I N M E M O R I A M
The American Studies of Henry Nash Smith
By Richard Bridgman
A history of the American Studies movement has yet to be
written, but we do know that it gained its early institutional
form at Harvard in the middle thirties with the establishment of
a doctoral program in American Civilization, overseen by Howard
Mumford Jones, and that its first graduate, in 1940, was Henry
Nash Smith. With Smith's death, in an automobile accident in
Nevada last May at the age of seventy-nine, a reluctant leader of
a movement always uncertain of its identity entered the history
that he had pondered for so long.
The year before Henry Smith took his doctorate, he published
a still well-known article in the New England Quarterly on what
he called Emerson's "problem of vocation." In it, he outlined how
Emerson was torn between a commitment to such action as would
reform society and a reserved life of contemplation. Ultimately,
Smith thought, Emerson learned to accept the tensions between
these two modes of being as "important themes for his art." One's
choice of topics for investigation and their treatment often
reflect one's own preoccupations, and there is every evidence
that this was the case in Smith's treatment of Emerson. Further,
that a scholar generally associated with the West should this
early in his career have engaged himself with the quintessential
New England mind is reflective of the paradoxes that regularly
arise out of the diversity of American lives. Yet, as I hope to
show, it makes sense, for Smith's whole is the author of The
Colloquial Style in America and other books. Except for periods
as visiting professor at the university of Copenhagen and at
Moscow State University, he has taught since 1962 at the
University of California, Berkeley. His career was involved in
studying the problems and illusions of identity, which in turn
bear upon the conduct of one's life.
Henry Smith initially possessed a distinct regional
identity, to the best aspects of which he consciously elected to
be faithful. He had graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1925 at the age of eighteen.
In 1926, he went to Harvard for a year's graduate work. Upon his return to Dallas, he began
teaching at Southern Methodist, and, under the guidance of John
McGinnis, he started to co-edit the Southwest Review. The journal
had moved in 1924 from the sponsorship of the University of Texas
at Austin, where it had appeared as the Texas Review. Its
renaming signaled larger regional aspirations, which a group of
internationalists on the magazine's board broadened even further.
Over the years, various members of the creative and academic
communities were associated with it as contributing editors,
among them Mary Austin, Witter Bynner, Albert Guerard, Howard
Mumford Jones, and Jay B. Hubbell. It was among this company that
Henry Smith began to stake out an editorial ground.
Smith wrote editor's notes, book reviews, and articles for
the Southwest Review, an experience he later described as "a sort
of super-graduate seminar, an Institute of Higher Studies." Under
McGinnis's tutelage, he said, "We learned to abhor slipshod
thinking and shoddy writing, and to respect clear ideas and sound
prose." Another person familiar with the situation said that, by
the middle of the Depression, "the magazine certainly would have
died had Smith not given up everything else but his teaching to
keep it going." The teaching itself was no small responsibility,
for at that time the normal load at SMU was fifteen class hours a
week. The strain was sufficient for Smith to have written in a
private letter in 1936 that "keeping the magazine going seems to
involve an outlay of energy and time that is entirely
unreasonable; according to all common sense it is not worth it."
His first full-length article, written when he was
twenty-two, with the articulateness and confidence of one twice
his age, was entitled "Culture." It displayed many of the lines
of his subsequent thought. He was still thinking locally, as when
he observed that, even if signs of an interest in art had sprung
up lately in Texas, to him they appeared no more than "a
superficial striving for an effect without a cause." In their
material prosperity, Texans were suffering from "the inanity of
ease" that had caused the women with their earnest presence and
the men with their checkbooks to try to handle culture as a
purchasable commodity.
In defining "culture," Smith said that it was "not anything
measurable," but that one sense of it was "the ability to do
nothing, significantly." At its best, he argued that culture was
"not a lecturer and a study class"-- the common secular means at
that time for middle-class enlightenment--but "a society .of free individuals." Smith's definitions were always of that
nature: straightforward but a little vague, certainly not
academic or technical, but always with the force of imperative
ideas behind them. This feature of his thought seemed to have
derived from the nature of Texas intellectual life at the time--a
period when various figures, such as Walter Prescott Webb and J.
Frank Dobie, associated themselves only cautiously with the
academy. Dobie, a close friend of Smith, had written on Thomas
Heywood's The Golden Age for his master's degree at Columbia, but
having done so, he evolved into a Western folklorist, and once
remarked that "the average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but the
transference of bones from one graveyard to another." As for
Webb, although he eventually became an internationally known
historian of the West, he failed to complete his doctorate at the
University of Chicago, and when one was finally awarded to him by
the University of Texas, it was because his home institution
accepted as his dissertation The Great Plains, a book that he had
published the year before. Webb was then forty-four. No wonder
that in reviewing Norman Foerster's American Scholar in 1930,
Smith should have declared: "Someone should say once in a while,
where it will be heard in academic circles, that there are other
forms of strenuousness of the spirit than those involved in
scholarly research." Despite taking his bachelor's degree at a
comparatively young age, Smith himself was thirty-four before
achieving his Harvard doctorate, and forty-four before his first
book, Virgin Land, appeared. All of which is to say that research
degrees were not then a central goal for Texas thinkers.
In writing reviews for the Dallas Morning News book page
and editing the Southwest Review, Smith had elected to make a
career not solely within institutional education, but not
excluding it. He was seeking something more authentic than the
local study groups dedicated to Browning's poetry and superior to
mass culture. He pointed out that the urban Texan lived in an
unreal world, made up of cars that originated in Detroit, popular
songs from Manhattan, and movies from California. The value of
these "opiates" needed to be assessed skeptically. The way to do
it was for Texans to understand and participate in "their
specific environment," for not until they had accepted the local
world would it become universal. Then, "when we have whole men
and women we shall have composers and poets." Smith had brought
the Emersonian ethos from Harvard to Dallas.
Questions of identity were central in the Southwest at that
time. Like Americans in general, perpetually trying to separate
their authentic elements from patterns inherited from abroad, the Texan was cultivating an
awareness of his immediate environment without cutting himself off from the larger
world. The group with whom Smith came to maturity was far from
parochial. Webb had done advanced work at the University of Chi-
cago, and in 1942-43 was the Harnsworth Professor of American
History at Oxford; Dobie had attended Columbia and during 1943-44
gave a series of popular lectures at Cambridge University; and
Smith himself had graduated from Harvard and later lectured
throughout Europe. Yet each identified with the Southwest,
without yielding sentimentally to such vulgar manifestations of
Texas jingoism as its six-shooters, boots, and ten- gallon
hats--what Smith called "fossilized Western symbols preserved in
contemporary popular culture."
Yet, one must not deny one's environment. In his commitment
to regionalism, Smith pointedly distinguished the Southwest from
the South, which was itself undergoing a renaissance of sorts
just then. Although Smith criticized the primitive state of
development in the Southwest--it had no university comparable to
that of North Carolina, he said, and it neglected minds like
Stark Young, Frank Dobie, and John Lomax--nonetheless, when the
time came, he was confident that the region's literary results
would differ markedly from those produced in the South. He argued
that the Southern Agrarian movement merely perpetuated "the myth
of the plantation, an American Arcadia," even as it neglected the
South's actual economic problems. As for the Southwest, Smith
spoke years later in paying tribute to Dobie of the folklorist's
love of freedom and his resistance to "all coercive forces,"
which Smith identified as no abstraction, "but a quality of
experience of actual human beings in immediate contact with a
semi-parched earth--its dust and heat and relentless distances,
its austere plants and lean animals."
As a young editor and teacher, Smith regularly composed
essays on current issues as well. He took the opportunity of the
1928 election to criticize Hoover's "philosophy of comfort,"
saying that Hoover was "not stressing the actual relief of
misery--no one could object to that or fail to applaud it--but
instead he is holding up as his principal argument the
superiority of the American standard of luxury to that of other
nations. There is in his attitude entirely too much exaltation of
creature comfort and economic prudence without any suggestion of
the free play of ideas." In another article, given the expatriate
movement on the one hand and Sinclair Lewis's exposure of the .tawdriness of Main Street on the other, Smith addressed the
question of why one would even wish to live in the United States.
Again, he emphasized the obligation to confront actuality: "We
must learn to cease looking for idyllic beauty in the Texas
Panhandle or for a Gothic architecture on our Main Streets" and
rather "learn to respond to the niggardly grandeur of the Plains"
as well as to "conceive the sort of building which belongs on
our soil." Then, memorably: "Newness half-violated is the
American environment; but it has its compensations.
Even as Smith was trying out his ideas, his Methodist
university was suffering the onset of political strain. Worse for
Smith, the chairman of the English department tried to fire him
on moral grounds, while the university president more
diplomatically sought his resignation by offering a year's pay
without duties. The problem was William Faulkner.
At the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929, Smith
had reviewed it favorably, saying that certain pages in it were
"very near great literature," while at the same time underlining
his particular concerns with the observation that the "book has
shown un-guessed possibilities in the treatment of provincial
life without loss of universality." Admiring Faulkner's work, he
had purchased the story "Miss Zilphia Gant" for the Southwest
Review. The story had already been rejected twice by Scribner's
and the American Mercury. John McGinnis then persuaded Smith not
to publish it in their journal, whereupon Smith arranged for it
to be brought out in 1932, by the Book Club of Texas in an
edition of three hundred copies, with an introduction by Smith
himself.
Those were the grounds for which John 0. Beaty, Smith's
chairman, sought his dismissal. Beaty regarded "Miss Zilphia
Gant" as "the foulest book I have ever read--a book which parades
sex abnormalities in a hideous way and also contains a
particularly scurrilous attack on Jesus Christ." Beaty was about
right, for this is one of Faulkner's cruder stories, with a
half-wit, a tramp lover, a woman justifying masturbating to
herself because "Mary did it without a man," two murders, and a
general domestic pathology sustained over two generations. SMU's
president, Charles Selecman, agreed that the story was "sala-
cious and immoral in tone," but when Smith returned from England
where he was then teaching and refused to resign, the president
made a place for Smith in the Comparative Literature department,
even though Beaty regarded this compromise as "a surrender to
subversive elements."
During this same period, Selecman himself came under fire
from his faculty because of his imperiousness and, worse, for his
insensitivity to salaries. Smith was one of the faculty members
who petitioned formally to the board of trustees for relief,
which in time was partially granted. The constricted tangle of
academic life in Texas certainly contributed in large measure to
Smith's eventual decision to leave. By 1937, he had reentered
Harvard and enrolled in its new American Civilization program.
After taking his doctorate there in 1940, he returned for a year
to SMU, where he at once introduced a "History of American
Civilization" program, but the following year he moved to the
University of Texas at Austin as a professor of American History
and English, departmental boundaries still being sufficiently
rigid to make it difficult to accommodate a representative of the
new field of American Studies.
At the University of Texas, too, trouble was brewing, which
resulted in 1944 with the dismissal of the university's
president, Homer P. Rainey. In the aftermath of this controversial decision, Smith prepared a
documentary pamphlet for the Students Association, which was then engaged in protest
demonstrations. In the pamphlet, some of Smith's most characteristic qualities of mind emerged.
In the preamble to his account, Smith warned that both his selection of materials and
the emphasis he placed upon them would "inevitably reveal a
perspective." "No one," he said, "can prepare such a narrative
without using a frame of reference." But that did not mean a
historian could not tell the truth--"It is merely a comment on the
nature of historical truth, which is human rather than
mathematical or mechanical. "
Smith then outlined the chronology of events at the
University of Texas from 1939 through 1945. There had been
several confrontations in which the university regents accused
the faculty of immorality, racial liberalism, and Communist
sympathies. At one point, reviewing a contretemps over faculty
representation on the athletic council, Smith concluded: "I
confess that a careful study of these two accounts has failed to
leave me with a clear impression of what happened.... Since the
matter has not attracted very much attention, I am inclined to
leave it at that." Then, suggesting the distance between him and
his fellow Texans, he added: "I have never been able to
understand intercollegiate athletics." One issue, though must
have struck him with special force. In 1942, for a reading course
designed for sophomore engineering students, John Dos Passo's Big
Money had been assigned. One of the regents attacked the choice
as "sheer worship of filth for filth's sake" by a "degenerate
group of sophisticates," and, despite faculty protests, the novel
was ultimately dropped from the reading list.
Although formally remaining a member of the Texas faculty
until 1947, Smith returned to Harvard in 1945 to replace Perry
Miller while he was on leave; then, in the following year, Smith
accepted a fellowship at the Huntington Library. In effect, his
years in Texas were over. In 1947, he moved to the University of
Minnesota to join a diversely formidable group, improbably
gathered there, among them Joseph Warren Beach, Allen Tate,
Robert Penn Warren, and Samuel H. Monk. While at Minnesota, just
as the McCarthy period opened, Smith addressed another national
issue--academic freedom--which was then tormenting the University
of Washington. In his 1949 essay "Legislatures, Communists, and
State Universities," Smith argued the case against dismissing
faculty members who were Communists on the grounds that the
pressures against being a party member were so severe in the
United States that "remaining in the party is itself an act of
free choice, constantly repeated." In fact, he added, it was
tangibly advantageous for a faculty member to leave the Party,
rather than to endure the obloquy of open membership. Smith's
central point was that an open society, and institutions in it
such as the universities, required freedom of discussion. He
believed that the steady expansion of the sphere of unacceptable
behavior was a profoundly dangerous one and that the subjection
of a university to any orthodoxy was inevitably destructive.
A decade after he moved to Berkeley in 1953, Smith found
himself immersed in a series of successive and related uprisings,
starting with the Free Speech movement, then progressing through
the Vietnam, Cambodian, and Third World protests, all of which
pitted the university against its regents and legislature, with
the ultimate firing of administrative officials. During this
period of wearing turmoil, Smith was less publicly visible than
in the past. Rather, he operated largely behind the scenes as a
trusted conciliator, talking and negotiating with all parties.
Smith was never, I think, a joyful controversialist. His
engagement came from principle. By nature he was a deliberate
speaker and writer. In his lecture courses, he invariably developed his ideas and the evidence for
them in a step-by-stepsequence that gained the respect but not the enthusiasm of his
undergraduate students. He was not a performer. Listening to him
lay out an argument afforded pleasures comparable to those
derived from following a strong, solid chess game.
It is difficult to communicate a presence as unassuming as
Henry's, but there is no doubt in my mind that it constituted an
important part of his influence as an intellectual leader. Tall,
lanky, with a slight, measured drawl, he was neither flamboyant
nor eccentric, but that most improbable of entities, a sober,
serious citizen who liked to laugh. Rational in the best sense,
he took genuine pleasure in thinking and never turned
contemptuously away from new developments in thought. If asked,
he would explain his reservations, and would candidly acknowledge
his bewilderment rather than make a pretense of comprehension,
and then seek enlightenment as he did in a series of letters to
his friend Helen Vendler over the significance of John Ashbery.
Always courteous, usually calm, he lightened his burdens in the
evening with martinis, baroque music, and friends.
As a graduate teacher, Smith insisted upon thorough
research and regarded precision as imperative, though without
being pedantic about it. After Tony Tanner took a seminar from
Smith, he wrote an account of it as a model for British
universities. Tanner described how the group of students were
initially puzzled by the variety of apparently extra-literary
projects they were set, such as locating the popular ideas of
science in the period under consideration, the nature of book
illustrations, the size and distribution of the reading public,
and the psychological assumptions of the periodical critics. But
later, as they read the fiction together, Tanner said that they
came to realize the rich density of understanding they had
already accumulated as a group.
In my own experience, Smith was a patient graduate director
who encouraged independence, even though it was a time when we
were obliged to discuss seriously whether a dissertation on
pre-Jeffersonian agrarianism might conceivably be passed by an
English department (and to decide that it would not). The best I
can say is that he left one alone to get the quirks out of one's
system; but, when asked, he always gave candid help and worked
through drafts quietly and efficiently. On one of my manuscripts,
he noted "the deadening effect of allowing your discourse to
verge on 'And another ant brought another grain of wheat.' " That
made me wince, then laugh, then revise.
All this has been a long foreground to the Texan Henry
Smith becoming Henry Nash Smith as he emerged onto the national
scene in 1950 by establishing emphatically the power and
originality of his mind with the publication of Virgin Land: The
American West as Symbol and Myth. The book had a prolonged
gestation like a European doctoral thesis, crowning a career
rather than, as in America, initiating one. Smith had been slowly
formulating his ideas and doing the punishing research necessary
for a project of this magnitude, contributing in the process four
chapters on Southern and Western subjects to the Literary History
of the United States in 1948. The essential questions that Virgin
Land addressed were: How did nineteenth-century Americans view
the huge blankness of the West, and in turn, how did their
imaginative conceptions affect their behavior? What hypnotizes
and draws men into action, especially under the rude conditions
of a frontier? Smith had already observed the power of
misconceptions in the more limited area of the Southwest. Now he
elected to think about that great dim North American continent
stretching out beyond the Alleghenies. As the continent was
explored, inhabited, and cultivated, various images of it developed. First, there were those
conceptions that drew people to and beyond the frontier, and then those generated by encounters
with the territory itself. Smith's originality was in seeing that
these diverse ways of identifying both the land and the
particular kinds of people operating on it were products of the
imagination, and that even when they were incontestably at odds
with the reality of the scene, they still often functioned
effectively.
If some of Smith's sources were from literature now
considered classic, notably that by James Fenimore Cooper and
Walt Whitman, he drew much more upon the revelatory evidence of
popular writing. The early quasi-fictional lives of Daniel
Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson yielded in the sixties to
Erastus Beadle's series of dime novels, closely followed by the
theatrical flamboyance of Buffalo Bill Cody. But visions of the
West were hardly confined to imaginative literature. They also
appeared in the writings of travelers, scientists, traders, and
politicians, none of whom could see without preconceptions. The
coalescence of their views of the far territories proved to be
compelling determinants on practical matters, such as
legislation, as well as on the behavior of the populace.
Smith's patient harvest of diverse testimonies indicated
what insights were available when one ignored, as it were, the
limits of any specifically defined academic discipline. In the
opening pages of one chapter of Virgin Land, the sources for
Smith's argument are successively: Toqueville's Democracy in
America; an essay by Whitman; Lewis Evans's Geographical,
Historical, Political, Philosophical Essay (1775); Jonathan
Carver's Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America in
the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768; Nathaniel Ames's Astronomical
Diary; a poem by Freneau; a letter and an essay by Franklin; an
article from the William and Mary Quarterly and one from
Agricultural History; and George Logan's Letters, Addressed to
the Yeomanry of the United States (1791). Each source constitutes
a part of the extremely intricate mosaic that Smith was
assembling. One never feels that their function is to crush the
reader with authority, but rather to enlighten by means of
establishing unexpected conjunctions of evidence.
As he worked with his materials, Smith gradually decided
that the central ideas of the American West coalesced under three
headings that were historically sequential but subject to much
overlapping and contradiction. Initially, the continent was
regarded as no more than a "passage to India," a practical means
of gaining access to the rich Oriental trade. But crossing the
continent required the services of various experts in wilderness
ways, such as guides and hunters. In tribute to Cooper's great
creation, Smith designated them "sons of Leatherstocking."
Finally, as the West began to be domesticated by farmers, it
acquired a powerful imaginative identity as "the garden of the
world."
Smith shows how each of these governing symbols originated,
then spread throughout discourses of different kinds, as well as
how certain important implications developed out of them. As the
various embodiments of the frontiersman proved to be especially
influential, Smith traces his character and its various
incarnations from Daniel Boone through Cooper's mythmaking and
into the "objectified mass dream" of the popular romances
(printed on the new rapid rotary steam presses and therefore
appropriately known as "steam literature"). Smith follows the
evolution of the Western hero until the early 1870s, at which
point the cowboy (first known as a "herder") begins to emerge. In
an analysis that remains noteworthy even today, he also considers
the heroines of the dime novels, to whom the frontiersman's
skills were transferred, producing Hurricane Nell, Wild Edna, and
Calamity Jane. Smith only suggests the subsequent extensions of
the self-reliant frontiersman into the private detective,
although in reconsidering Virgin Land he cited appreciatively
the work of John G. Cawelti, who demonstrated the persistence of
this kind of hero in such related genres as the spy thriller and
science fiction.
If the frontiersman dominated the imaginative frontier, his
identity required definition; but, when one was advanced,
problems arose at once. What was the essence of the role he
played? Was he a representative of civilized values, bringing the
light of rationality into a savage gloom? Or was he a child of
nature, withdrawing from the legalisms and artificialities of
urban civilization to pursue an elemental existence of bracing
immediacy? Each conception of the frontiersman had its own
imaginative limitations. The standard-bearer for a Christian
empire could become sufficiently civilized and pious as to lose
the force of his independence, while in the anarchistic
conditions of the wilderness the new Adam had the potential of
lapsing into brutish criminality.
Since the conventions of antebellum American literature
were hardly prepared to accommodate a harsh realism--it would take
the experience of a murderous Civil War to achieve that--various
adaptations of the frontiersman had to be made, particularly in
respect to love, marriage, and domesticity. Sensing that too much
taming would forfeit the primal energy of the character, writers
normally just decided to keep the frontiersman-hero apart from
women. But the necessary mingling of the frontiersman with other
members of society generated conflicts of class. Even fictional
conventions required that only certain people could consort
intimately with others, so that, however morally noble Natty
Bumppo might be, his background excluded him from certain social
relationships. Dialect, too, became an index of self, and for
Smith in particular, the significance of one's speech patterns
became central, for his next major work would concern Mark
Twain's championship of the vernacular, with all the triumphs,
but also strains and limitations, connected with such an
advocacy.
As the frontier moved westward, leaving behind land now
available to be worked, the political imagination of Americans
began to develop an abstract conception of its inhabitants that
went back at least as far as Crevecoeur and Jefferson--that
of the yeoman farmer, the freeholder whose job and pleasure it
was to cultivate this earthly paradise. (The South, whose system
was built on much larger agricultural units, worked by slaves,
concurrently developed an alternative myth of the plantation
pastoral.) On the whole, even if he appeared regularly in
political rhetoric, the sturdy yeoman resisted translation into
fiction, for he lacked the adventurousness associated with the
men of the frontier.
The territory that the yeoman inhabited came to have an
equivalent myth--that of a garden, an agrarian paradise of fertile
soil, blessed with a balanced outpouring of sun and rain. Such
images appeared regularly in legislative speeches, even though
the reality was quite different. As Americans moved West, they
encountered not Eden but treeless prairies and a succession of
agricultural blights: tornadoes, dust storms, drought, and
locusts. At the same time, as huge land grants were made to the
railways, then transferred into the hands of speculators, Eastern
capital began to invest in Western land, perverting the idea of
an agrarian utopia, even as the technology of steam-driven
tractors and threshing machines threatened the existence of
independent freeholds. Yet, the myth of a garden cultivated by
small freeholders persisted, and persists even into contemporary
farm crises, where businessmen farmers with land and equipment
capitalized to several million dollars are still idealized as
simple husbandmen .
Smith proposed that the myth of the garden had several
other large-scale consequences, among them a characteristic
American isolationism, encouraged by the conception of self-
sufficiency available in the protected heartland. Also, the
argument that the existence of large areas of fertile land served
the United States as a safety valve seemed to him dubious even
for the nineteenth century. That myth, he thought, simply masked
conditions of unemployment and labor strife. The governing powers
of mercantile trade and industrial technology profited by the
sustained assumption that, if things were unsatisfactory, then
one could always move westward, for there were invariably
immigrants and conservative stay-at-homes who would take over the
abandoned jobs on industry's terms.
Virgin Land contains much more than this summary has
covered, but perhaps I have suggested the provocative nature of
its insights, achieved by a patient survey of statistics,
historical accounts, political speeches, and popular fiction. As
the United States assumed its role of international power and
prominence, Smith offered a complex interpretation of the
capaciousness, depth, and illusion of its early years. Still, the
book has had its critics, Smith among them. They have focused
especially on his use of what were seemingly his central
organizing terms, myth and symbol. It is clear that Smith never
intended these terms to be much more than mechanisms to enable
him to organize a great deal of imaginative material in which he
found certain shared assumptions and dynamics--what he called
"recurrent images and constellations of images." On the other
hand, he later came to believe that, in Virgin Land, he had too
readily accepted the nineteenth-century view that saw the
American Indians at "a stage of evolution far inferior to that of
the European settlers," and that, with the help of revisionist
historians and young agitators who identified themselves with the
Native Americans, he now saw that the cost of domesticating the
continent had been "a prolonged act of genocide."
Because of Smith's centrality for the American Studies
movement, theoretical issues continued to dog him. The movement,
begun at Harvard in the thirties, came to prominence after the
Second World War. In part, it involved a yearning to move
intellectual investigations beyond the strict boundaries of
disciplines as conventionally defined, to find a way of studying
the interactions of consciousness and society. It was a time
when departments of English were dominated by an older generation
of philologists and belletrists, with the young Turks of the New
Criticism on the rise. History was regarded as invested by a
fallacious scientific objectivity, whereas literary studies were
becoming committed to the autonomy of the text, quite outside
biography and history. At the same time, with the United States
prominent on the world scene, there was an increasing national
self-consciousness, a greater concern for locating an American
identity. As it happened, this search for identity soon became an
international preoccupation, with the result that the American
Studies movement became as important abroad as it was in the
United States. (In fact, Bernard Fay had assumed the chair of
American Civilization at the College de France as early as
1932.) The U.S. government assisted this activity by encouraging
European and Asian nations to make a gesture toward reducing
their war debts by acquiring libraries of American books and by
sponsoring visiting lecturers from the United States.
Meanwhile, the American Studies movement itself underwent
paroxysms of self-definition. Had it a methodology? If not, could
it develop one? Henry Smith continued to resist technical
intricacies. In the opening pages of Virgin Land, he had finessed
the problem of myth and symbol by defining them as "larger or
smaller units of the same kind of thing, namely an intellectual
construction that fuses concept and emotion into an image." In a
later article, he defined American Studies with similar deceptive
simplicity. It was the study of "American culture, past and
present, as a whole." As for "culture," it was "the way in which
subjective experience is organized."
Such language was hardly adequate at the theoretical level,
but even Bruce Kuklick, the most severe critic of Smith's
philosophic underpinnings, concluded that, although "humanist
scholarship in American Studies illustrates a set of classic
errors... I realize that philosophical criticism is much easier
to do than constructive empirical research." Smith's goal was
invariably humanistic. He sought access to those meanings that
were larger than those available in historical data or aesthetic
evaluation alone. Others, like his colleague at Harvard and
Minnesota, Leo Marx, openly defended an "unscientific method" for
American Studies, claiming, justifiably, I think, that it tried
not to be capricious or impressionistic but believed that
significant relationships were not susceptible to quantification
and that discursive meanings were not all that was available in a
culture.
American Studies, then, tried to prove its value in practice,
not theory. Forces deeper than theoretical precision were in
operation. Over the next generation, they produced a number of
illuminating studies of Americans' relationship to the continent
they occupied, among them R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam
(1955), which concerned the myth of America offering the
individual a fresh beginning, one emancipated from the chains of
history; Leo Marx's consideration of classic American writers
reacting to the onset of industrial technology, The Machine in
the Garden (1964), and Richard Slotkin's location of a sanctified
destructiveness in American life in Regeneration Through
Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860
(1973).
The American Studies movement expanded rapidly. Most of the
activity, however, was devoted, not toward the larger unifying
themes of culture itself, but rather toward more narrowly defined
areas, such as education, labor and folklore. The movement soon
produced a journal, American Quarterly, followed later by others
edited in Canada, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. It is notable
that Smith was rarely a central participant in these organized
activities. We never discussed the matter directly, but my sense
was that he was made uneasy by such exuberant national self-
preoccupation. I do know that, when he moved in 1953 from
Minnesota to the University of California, he hardly participated
in its American Studies activities, which at any rate never
developed beyond a one-year undergraduate honors' course.
At the same time that Henry Nash Smith joined Berkeley's
English department, he was invited to assume the editorship of
the Mark Twain papers. His selection now seems inevitable. It
determined the course of Smith's work for the next twenty years.
For a time in his role as editor, Smith had many administrative
decisions and legal negotiations to carry out. He was not
enamored of such work, but he could never resist a serious call
from society. He believed in the community of scholars, and when
he felt it was his responsibility to do so, he served. Once at
the airport on a Christmas afternoon, I was grousing to him about
the obligation of leaving on a holiday for the Modern Language
Association meeting. Henry heard me out for a while, then,
looking straight at me, he said, "It's what we do." After a
moment, to temper that disconcertingly sober observation, he
smiled and added: "Don't you know the cows have to be milked on
Sundays too?"
Once the Twain papers had been organized, Smith accepted
the chairmanship of the department, serving from 1957 through
1960. In 1968-69, he was president of the MLA, and in 1973, the
year before he retired, he agreed to chair an arduous year-long
study of the future of Berkeley's English department. All of
these activities seriously dissipated his energies, although I
don't suppose he would have conceded the legitimacy of the
implications of that proposition.
In 1957, Smith brought out Mark Twain of the Enterprise, a
selection of Virginia City journalism, helpfully placed in its
historical context. Three years later, the Mark Twain-Howells
Letters, 1872-1910 appeared in two volumes co-edited with William
Gibson and so scrupulously annotated and indexed that even today
the collection remains the most detailed and reliable compilation
of information about many of the people and dates in Clemens's
life-quite aside from affording the intrinsic interest of
listening to the two Midwestern writers exchange ideas with one
another over nearly forty years. Finally, in 1962, Smith
published his own thoughts on Clemens's career in Mark Twain: The
Development of a Writer.
The focus of Smith's consideration here was on Mark Twain's
discovery of the power and uses of the vernacular, a term Smith
expanded to mean not diction alone but a whole set of attitudes
and values, constituting a new, sometimes skeptical, sometimes
appreciative perspective on the world. Twain's increasing
awareness of those gifts that first brought him to prominence
constituted a version of the problem Smith had addressed years
before in Dallas: the regionalist's task of` achieving authenticity through a consciousness of the
actualities of his environment. For Twain, the task meant establishing his identity
in relation to what Smith called "the Matter of Hannibal"--that
is, "by working out a continuity between his adult life in
Hartford and his remote childhood in the small town on the west
bank of [the Mississippi] thirty years in the past." Smith showed
how Twain intuitively, not programmatically, worked his way past
the popular spread-eagle oratory and brag as well as the genteel
tradition that dominated polite literature in order to create in
Huckleberry Finn a middle style largely free of dialect, of
idiosyncratic color, and of`"eloquence," yet with an eloquence
all its own.
Because Mark Twain entered a period of severe ideological
trauma in the 1890's, his later works served Smith's argument
less well. Accordingly, Smith took the opportunity to readdress
one of them in a series of lectures that appeared in 1964 as Mark
Twain's Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in "A
Connecticut Yankee". Here, he explored the implications of the
protagonist, Hank Morgan, being at once a capitalist and a
vernacular hero. The consequence was that what had started as a
good-natured burlesque of Arthurian England ended in the
nightmarish carnage of the book's conclusion.
Smith's last book, Democracy and the Novel: Popular
Resistance to Classic American Writers, appeared in 1978
following his retirement. Its chapters are somewhat awkwardly
linked essays, which in themselves are often perceptive, however
roughly they cohere. In them, Smith reversed his long preoccupation with popular culture in
order to understand the tensions that the major novelists felt as they contested the commonly held
assumptions of their nation. Various problems of audience, of
moral standards, and of inhibiting conventions are considered
against a background of genteel sentimentalism.
During Henry Smith's long involvement with Mark Twain, much
of his energy was directed toward trying to steer a rational
course through the extended turmoil that began at Berkeley with
the Free Speech movement, then escalated nationally to encompass,
over the better part of the next ten years, protests against
academic establishments, the United States involvement in Vietnam
and its Cambodian aftermath, and various Third World strikes and
confrontations. It was a period of extreme tension and,
inevitably, of regular demands for redefinitions of purpose and
priorities in the university. As president of the MLA in 1969,
Smith faced the problems head-on.
He gave his presidential address an ironic title drawn from
a Bob Dylan song: "Something Is Happening, But You Don't Know What It Is, Do You, Mr.
Jones?" He acknowledged that his term as president had been "distinctly uncomfortable," but he
accepted the challenges of the militants as offered in good faith. On
behalf of the profoundly establishmentarian Modern Language
Association, he tried systematically to sort through the various
charges of its rebellious members to determine those for which
concrete action was already underway, those that he thought
deserved immediate attention, and those that required further
discussion to clarify the ends in mind.
One issue Smith identified as of the greatest importance
for consideration was the claim that, because "objective"
scholarship, criticism, and teaching failed to question the existing social and economic orders,
they therefore represented nothing more than an immoral neutrality. Smith regarded it as
salutary to re-examine the aims and methods of scholarship; at the
same time, he believed that the challengers incurred the
obligation of proposing alternatives, which themselves would be
susceptible to scrutiny and debate. There is a self-conscious
tone throughout the address, a hint that Smith felt that even the
act of making an annual address might be outdated, and that there
were disagreements, misunderstandings, and agendas that went far
beyond his own commitment to rational discourse. The "inglorious
liberalism" that he represented supposed, he said, that "all
political activity involves some degree of guilt. Absolute purity
is unattainable; but to fail of perfection is not necessarily to
accept total corruption." Provocation was useful, he reiterated
doggedly, whenever it obliged scholars to explain why their work
merited attention.
The speech is to me a moving document, for it represents
Henry Smith still exemplifying those principles to which he had
adhered all his life, but adapting them to the contemporary
situation. Whatever his reservations about the passionate tumult
swirling around him, he tried to turn its energies to the
positive ends of re-examining self and its institutions. He
himself had always been willing to acknowledge his own
insufficiencies, anxieties, and weaknesses. So there was
something ironically painful for anyone who knew his stands
against administrative and legislative interference with the
intellectual life in Dallas, in Austin, in Seattle, and in
Berkeley to find him now leading--and threatened with being
identified as the tool of--an establishment organization that was
under attack. But Henry understood the whims as well as the
reasons of history and long before had learned to endure their
fitful onslaughts. At the conclusion of his address, he opened
the floor to questions.
|