subject, should choose to end his life in part over the state of that once-indispensable nation. There is, somewhere from the twelfth floor of the Manger Hotel to the sidewalk in front of Boston’s North Station, a kind of object lesson about those, like Matthiessen, who see America as a grander, transcendent, mythic nation dedicated to certain inviolate truths of freedom, justice, and equality, and those others – frequently those in charge – who would prefer that the United States be a country like any other, albeit far more powerful. Before Matthieson, American literature was not a fit subject in an English Department which still largely focused on the great British authors; no room for Thoreau and Dickinson alongside Chaucer and Shakespeare (though his position was in the English Department, he notably taught undergraduates in Harvard’s History and Literature program). With American Renaissance, Matthiessen (the privileged Pasadena-scion of a family zinc fortune) not only supplied a helpful categorization for the remarkable half-decade that started in 1850 and which encompassed the publication of The Scarlett Letter, Moby-Dick, Walden, and Leaves of Grass, he also arguably invented the idea of American literature as a separate branch of the Anglophone, for criticism is always as creative as it is analytical. “The primary value of these books,” wrote Matthiessen regarding Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman, “lies in what they can still tell us about ourselves… [for] they were written with the conscious aim of helping to further a ‘literature for our democracy.’” When Matthiessen jumped from that window, The Scarlett Letter – our national epic of misplaced shame and guilt – had just turned a hundred a few weeks before.
To be an Americanist is always an ambivalent position of sorts, or maybe just for me. Though I’m not formally trained in American Studies as a discipline, and my primary field is seventeenth-century British Literature (the sorts of scholars for whom Matthiessen had to most vociferously make his case), during my doctoral comprehensive examinations my secondary field of specialization was “Early American Literature,” an eccentric hodgepodge of texts that made me read a list from the Popol Vuh and Norse Eddas through the early Republican poetry of a Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow. Within my department, I was (if I’m remembering correctly), the first early modernist to subspecialize in early American writing, and the rare graduate student not to choose Medieval literature for that secondary discipline, a period that seemed the natural partner with the Renaissance.
Nothing about pairing the early modern and the early American felt incongruous to me; after all, I reasoned, you’re basically reading stuff by the same people during the same period, only separated by an ocean. The mania for “transatlantic” scholarship certainly made my particular work not overly idiosyncratic, though with an intellectual foot in seventeenth-century Boston, England and Boston, New England there were certain things that I learned about specialties. For one, the early Americanists all knew about the works being written across the sea during the same time period in a manner that the converse wasn’t true. Every scholar of Michael Wigglesworth has read John Milton, the opposite – I’d venture – is unlikely. There’s a reason for that, of course: Wigglesworth is bad. As I often joke, early American literature, that is the writing produced before the renaissance defined by Matthiessen, is the genuinely boring stuff – at least as literature alone (an Edward Taylor or Anne Bradstreet aside).
Which is the second thing that I observed in being an interloper into American Studies, and that’s just how much critical and theoretical work was necessary in developing a conceptual framework for America, of justifying the work. That’s not to say that the same isn’t true in my primary field, as the often-rancorous disputes a generation ago about whether the period is best described as the “early modern” or the “Renaissance” can attest to. But with early American literature, there is the added issue of thinking through how texts can be involved in the construction of a country seemingly ex nihilo, of what the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman called, in a 1958 theoretical treatise of this same name, the “invention of America.” Because much of American literature (but not all!) is Anglophone, there was a difficulty, especially during the years of U.S. ascendancy both before and after the Second World War, of thinking of it as separate from English literature, for as William Spengemann observed in A New World of Words: Redefining Early American Literature, Kafka is taught in German classes and Rousseau in French even though neither was respectively from Germany or France.
For scholars of Matthiessen’s generation, those involved in the development of American Studies, American literature was independent from British even if they ostensibly shared a tongue, an argument of interest both to progressive socialists (albeit patriotic ones) like the Harvard professor and the U.S. State Department. According to Spengemann, it wasn’t actually language that marked “American” literature, but a certain orientation, a particular perspective and set of concerns, so that the cannon of early American literature could include not just dreary Puritan religious tracts and dry almanacs, but Thomas More’s Utopia and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. An ingenious critical gambit, and a demonstration of the creative fecundity of theory over base factuality, but also a claim indisputably helpful to my own professional development. Reading Spengemann, I had a realization about how the two halves of my scholarly fascinations could be combined, of how what interested me more than said Puritan religious tracts or almanacs (though I do find them interesting) was how they, and other works, could be enlisted in the project of inventing America. And so, on the high theoretical seas, I made landfall in my newfoundland of American Studies.
“Chronicles of the past reflect the perspectives, agendas, and quirks of their authors,” wrote Louis Menand (a great scholar of American Studies) in The New Yorker, “historians are engaged in storytelling, not science.” Always being more amenable to this as a literary scholar than a historian, I’ve appreciated looking in the back window of American Studies and seeing that they too often share this particular understanding. For me, the genuine revelation in my comprehensive examination lists, reflective of the happiest part of getting a PhD when I could just devote myself to reading dusty, dog-eared, red-ink-underlined used books written by Benedict Anderson to Christian Renatus von Zinzendorf, was not the primary texts in early American literature, but the multitude of deeply weird (to me) secondary ones. This isn’t to say that I didn’t appreciate the theoretical titles in my primary field – I still fashion myself a New Historicist, after all. Nor is to say that I didn’t like all of those deeply strange early American works, from Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan to William Byrd’s The History of the Dividing Line, that fewwould read if they hadn’t been written in what would one day be the United States. But I received a thrill from the assemblage of critical works that tried to make sense of those early works, that tried to understand Morton and Byrd and to enlist them after the fact into a national story, an American myth.
Precursors like Frederick Jackson Turner at the 1893 Columbian World’s Exposition lecturing in Chicago’s White City about the closing of the frontier or the grandfather of Puritan studies Perry Miller working in the Office of Strategic Services as a psy-op agent against Nazis while turning a wayward biblical quotation by John Winthrop into the archetypal Hesperian “city on a hill.” There was Richard Slotkin who in his landmark trilogy that begins with Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 posited a series of questions about the isolate, stoic, and cold American soul (as D.H. Lawrence referred to it) that to me explains everything from the Vietnam War to school shootings; a similar indispensability with Richard Drinnon’s Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. Then there is the brilliant Leslie Fiedler, that if any writer proves my point about creativity being more important than analysis is him, especially in Love and Death in the American Novel.
No coterie of scholars impressed me more, maybe “thrilled” is again the better verb, than the so-called “Myth and Symbol School” of American Studies. Here was a group of historians and literary scholars, included in the refreshingly old-fashioned syllabus of critical texts for my comprehensives, whose work was involved in the invention of America as an idea. This was a variety of scholarship exemplified by the movement’s founder Henry Nash Smith in 1950 when he wrote that in a nation as constructed and conceived, invented and imagined as America, the issue of historical explication involved not just government missives and census records, but the exegesis of “a collective representation, a poetic idea… that defined the promise of American life.”
That argument is from Nash’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth which inaugurated the theoretical inclination that borrowed its name from the subtitle, a group of thinkers that understood abstract archetypes as riven through actual American experience, of fundamentally literary tropes that were literalized in our history (for good and much more frequently bad) so that a poetic sensibility becomes as indispensable as a positivist one in terms of comprehending the United States. Whether Nash’s Virgin Land, Ernest Tuveson’s Redeemer Nation, R.W.B. Lewis’ American Adam, or Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden, this was an approach which read (and indeed wrote) “America” as a kind of literary fiction, that applied the tools of criticism to the questions of history, of national experience. A kind of national psychoanalysis whereby “studying the images and symbols which a society has created for itself” allows us to “gain a better understanding of American society,” as Nash writes.
Obviously, there is much of transference in this, of projection, which is a large part of why Myth and Symbol School was passe before I was born, but also what appealed to me about it. For the title of this essay promised a memoirist’s confession of why I’m a “reluctant” American and Americanist, which is intrinsically related to the creation of our national symbols. I’ve already established my circuitous route from Stratford-upon-Avon to Plymouth Rock, but for me American Myth and Symbol School provided a personal grounding as an American, with understanding a nation for which I’ve always had an ambivalent (in the true sense of that word) patriotism and love towards. Second-generation American with a somehow unquenchable affection for the nation, as well as a deep awareness of its injustices, hypocrisies, inequities, and brutalities, Myth and Symbol thinking allowed one to dwell in, well, myth and symbol. To me, American Studies was a discipline to be done at a dusty antiquarian’s desk of heavy stained wood, to pore through pages of Emerson and Thoreau in a stuffy office while looking out at a manicured campus lawn, contemplating democracy.
In the spirit of Nash and Tuveson, Robert Bealuah and Sacvan Bercovitch, I enjoyed coining theoretical neologisms, though none of mine ever took obviously. “Covenantal ambivalence,” “directional poetics,” “total civilization” – I churned them out like I was on a Fordist assembly line. What this taught me, as I fully embraced the subjective, generative, creative act of thinking about national myth, was how America has never been a fact, but an idea. Of course, ideas can be changed in a way that facts can’t, and the myths and symbols of dreams can become nightmares. Myth and Symbol was always meant to be diagnostic as much as prescriptivist, to critique dreams as much as to advocate for them. And yet when reading Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role, there is a capacity to thrill, a danger in reading the myth as the reality. Somewhere there remains an idea to be yearned for and strived towards, an ever allusive and always beautiful undiscovered country, but in 2026 I’m not quite sure where it’s located on the map.
