‘Utopia’ means ‘no place’ as well as ‘good place,’ so founding one outside book would require giving no place, negating the airy nothingness of imagination. If you can dream it, you can do it, utopians say. Realists reply, Why so? and utopians answer, Why not? The problem with the question, ‘Why not?’ is its openness; an evil man can pose it as easily as good one. One should deal circumspectly with utopians.

Nathaniel Hawthorne prefaces The Blithedale Romance circumspectly, with a ‘cover’ story. [1] Although Blithedale (‘Happy Valley’) resembles the Brook Farm commune founded in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1840, Hawthorne professedly does not intend “to illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in respect to socialism” (633). Hawthorne invites his readers to think undogmatically about a political dogma. He claims a purely literary reason for selecting this no-place for his setting. An “American romancer” needs “an atmosphere of strange enchantment” not easily found in his matter-of-fact commercial republic. Brook Farm/Blithedale was just such a place, “essentially a day-dream, and not yet a fact”—”an available foothold between fiction and reality” (674). By so characterizing the Roxbury utopia, Hawthorne quietly puts its founders (himself included) in their place, while saying nothing to provoke ideological antagonism. To thoughtful readers he uncovers himself as a politic man.

His apologia leads such readers to wonder, Why be a “romancer” at all? Why not be novelist who stays closer to hard facts? Or a journalist, or an essayist? the author selects the genre, not the other way around. Hawthorne wrote in a variety of genres. Why choose this one?

To write astringently about Brook Farm in 1852, a decade or so after living there, would have exposed Hawthorne to hazards akin to the political speaker who engages in ‘personalities.’ Moreover, although Brook Farm had faded away by 1852, reform politics had strengthened, at least in New England; abolitionism, women’s rights, pacifism, and prohibition (of alcohol and even tobacco, a crop harvested by slaves) all had their fervent champions, many of whom endorsed all of those reforms more or less at once. The collision of romanticism with American politics would precipitate such controversy as might end in violence. A head-on critique, a polemic or word-war, would only exacerbate tensions. A prudent man might prefer indirection. A sort of romance novel—with its vivid characters, men who aspire to heroism, ladies with mysterious pasts, love repressed and expressed—might neutralize romantic toxins with romantic and mock-romantic anti-toxins. A romance after all will hold the attention of romantic souls first of all; a certain sort of romance might cure them of romantic excesses. Can there be a prudent romance?

Finally, does political life itself not have a touch of romance in it, even in the sobersided commercial republic? He would rule by ballots rather than bullets needs to tell a story about himself in order to get elected; he needs to become Old Tippecanoe, Dr. New Deal, or the Man from Hope. Even the regime of enlightened self-interest runs also on stirring fictions and semi-fictions that make an election seem more than the usual rat race. Hawthorne in his preface shows himself both politic with respect to his circumstances nd understanding with respect to American politics, indeed politics generally.

He divides his romance into twenty-nine chapters, narrated by a man whose name, Miles Coverdale, incorporates covering or masking. Scholars have noticed that a dale or valley symbolizes the human heart in Hawthorne’s fiction; Mr. Covered-heart will tell us about the no-place of Happy Heart, in a romance by a writer with a cover story. As for “Miles,” it suggests distance; Coverdale characteristically distances himself, does not fully participate in life real or utopian, in order to see clearly, and to consider what he sees. His watchfulness adds nothing to his popularity, to his political effectiveness in a democratic society, but it does make him a more plausible than any whole-souledly political actor would be.

Inasmuch as the word ‘utopia’ invites one to think about place, one may group the chapters here according to the place in which the narrator resides. Coverdale walks miles back and forth between Boston and Blithedale. The first and final chapters complement one another; each is set in the city. The second and fourth chapter groups (chapters 2-15 and chapters 24-28) describe the narrator’s stays in the countryside commune. The central group of chapters see Coverdale in the city. The city, Boston, means politics and commerce; the country commune founds itself on principles opposed to American commercial republicanism, albeit not entirely opposed to all American impulses, particularly in New England: Many critics have noticed in the Blithedalers the American Puritan and even American Enlightenment urge to secede from a corrupt old world and start anew. [3] Americans need to distinguish among secessions. Some are reasonable, some merely passion-driven, factitious.

The first chapter, “Old Moodie,” contrasts with the last chapter, “Miles Coverdale’s Confession.” Each title points to a man. Old Moodie, an eccentric partly masked by an eye-patch, accosts the bachelor-poet Coverdale, whom Moodie knows to be ready to take up residence at Blithedale. Old Moodie almost but not quite asks Coverdale to do him “a very great favor,” unspecified, then reconsiders and demurs. His secret, a story of love gone very wrong, counterbalances the self-uncovering of Coverdale’s own futile love in chapter 29. Like politics, so often fueled by libido dominandi, romantic love lends itself to covering, to stratagem, to subterfuge. Aristotle sees that the love of man and woman can yield a family, then link with other families to form clans, tribes, villages, and finally the political community. Modern romantic love complicates the very foundation of political life by democratizing it, so to speak. By making marriage a love-match, it introduces the complexities of the lovers’ assent, and consequently their passions, into the very foundations of the city, where before the young had done their fathers’ bidding in sustaining the family founded by distant ancestors. Coverdale himself seems to have no family. Not only has he no wife or children, he seems not to have parents or relations of any sort. He is a man without connections, if not qualities. If Coverdale is young man so to speak without parents, Old Moodie will turn out to be a father so to speak without children, a man who sired but did not really father two daughters who find themselves living together for the first time at Blithedale. Blithedale is indeed utopia, a no-place populated in part not by fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, but by ‘consenting adults’ whose real families are nowhere to be seen. [4] They are social atoms who suppose themselves to oppose commercial republicanism with communitarianism, the “blithe tones of brotherhood” (641), but in fact exaggerate or caricature its individualism. Blithedale is, as one chapter title calls it, “a modern Arcadia,” and thus no Arcadia at all.

Blithedale as No-Place
The first group of chapters, set in Blithedale, find Coverdale’s attention quickly focused on two women and one man. [5] Zenobia’s name and nature belie the ostensible egalitarianism of communitarianism conceived democratically. “Zenobia” is a pen name, “a sort of mask” (637), for a feminist literary lioness with “something imperial” about her: “However humble looked her new philosophy, [she] had as much native pride as any queen would have known what to do with” (642-643). She’s taken her name from the third-century queen of Palmyra, whom we meet in Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. [6] Such spiritedness by nature precludes social and political equality from the start. Such a one must rule, ruin, or be ruined. At the founding of paradisiacal Blithedale, she is both Eve (646-647) and Pandora (652), unwittingly bringing evils. [7] That commercial-republican America can produce a Zenobia, the type of an Oriental despot, poses a problem that Blithedale utopianism cannot cure, one that the great commercial republic itself can only ‘kill.’ That commercial-republican America can produce a Zenobia also suggests the limits even carefully-designed political institutions and the way of life they reinforce can have over some human souls—bad news for good-place aspirations.

The other woman, young and wan, is carried in out of the snowstorm half-frozen. Eventually discovered as Zenobia’s half-sister, offspring of Old Moodie’s second marriage, Priscilla arrives masked or veiled as it were, wrapped in a cloak against the cold. Anything but imperial, she attaches herself to Zenobia, seeking and needing protection and just rule. A natural rank-order establishes itself on the first day of Coverdale’s stay at Blithedale.

The man, Hollingsworth (his worth will indeed finally sound hollow, not holy, when tested), tends Coverdale patiently when the poetaster takes ill, less out of compassion than to attach an ally by the cords of obligation. The only Blithedalian to ask a blessing in prayer, he prays not for the successful founding of Blithedale. Hollingworth subverts the commune even more radically than Zenobia does, coming to it not as a citizen but as a revolutionary under cover. Hollingsworth wants to turn Blithedale into the site of a reformatory for criminals, and in his monomaniacal reformism he cares for Coverdale “only for the ulterior purpose of making me a proselyte to his views” (681). He seeks co-conspirators for a bloodless coup d’état, a revolution to replace the revolutionary experiment the others have consented to undertake. Declaiming vehemently against the French socialist Fourier, who would build socialism upon selfishness (677), he mistakes his own “terrible egoism” for “an angel of God” (679). Hollingworth had worked as a blacksmith; Hephaestus numbered among the gods Zeus charged with the creation of Pandora. Hephaestus is a sort of father to Pandora. Blithedale’s Pandora, Zenobia, and her half-sister both fall in love with Hollingsworth. Their love for a superficially strong megalomaniac derives from their real father’s failure to father.

Sickness (and by implication death) takes some of the blitheness out of the dale. Imagery of cold and marble prefigure death at Blithedale (664). Coverdale’s suggestion to build a cemetery gets brushed aside; the residents of Happy Valley want no part of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Sickness and death put natural limits on utopia. So does work. After recovering from his illness, Coverdale quickly finds that the community needs a sort of foreign policy, a way of competing economically with the city (649). A true no-place—the just city of Plato’s Republic, for example—need not worry about foreigners, but this no-place is placed, and so must. To compete, it needs workers, not poets or feminist tractarian-orators, and Coverdale does work, hard, experiencing for the first time, he later sees, “the curse of Adam’s posterity” (688-689). In any real place, a life balancing work and leisure proves nearly impossible. The curse of Adam’s posterity is here in the new Paradise; merely communalizing labor does nothing to lift that curse. Blithedale’s egalitarianism precludes even the very limited leisure seen in Socrates’ utopia, restricted to the philosopher-kings and compromised even for them because they must take the time to rule their inferiors. there will never be a ‘synthesis’ of democracy nd utopia. The cure for the ills of utopianism is not more democracy.

Modern science gives intellectual and even some moral authority to the modern commercial republic, assisting citizen in their quest for the conquest of nature in order to procure self-preservation and comfort. But the Promethean technology that enables citizens to dispense with slaves has yet to enable commercial republicans to work less hard, although they do work less with their bodies. For all its rhetoric of Enlightenment, modern science covers a heart that beats for power, not liberty. In Boston, Coverdale had seen an exhibition of clairvoyance—forward-seeing, literally pro-methean—starring The Veiled Lady, a covered, mysterious figure whom Coverdale calls “one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a new science, or the revival of an old humbug” (635). In replacing the authority of God (in Enlightenment terms, priestcraft) with the authority of science, we must still ask: Is the latest modern marvel a produce of science or of quackery, real knowledge or clever sham? [8]  The Veiled Lady’s partner is a Professor Westervelt (‘Western-world’), a Satanic mesmerist who later slithers into mock-Edenic Blithedale, confiding truths and lies. The main truths: that Hollingsworth cares less for Zenobia than for the money she can donate to his projected reformatory (this, to Coverdale); that Priscilla is the Veiled Lady and Zenobia’s half-sister (this, to his ex-lover, Zenobia). The main lie: his very being, which uses truth cynically, to rule or, failing that, to ruin. Westervelt lives in the shadow-world of the Enlightenment project, seeing that if science can conquer nature the appearance of science, a mask of scientism, can gull citizens to consent to tyranny. Both sisters, without the natural protection of a fatherly father, have at different times succumbed to Westervelt’s half-real, half-fraudulent charms—modest Priscilla to the charm of his mesmerism, the erotic and spirited Zenobia to the charms of his body. Mesmerism combines a sort of science with a sort of rhetoric; Westervelt’s personal beauty is artificially enhanced with false teeth and fancy clothes.

As for the fourth character, the narrator himself, in the first set of Blithedale chapters he reveals more than he knows. Coverdale reveals himself as a modern and democratized man, a being of denatured manliness, “a devoted epicure of [his] own emotions” (760). Of his Blithedale foray he rightly says, near the outset, “the greatest obstacle to being heroic”—to being a man in full—”is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove oneself a fool; the truest wisdom is to resist the doubt; the profoundest wisdom is to know when it ought to be resisted, and when obeyed” (640). Just so, especially in a political enterprise, especially an enterprise of political reform, and most especially in the most radical enterprise of political reform, the founding of a new political community. In this highest politics, heroism, the finest spiritedness, combines with prudence or practical wisdom to form the statesman-founder or the preserver of some good founding. Coverdale finds such wisdom, but only retrospectively. Although attracted, he could not, “under any circumstances, have fallen in love with Zenobia” (672), as a real man might have done; he reads the George Sand romances she gives him without discernible effect. He dislikes his own sex (men are such brutes, he muses [695]); he contends that the best aspect of a man’s soul is seen when womanly caring shines through (667); he says that he wishes he could be ruled by women instead of men. But the two sisters he cares for at Blithedale love the blow-hard but at least superficially manly Hollingsworth, armed with the “necromancy” of rhetoric (741)—when they are not in the thrall of that other magician, Westervelt. Coverdale lacks even the modest degree of manliness that would attract a woman sufficiently to want to rule him. He can neither rule nor be ruled, and so lacks both characteristics of the Aristotelian citizen.

Covering himself, he quite literally observes others from all angles; from below, when listening to Hollingsworth’s harangues delivered atop a large rock; from above, when in an apartment in town, looking into the windows across the street, or in a leafy bower in the woods at Blithedale. He acts effectively only in slavish work, never in political rule. Coverdale has one strength, born of passivity; he can resist the machinations of stronger men. He instantly spots Westervelt as an evil mountebank, and sees through Hollingsworth, too, not so quickly. In the book’s central chapter, “A Crisis,” he resists Hollingsworth’s offer of subordinate partnership in the criminal-reformatory scheme. He is just strong enough to say no, if never strong enough to say yes. Zenobia, so very wrong so often and even wicked in one thing, foretells Coverdale’s fate in her story of a young man, Theodore (literally and ironically, ‘Gift-from-God’), offered the choice of loving the Veiled Lady without seeing her unveiled or unveiling her first but forbidden from having her and longing forever for her face. Coverdale can resist evil, but lacks the manliness to love erotically or Christianly/agapically, which is always, in this world, to love sight-unseen (776-777). Zenobia (‘Gift-from-Zeus’) does see into the covered heart of Mr. Gift-from-God, and judges him not to be God’s gift to women.

Coverdale’s refusal does precipitate a crisis. If Hollingsworth can have no male followers (however minimally manly), only women, he has only one half of what he needs as a founder. His enterprise because no other men will join it, not even weak ones. If the romance ended here, the romancer would have a novella satirizing modern reformers. But Hawthorne will dig deeper.

 

Return to the City

In the central set of chapters Coverdale recounts his time back in the city, after his break with Hollingsworth leaves his bonds with the sisters weakened. Before leaving Blithedale, he visits the communal pigsty, “to take leave of the swine!” (757). In Plato’s Republic, one of Socrates’ young interlocutors pushes his partners to new philosophic heights by dismissing Socrates’ first formulation of the just city as a mere city of pigs, a place where only the most ordinary needs of the body are to be satisfied, while the boldest, most spirited eroticism will starve. Blithedale’s real city of pigs is populated by “greasy citizens” who are “almost stifled and buried alive, in their corporeal substance.” “Peeping at me, an instant, out of their small, red, hardly perceptible eyes”—no visionary madness, here—”they dropt asleep again; yet not so far asleep but that their unctuous bliss was still present to them, betwixt dream and reality” (757-758). In the preface Hawthorne had called Brook Farm itself both daydream and fact, fiction and reality. For Hawthorne as for Plato, the best practical utopians are pigs, who suffer none of the heart-burnings of people.

Going to the countryside means returning to nature, and Hawthorne uses the four natural elements (fire, water, earth, and air) as images throughout. Coverdale returns to the city but discovers for the first time that nature is there, too: sky, rain, fruit trees, grapevines, wind, birds, and a solitary predatory cat. And a human family, the only unbroken one in the novel. The city is natural for human beings; romanticism is mistaken in its naturalism. “‘I bless God for these good folks,’ thought I to myself—’I have not seen a prettier piece of nature, in all my summer in the country…. I will pay them a little more attention, by-and-by'” (764). If he ever does, he doesn’t tell us; that doesn’t prevent us from remembering them. He next sees a dove in a rainstorm, yet does not think of the Covenant, and its promise of a world that will never be destroyed again, by God or man.

Against the persistent strength of nature, human beings in this group of chapters set their art. The first of these artists is the wealthy Zenobia, whom Coverdale spies in her apartment with Priscilla and Westervelt. In town, Zenobia dresses according to her status, transforming herself “into a work of art” (775). Offended by her cold treatment, Coverdale induces her to blush and then to pale by mentioning Hollingsworth, who, he remarks, likely prefers the more pliant of the sisters. Zenobia sees this, too, and attempts to rid herself of her rival by shunting her back to Westervelt, who puts her on exhibit again as the Veiled Lady. Here socialism, scientism, and charlatanry converge explicitly. Westervelt speaks to his audience of marks about “a new era that was dawning upon the world; a near that would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity, with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one great, mutually conscious brotherhood” (806). In this New Age of what Coverdale calls with deliberate paradox “mystical sensuality,” men believe that not only nature but human nature, the human soul, are infinitely malleable (804), stuff for the scientistic and synthetic forging of a new Heaven and a new Earth. This is the utopianism of the evil ‘Why not?’ Coverdale witnesses the mesmeric exploitation of Priscilla for a second time, but does nothing; it is Hollingsworth, who has actively pursued her back to town, who has the strength to call out to her and break the spell. More precisely, the hypnosis fails less by virtue of Hollingsworth’s own strength of character (he is really only reclaiming a lost disciple) as by virtue of the strength of Priscilla’s agapic love for him. The real enchantment of selfless love defeats false enchantment in this true, that is, anti-Romantic, romance.

Zenobia’s betrayal of her sister and Westervelt’s pseudo-mystical, scientistic spell would never have occurred had it not been for the failure of Old Moodie as husband and father. His prideful confession is central to this central, city-centered chapter group. Coverdale finds him in a saloon, after noticing that the same wine that brings joy elsewhere in the world brings a sort of death-in-life drunkenness to the commercial-republican descendants of Puritan New England. Still, as in Plato’s Laws, nature finally exerts its power over regime differences, dissolving some conventional restraints. Wine gets old men talking here, as it did in ancient Greece. Moodie tells his story, the story of a rich man named Fauntleroy (‘Boy-King’) who, basking in the “unnatural light” of his gold and wanting to stay rich, committed a crime, was discovered, and fled; unable to take his punishment like a man, he left his noble wife to die and his beautiful daughter “worse than orphaned” (791-792). With “no adequate control” from any parent, “her character was left to shape itself,” its passions leading the way to the rule of Westervelt. Moodie saw her years later, feeling not shame but pride at “the brilliant child of my prosperity” (800). “In Zenobia, I live again!” (799), his vanity renewed. Soon forgotten—”being a mere image, an optical delusion, crated by the sunshine of prosperity” (792), he had by then remarried, choosing this time a poor seamstress, who bore him another daughter before dying. Like the Emperor Gallienus, the moody old ex-king invites rebellion. Old Moodie is a sort of King Midas, his “fatality” determined by his love of gold, “being to behold whatever he touched dissolve” (793). [9]  And through Moodie Westervelt also came to rule Priscilla. Moodie had caused Priscilla to be brought to Blithedale in order to bring her under Zenobia’s protection (had he, like his elder daughter, finally come to be disenchanted by the charlatan?), hoping that Zenobia would treat her as a sister. But he had long ago destroyed the natural foundations of any sisterly feelings, which would depend upon a shared childhood. What the family could not supply, the watery communitarianism of Blithedale could not begin to replace. Just the opposite: The two sisters became rivals in love, the more powerful betraying the weaker by returning her to a man she knew might destroy Priscilla’s soul.

 

Justice Without Communitarianism

The third group of chapters returns Coverdale to Blithedale, where Hollingsworth, Priscilla, and Zenobia have also come, after the defeat of Westervelt. Coverdale quickly learns that defeating Satan once does not defeat him once and for all, or even for long. The Blithedalers enjoy a masquerade: Dressed in costumes that mix antiquity (the goddess Diana, Arcadian shepherd) with early America (Puritans, shakers, Indians, a witch), and modern America (“a negro of the Jim Crow order,” a Kentucky woodsman), they dance to a fiddler dressed as the Devil (814-815). New-Age Blithedale contains human types that span the history of the West, and so is not entirely new. [10]  All in play—but all linking the Blithedale project imagistically with the more sinister devil and play-actor, Westervelt. Earlier, Westervelt had only lurked on the edges of Blithedale; now, his symbolic equivalent plays the tune to which the communitarians dance. They laugh at each other’s costumes, and Coverdale—concealed and watching, as usual—betrays his presence by laughing, too. The Blithedalers merrily chase him. Escaping, he stumbles over mossed-over logs left by some previous owner, decades before. After tripping over these hard facts produced by nature and a hard-working man, Coverdale wanders off to find his three erstwhile friends, engaged in a real showdown.

Utopians seek justice. In real communities, justice is the aim of the courts. With characteristic drama, Zenobia announces, “I have been on trial for my life,” and Hollingsworth does look the part of the Puritan judge trying a witch, with Priscilla “the pale victim” of witchcraft. Costumed as the Oriental princess for whom she named herself, Zenobia appears “dethroned” (818-819). Appealing her case to a higher authority, God, she counter-accuses Hollingsworth of selfish manipulation. They are right about each other, and God will indeed judge them both. Hollingsworth leaves with Priscilla, who is rejected by her sister in the end because Zenobia cannot humble herself to ask forgiveness for injury. In any event, Priscilla loves Hollingsworth more, needing him and owing him more, and better able to give him what he will need after he gets what he deserves. She is the real human judge, the only one animated by Christian love, and she renders the right decision.

For her part, Zenobia draws a moral—the wrong one. Men always triumph over women on “the battlefield of life” because a woman’s breast has no breastplate, and “the whole universe” makes “common cause against the woman who swerves one hair’s-breath, out of the beaten path”; in so swerving, the woman herself “goes all astray and never sees the world in its true aspect afterwards” (827). In her Epicurean ambition to swerve like one of the philosopher’s atoms, Zenobia succeeds only in confusing herself. Her feminist/reformist self-pity illustrates the truth Zenobia mixes with it. She then denies that Priscilla will be a better wife for Hollingsworth than she could have been; judging by appearances (as she had done in her liaison with the handsome Westervelt, and as an attractive person is especially likely to do), she mistakenly claims that Priscilla is too weak to sustain the marriage. She leaves Coverdale with a final lie. “Sick to death with playing at philanthropy and progress” in “a foolish dream,” she will convert to Catholicism and go “behind the black veil” (830)—in imitative opposition to Priscilla and the silvery veil she wore in the mesmerism shows. In reality, Zenobia has chosen the black veil of suicide; she walks into the water, quenching the fire of her spirit, to the end playing the tragic heroine of a romance novel, a romance Hawthorne undercuts by describing the grisly scene of the recovery of her corpse. [11]  In death she defeats Westervelt—at the funeral he laments, “she is beyond my reach”—and Hollinsworth, who will spend the remainder of his life overcome by guilt for his crime—he, who had intended to reform criminals. But in so triumphing she destroys herself. Only Priscilla really triumphs, now the “guardian” of her broken beloved, whose presence nonetheless protects her in the society of her day better than Zenobia could have done. When Coverdale next sees the couple, Priscilla shows “a veiled happiness in her fair and quiet countenance” (843-844)—veiled, because she cares for an emotional invalid, but true, because agapic love is true. Nature also wins: “While Zenobia lived, Nature was proud of her, and directed all eyes upon that radiant presence, as her fairest handiwork. Zenobia perished. Will not Nature shed a tear? Ah, no! She adopts the calamity at once into her system,” growing grass on the beauty’s grave (845). Nature’s water quenched nature’s fire. The airy, still small voice of the one unselfish human soul in the story and the powerful, silent workings of nature quietly and justly prevail over earthly play-acting and self-importance.

 

Coverdale Uncovered

“I—I myself—was in love—with—PRISCILLA!” (585). Coverdale’s confession, his unmasking of his own nature, constitutes the book’s last words and confirms Zenobia’s parable about the need to love unselfishly and sight-unseen. Coverdale can perform neither of the principle duties of a citizen: He cannot form a family; he cannot summon the energy to fight in a good cause. [12]  He has the strength to tell a story truly, and no more. Some scholars have called him an unreliable narrator, but he is actually quite reliable at that. It is as a man and a citizen that he cannot be relied upon.

Hawthorne writes no ‘postface’ to balance his preface. He leaves that to his readers. In a way, he also leaves some notes toward one, consisting of his other contemporaneous writings and citizen activities. Some decades ago, American literary scholars debated whether books like The Blithedale Romance ought to be read in their ‘historical context’ or as works with an integrity of their own, apart from the circumstances in which they were written. Both sides were right. To understand the pith of The Blithedale Romance, one needs know little more of Brook Farm and of America than Hawthorne says in the preface, which isn’t much. Utopianism is perennial, and so is a just critique of utopianism. This notwithstanding, it amplifies the understanding of any work of art to look beyond it, to consider the possible political purposes of its author in practice as well as ‘in theory.’ Would it not be good to see if a book that commends prudence as a moral and political good actually tended to serve the ends intended?

Hawthorne’s lifetime coincided with the ever-sharpening factionalism which lead to civil war. [13]  The compromises that had helped to hold the Union together for decades began to unravel as the Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened the issue of slavery in the American West. The Democratic Party tried to close regional divisions within itself and within the country at large by nominating Hawthorne’s college friend, Franklin Pierce, for the presidency. A New Hampshireman, Pierce exemplified the political ‘Doughface’—the Northern man with Southern principles who opposed abolitionism as destructive of the American constitutional union. A loyal Democrat, Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography of Pierce. Whigs jibed, Hawthorne has given us another romance, and in a way he had. But he intended his Life of Franklin Pierce to complement Blithedale as a cognate act of prudence. [14]

A “man of the people, but whose natural qualities inevitably made him a leader among them,” Pierce had learned patriotism from his father and religion from his mother (83). His father had opposed the “questionable, if not treasonable” disunionism of the High Federalists during the Madison Administration. As a boy, Pierce had listened to his father talking politics with “homely, native eloquence” (84). At Bowdoin College Pierce joined “the progressive or democratic” rather than the “respectable conservative” student party (87). In political life ever since he has remained a firm Jacksonian, detesting governmental centralization as much as disunion. Thus he had never “shun[ned] the obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue the Northern man who dared to love that great and sacred reality—his whole, united, native country—better than the mistiness of a philanthropic theory,” namely, abolitionism (105). Pierce saw that anti-slavery agitation would tear “to pieces the Constitution”; “the evil would be certain, while the good was, at best, a contingency” (163). More likely, abolition of slavery would result in “the ruin of two races which now dwelt in greater peace and affection, it is not too much to say, than ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf” (164). “The theorist may take that view [abolitionism] in his closet; the philanthropist by profession may strive to act upon it uncompromisingly, amid the tumult and warfare of his life. But the statesman of practical sagacity—who loves his country as it is, and evolves good from things as they exist, and who demands to feel his firm grasp upon a better reality before he quits the one already gained—will be likely here, with all the greatest statesmen of America, to stand in the attitude of a conservative.” (163) Slavery is an evil, but it is “one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivance, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream” (166).

“[G]reat moral reform” occurs not by dint of human will and intellect,” and even when human “progress” effects such reform, it leaves some other “evil or wrong on the path behind it” (166). All of this mixes prudence and romance in much the same proportions as Blithedale does; unfortunately, unlike even a prudent romance, political analysis must do more than illustrate moral truths, although it ought not ignore them. The complacent portrait of amicable master-slave relations and the prophesied ease with which the evil of slavery would dissolve are probably intended as artful romantic tranquilizers for overwrought reformers, but they are utopian-all-too-utopian.

In falsifying these romantic claims, the Civil War shook Hawthorne. Ten years after the publication of Blithedale and the Life, he published one of his last essays, “Chiefly About War Matters,” published in 1862 [15]. He masked himself with the pen name, “A Peaceable Man” and decried the likelihood that domestic politics would be populated by military heroes for the next half-century (one bullet-headed president will succeed another in the Presidential chair”) (367). True to his unionism, he condemned secession as treason.

He rightly predicted that “whoever may be benefitted by the results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes… who must henceforth fight a hard battle with the world, on very unequal terms” (387). He condemns John Brown (“Nobody was ever more justly hanged”) because such utter lack of prudence alone deserves the most severe requital (397-398), while admitting that “my Yankee heart stirred triumphantly” when he saw the conversion of the fortress Brown had stormed into a prison for rebels (398). The prisoners themselves are men of a type unknown to Northerners; having lived in isolation and illiteracy under the rule of plantation grandees, these peasants had not “the remotest comprehension of what they had been fighting for” (400).

The weakest section of the essay unfortunately forms its centerpiece: Hawthorne’s portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The “essential representative of all the Yankees” is ungainly, kind, naturally if not conventionally dignified, and yes, honest (374-379). Of the stated purpose of Lincoln—to defend the Union in war in order to preserve the Constitution in defense of the natural rights of enunciated in the Declaration of Independence—Hawthorne betrays not the slightest comprehension. He awards more unmixed praise to General George McClellan, the Democratic Party general who would run against Lincoln two years later. By then Hawthorne would be dead, and with him much of the generation that had attempted to invent ways of preserving the Union in peace, mixing realism and self-deception.

If, finally, Hawthorne lacked both the firmness in defense of principle and the practical wisdom of Lincoln, if his prudential critique of utopianism lacks an adequate philosophic dimension to go with its attractive and understated Christianity, that reservation suggests that he was no Shakespeare. ‘Being no Shakespeare’ is a widely-held deficiency among writers, hard to hold against one. ‘Being no Lincoln’ as a political man is also no rarity. The Blithedale Romance remains a fine American antidote to the utopianism some Americans fall into when their patience with their country finally runs out.

 

Notes

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Blithedale Romance. In Millicent Bell, ed.: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels (New York: The Library of America, 1983). All subsequent citations in text. For the best textual exegesis of the novel, one that is especially alert to Hawthorne’s use of symbolism, see Hyatt H. Waggoner: Hawthorne: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).
2. “[T]he humorous sketch of his companions in the custom house”—which Hawthorne published some time before writing the Blithedale Romance—”had called down upon Hawthorne’s head a storm of vilification. Consequently… he wanted to take every precaution to make clear that he was not copying actual people.” See F. O. Matthiessen: American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1972 [1941], 266).
3. See for example A. N. Kaul: “The Blithedale Romance,” in A. N. Kaul, ed.: Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966, 155. Founded by a Unitarian minister, Brook Farm aspired to a sort of secularized or at least non-sectarian community, imitating the structure of the highly sectarian and entirely unsecular communitarian aspirations of the American Puritans. See also George Parsons Lathrop: A Study of Hawthorne (New York: AMS Press, 1969 [1876], 181-190) and Hubert H. Hoeltje: Inward City: The Mind and Heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Durham: Duke University Press, 1962).
4. “We had very young people among us, it is true,—downy lads, rosy girls in their first teens, and children of all heights above one’s knee [i.e., no infants at all], but these had chiefly been sent hither for education, which it was one of the objects and methods of our institution to supply” (685-686). Few families ventured upon the utopian project.
5. Some critics have complained that Hawthorne’s portrait of the commune fails because it centers on four characters only. But that is Hawthorne’s point: Human beings naturally settle into cliques of families and friends. Founders of stable political communities recognize that and build upon it. Mis-founded communities, including utopias, do not, and fail.
6. Zenobia was one of several provincial rulers who rebelled during the irregular reign of the Emperor Gellienus in the third century A. D. Mild and indolent, with outbursts of cruelty, Gellienus failed adequately to defend the Empire—something of a parallel, as it happens, to the father of Hawthorne’s Zenobia, as will transpire. Zenobia, “queen of Palmyra and the East,” claimed Cleopatra as an ancestor, equaling her in beauty and surpassing her in chastity and valor (Gibbon: Decline and Fall, I.xi). A woman of “superior genius [who] broke through the servile indolence impoed on her sex by the climate and manners of Asia (I.xi) (its political life proverbial in the West for its luxury, ‘effeminacy,’ and consequent susceptibility to despotism), the heroic Zenobia’s “manly understanding,” her “incomparable prudence and fortitude,” refined by her considerable learning, entitled her to rule. It did not entitle her to rebel, in the estimation of the Romans, and the Emperor Aurelian crushed her army, captured her, fettered her with gold, and exhibited her in a triumph at Rome. In the end, her courage faltered and she “ignominiously purchased life by the sacrifice of her fame and her friends,” blaming her rebellion on her political allies (I.xi). Ancient Palmyra was a place of commerce and arts; its queen’s luxury, spiritedness, treachery, and enslavement in gilded chains prefigures the character and history of her fictional American counterpart.
7. ‘Zenobia’ means ‘gift of Zeus,’ and Pandora was indeed Zeus’ ‘gift’ to human beings. The story of that unpleasant gift forms part of a story of the gods themselves, which for the Greeks was a story of failed fatherhood. The first gods are the offspring of Father Heaven and Mother Earth. Father Heaven hates his own offspring, confining them; in revenge his son Chronos castrates him. Zeus is a new god, an Olympian, who defeats his father Chronos and ends the times when fellowship existed between the gods and men. Zeus founds an oligarchy if not a tyranny in the cosmos. In order to subordinate men, Zeus hid labor-saving fire from them, because leisure provides men with the opportunity to think and thus to rule or challenge the rule of the gods. In the familiar myth, Prometheus—a brother of Chronos and therefore an enemy of the Olympians—steals fire and gives it to men; Zeus retaliates not by injuring Prometheus, whom he did not fear, but men, bidding the blacksmith-god Hephaestus and other Olympians to create the beautiful Pandora, like Hawthorne’s Zenobia a master of rhetoric with a taste for finery in clothing. ‘Pandora’ means ‘all-gifted,’ the one who has been given everything; she in turn will give not good but evils (Hesiod: Works and Days, ll. 42-105). Pandora is the first woman, the Eve of Greek myth, a bringer of evil to men, that is, to males, tormenting them if they marry and leaving them without support of family if they refuse to marry (Hesiod: Theogeny, ll. 585-612). The parallels to Hawthorne’s Zenobia and her two ‘countries,’ Blithedale and America, are clear: the father who gives wealth to the daughter but inculcates no good habits in her, the founding and refounding of political communities that repeat the tensions between fathers and children down through the generations. There is one twist to the Greek myth: Hawthorne has the father, Old Moodie, deliver not Pandora but his other daughter, Priscilla, to Blithedale. In a sense Priscilla  opens a box of evils, leading to the effective destruction of the community, but it is the evil in Zenobia she ‘opens.’ Hawthorne would never simply blame any being or force external to men for evil, knowing that men supply their own evils out of their not-so-blithe hearts.
8. Hawthorne set down a solid foundation stone for his own marriage in writing to his fiancée on the new ‘spiritualism’: “The view which I take of the matter is caused by no want of faith in mysteries, but from a deep reverence of the soul…. Keep the imagination sane.” (Cited in Matthiessen, op. cit., 205). Keeping the imagination sane is the purpose of Hawthornian romance. In a more directly political way, Hawthorne also wrote, in 1844, that the American Revolution “did not, like that of France, go so deep as to disturb the common sense of the country.” (“A Book of Autographs,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne: Miscellanies: Biographical and Other Sketches and Letters [Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1900, 344]).
9. Kaul says that Old Moodie’s story “might be called The Parable of the American,” a riches-to-rags saga of a man who lives in the two American nations of rich and poor (Kaul, op. cit., 59). If anything, this is a reverse parable, a reverse Horatio Alger plot designed before the invention of Horatio Alger, just as Hawthorne’s Blithedale is a refutation of Marxist utopianism before Marx. Neither capitalism nor socialism wins Hawthorne’s wholehearted allegiance.
10. In Matthiessen’s words, “Unlike virtually all the other spokesmen of the day, [Hawthorne] could never feel that America was a new world…. Even at Brook Farm, he  had not been able to share in the declaration that the new age was the dawn of untried possibilities” (op. cit., 322).
11. A real Catholic, Orestes Brownson, wrote in a contemporary review that Hawthorne erred in having Zenobia commit suicide: “Women of her large experience and   free principles never kill themselves for disappointed affection” (Review, Brownson’s Literary Quarterly, October 1852; quoted in J. Donald Crowley, ed.: Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970, 266). Here Brownson is too much the realist, ignoring the genre Hawthorne has chosen.   Zenobia must die, because in romances justice must triumph.
12. “Were there any cause, in this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man’s dying for, and which my death would benefit, then—provided, however, the effort did not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble—methinks I might be bold to offer up my life” (847).
13. The best account of Hawthorne’s politics is Lawrence Sargent Hall: Hawthorne: Critic of Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944). Hall skillfully links Hawthorne’s writings with his political activities, including his tenure in the American consulate in London during the Pierce Administration.
14. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Life of Franklin Pierce, in Miscellanies: Biographical and Other Sketches and Letters (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1900). All citations in text. On the Whiggish jibe, see Matthiessen op. cit., 316-317.
15. Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Chiefly About War Matters,” in Miscellanies, op. cit.  All citations in text.

Jean Dutourd: The Springtime of Life. Denver and Helen Lindley translation. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1974.

Paper delivered at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D. C., August 1997

 

The Springtime of Life is a novel about fatherhood, love, and friendship in a modern political regime—France in the 1930s, during the last years of the Third Republic. Charles de Gaulle, who knew the terrain well, never stopped asking, How can this modern commercial republic defend itself? Given the kind of people who rule in such a regime, how can they, and their fellow citizens, be protected from the consequences of their own worst vices? How can they be encouraged in their virtues? Further, how can those men and women who are by nature not of the commercial republic nonetheless be brought to defend it against the much worse tyrannical regimes which seek to exploit the weaknesses of commercial republics and their citizens?

De Gaulle caused several writers to think about these questions. The most celebrated of them was André Malraux. Malraux writes in the tradition—the ‘regime,’ the ‘succession,’ in Diogenes Laertius’ sense—of Victor Hugo. A man of very different sensibility, Jean Dutourd writes in the tradition of Flaubert and Proust. This makes him in one sense more interesting than Malraux. A writer in the Hugo tradition might well respond favorably to Gaullist statesmanship, with its themes of la grandeur, la France, Le Tricolore. A writer in the Flaubert tradition will always hesitate before the grand gesture. How grand is it, really? Where does it point? A Flaubertian artist will apply a properly mixed acidic solution to the surface of Gaullism—treat it will a clarifying irony.

In The Springtime of Life, Dutourd presents Jacques de Boissy, a man in his twenties with two friends: Jean Pousselet, the friend of his childhood, and Captain Lacassagne, a new friend, a few years older.

Jean is the most intelligent of the three—or, at least, the most ‘intellectual.’ He dislikes his last name, which suggests something like ‘pushiness,’ bourgeois vulgarity. He is ill at ease with his family name, with his father’s name, with ‘his own.’ He believes that he stands in awe of writers, and believes, fashionably, in “the goodness of the world, in justice and loyalty” (13). He gives no thought to the political conditions of writing, to say nothing of the political conditions of goodness and justice. He ‘believes in’ loyalty, but will not practice it, in friendship or in love.

His mother is a silly, self-pitying war widow—the sort of person who should inspire sympathy, but cannot, leaving her acquaintances a touch irritated and a touch guilty at their irritation. The Great War stripped France of fathers, leaving a generation of ‘feminized,’ that is, submissive sons who imagine that good grace consists of intelligence yielding to stupidity, especially if stupidity is vehement. Living in a “feminine universe,” young men “readily believe in the fragility of women” (33); deference to Mme. Pousselet’s insistent inanities has habituated Jean to a slightly guilty resentment in retreat. By inspiring in her only son “the conviction… that he had been created more to be loved than to love” (43), Mme. Pousselet has left him morally and intellectually flaccid, anerotic. Her idea of motherhood is requiring her little boy to eat all the food on his plate, “hungry or not” (43), substituting annoying, pointless duty for natural desire and pleasure.

A feminized world (in this sense) is a privatized world. “[F]rom 1920 to 1940, the child was the Frenchmen’s alibi; he made it possible for them to abdicated with untroubled conscience their duties and their rights as citizens, to disregard the future of all under the pretext that they were occupied with the future of one, to think no longer about that pressing matter, demanding such tiresome vigilance, that is called liberty” (44).

Jean marries badly, of course. His wife is exactly like his mother, only more so, and with less reason. His mother’s founding moral instruction—eat everything on your plate—deprives him of the strength to push away from the table when young Nadine puts herself on his plate, despite Mother’s disapproval of the offering. An only child, habituated only to be loved and not to love, his soul is the prey of the stronger woman, the one who loves him more insistently. His mother had denatured him in order to attach him firmly to herself, not seeing that no firmness of attachment can arise from a soul with no real desires, not firmness to it.

Jean predictably resents Jacques’s new friend, the “solid, patient, indefatigable, unshakable,” and above all gentlemanly Captain Lacassage. Lacassage hasn’t “read any of the works of André Gide” (22). Surely, had he lived thirty years ago, a soldier like this would have plotted against Dreyfus! Dragooned (so to speak) into an excursion to Les Invalides with Jacques and the Captain, Jean complains about the tedious reminiscences of war veterans, giving thanks that men like Napoleon “are no longer interested in France” (84). Pious about littérateurs, contemptuous of military officers: Sure enough, Jean will enjoy a successful career in journalism.

By contrast, Jacques de Boissy is no intellectual. He is a young man of not exactly aristocratic pedigree: The ‘de’ was shrewdly joined to the ‘Boissy’ only a century back. But he has some of the cultivation of an aristocrat without having lost the aggressiveness of the bourgeois; the de Boissys are new aristocrats. In childhood he dominated Jean because he has a ready-made attitude “for every circumstance of life” and acts forthrightly thereon (11). When he meets Jean’s unfortunate mother, he acts as a sort of social statesman—taking her as she is, leaving her pleased and perhaps a touch better. (As a reader, she likes a good storyteller. Ah, you must try Les Thibaults. Humor? Do you know that very funny English writer, P. G. Wodehouse?) Jacques has the good breeding to be a hard man to embarrass, and never leaves others embarrassed.

Above all, Jacques is a man with a father. De Boissy père is “a bit of a shark,” a tough businessman.” From him, Jacques learns—contra Jean’s humanitarian illusions—that society is “not at all benevolent,” and that “it is a good thing to be on one’s guard” (13). He learns to retaliate when insulted, but to take correction from his superiors—and therefore to recognize that superiority really exists.

M. de Boissy is no bien-pensant, but he has kept his eyes open. After the Great War, he observes, women and horses have disappeared: “When the style of short hair appeared some ten years ago, I had an idea, and it may seem backward to you: I said to myself that we were witnessing Samson’s revenge, that Delilah had gone mad and in cutting off her curls she had given up her powers. A sort of symbolic surrender, if you like. But notice this: my experience has taught me that people do not give up except in the last extremity, when they see that all is lost, that the situation is untenable, that there is no longer any way of holding their ground. This sort of thing must have happened with women. They felt that they had no place in the world as women… that it was necessary to be like men.” (55-56). As for men, according to M. de Boissy, it is really quite simple: Justice consists of helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies (117). As for his son, he says, with irony, “I am  a modern father,” considering it “his duty to help his son’s personality to ‘expand,'” a modern attitude the novelist entertains with some suspicion, and to which M. de Boissy himself sets firm limits (14).

Unlike Jean, Jacques views literary life with cynicism, Captain Lacassagne with respect. In France, Jacques says, the government no longer governs. The police and the financiers govern, but those who wield “the real power today in a country that is no longer serious, a country that prefers words to events, or, if you like, the newspaper serial to history,” are the women and men of letters (24). They constitute the real French politeuma. Women and men of letters always rule when the government and the military are weak. Proust is “the greatest contemporary novelist” because “he alone has understood this and has made it the essence of his work” (24). Ergo, Jacques announces that he shall use literature as “a means to success”; “in 1935, for Julien Sorel, the red and the black are the colors of ink” (35).

Jean is shocked. His superficial literary idealism is offended. An idealist on the surface, at core Jean is not so much a cynic (that would take strength) but without character. In Jacques, the cynicism is what is superficial. Jacques reads good books seriously and prefers not to discuss them with unserious people, mentioning the names of Stendhal and Balzac “with a sort of affectionate mockery, emphasizing their eccentricities as though he had known them or as though they were still alive” (48). While reading an author, he becomes the author—a Christian with Bloy, an atheist with Diderot (79). He treats greatness as a living thing, a permanent possibility, without admitting to his friend Jean what Jean will never truly perceive: That greatness is a permanent possibility. In a calculatedly offhand way, he does his best to incorporate greatness in himself. He uses a sinecure at the War Ministry to write his first novel, which would indeed have been a success (his father judges), had he chosen to publish it; it is not long before he begins a serious one, with the support of his father, who senses the change and respects it.

A homely young woman falls in love with Jacques, who does his best to repel her, once he realizes that she does (thanks to another young woman, who tells him). But Anne-Marie is a woman who senses how to make the conquest, despite her disadvantage. She is not the least literary, or intellectual. She scarcely understands the manuscript he reads to her. But what she does understand, well before Jacques understands, is the significance of the fact that he is reading it, to her. So she praises his work and (she really does love him) learns how to type. Like men in love with literature, women in love with men are chameleons, “instantly assum[ing] the color of the man at whom they have taken aim” (161-162; compare Jacques, 79). They become exactly like military men in war; love brings out their intelligence. They discard pettiness—in Anne-Marie’s case, her fashionable bohemianism. A real woman is very much like a real aristocrat, the representative man “of the ancient regime,” tough, ardent, and discriminating, kindly conscious of his superiority (162). Anne-Marie, “ugly at twenty-six, would be beautiful at fifty,” thanks to the transformation, the crystallization, of soul that her love will effect. Eventually, and to his credit, “Jacques vaguely fores[ees] this distant metamorphosis,” and will marry her (175).

Captain Lacassagne tactfully gives Jacques the political education he needs to go with the sentimental education he has been receiving. First lesson: France, and the modern world generally, though automated, unhorsed, are not ‘automatic.’ They need tending. without tending, they will perish. The Great War very nearly saw the destruction of France. Its aftermath—fatherless sons and daughters—threatens France still.

Second lesson: Modern France is bourgeois, but bourgeois souls can’t defend it. Going along and getting along, while profitable, won’t work for a country located next to Germany. France won the Battle of the Marne because General Joffre “did not have the soul  of one vanquished”; he “made a stand” (96), showed the courage of an aristocrat, thereby making a modern army of barbers and shopkeepers not aristocratic, of course, but stubborn enough to win, to defend that piece of soil that is France. Without soil, where will the soldier, the barber, the shopkeeper—the writer—stand and work? Without France, the French language will become as extinct as Latin—living on as no more than a component of foreign languages. A writer must write in a language, usually his own. Lacassagne shows a young novelist why ‘his own’ matters to him, how literary life depends upon your own country, your own family, your own friends.

Third lesson: France should be fighting in Spain, on the republican side with the Communists, against Franco and his fascist allies. This has nothing to do with ideology. Lacassagne has met lieutenant colonel Charles de Gaulle, who observed that Soviet Russia is far away, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy on France’s border. A Francoist Spain would mean “France encircled” (204); that concrete geopolitical circumstance means more than the ideology du jour. That a Popular Front government, of all things, could not see this represents the triumph of pacifism over proletarianism—a silly idea trumped by a sillier. Go to Spain, de Gaulle told Lacassagne; “reconnoiter the future enemy” (206). (Jacques offers to go with him, but although Dutourd is a Gaullist he is no Malraux: The man of letters belongs at his desk, not on the battlefield (207). It is enough that he respect those who go to the battlefield.)

Fourth lesson: There really are superior men, by nature and not only by social convention. Lacassagne admits that he had allowed himself to become a bourgeoisified  soldier, a bureaucratic functionary in the War Ministry, “someone who was accommodating himself without reflection to the cowardly mediocrity into which the country had fallen” (200). De Gaulle made him recollect; he re-minded Lacassagne. De Gaulle caused Lacassagne to reflect upon what the French army is for, what France is for, why “there was every reason to die” for France (198). Lacassagne wants Jacques to be the kind of man who writes, lives on French soil, who makes that soil worth defending. He wants him to be part of the succession of French writers.

Lacassagne’s attempt at political education succeeds. He changes neither Jacques’s ideas nor his passions, but “taught him that there is a certain noble and romantic though realistic way of looking at the world” (211). The reconciliation of nobility and realism is the alliance of the spirited part of the soul with practical reason. In Greek terms, it is the alliance of thumos and phronēsis. In Dutourd’s terms, it is “heart.” In his book on Stendhal, The Man of Sensibility, Dutourd defines “heart” as “not only courage” but also “a desire to try one’s strength, a nobility of character, a horror of what is base or vulgar, espagnolisme, a passion for honor—in short, soul. And soul precisely as Alain defines it. Heart is what refuses the body.” [1]  Intellect should ally itself with soul: “How many cowards there are for one Socrates who dies a hero, and how often our intellectual masters give us opportunities to despise them in their lives! One sees every day that it is easier to have intellect, with and philosophy than heart, or, if you prefer it soul. Wars have at least this much good, that they permit us to see the souls of those we admire. Danger brings out the soul as rain brings out snails.” [2]  This alliance constitutes the character of the statesman. To enter into the succession of French writers, a writer needs to understand this alliance, to think about how it might be perpetuated in new circumstances.

Such an alliance is not ‘modern.’ Lacassagne leads Jacques to consider that the modern world is not mere uprootedness, as Barrès had said and Weil would say, but a systematized uprootedness—cars in place of horses, short-haired, streamlined women in place of long-haired, alluring ones. Politically, the modern world consists of “dictatorships by blackguards” and “republics of the petits bourgeois and the workers,” not constitutional monarchies or republics of citizen-soldiers (213). The Lacassagnian, or Gaullist, political education gives Jacques precisely what a writer needs; a theme worthy not only of his talent, but of his character, his sensibility, a theme that will strengthen and refine that character and sensibility. Dutourd’s reply to Malraux is: A political novel should not be directly political. A novel of manners is the novelistic way of writing about politics, because politics—the answer to the question, Who rules?—shapes manners, giving friendships and love affairs tensions unknown in other regimes. (Malraux’s response: Don’t write a novel, write an epic in prose. And in reply to Proust: Don’t write a novel, write an anti-memoir.)

Jean resents Jacques’s new novel. “Up to that time, Jacques and he had been equals”; Jacques’s superior wealth and family connections could be dismissed as mere accidents” (231). Jean, the bourgeois democrat, confronts the dilemma bourgeois democracy poses for its representative man. In the old regime, Jean would have been shielded from resentment by the realities of class. Not for a bourgeois Pousselot to concern himself with the accomplishments of a de Boissy! But now, “the unhappy fellow lied in miniature the drama of democracies where social life is insupportable because it is founded on merit, that is to say, you are exposed constantly to seeing someone who was your equal become your superior, and where consequently friendship is no longer possible” (231). Such weak social bonds make a bourgeois democracy susceptible to faction despite nominal equality, and therefore more likely to be heedless to foreign threats to the regime of democratic republicanism and to the lives of its citizens.

And so Jean fumes. He tries to discourage Jacques, scribbles a thousand corrections on the margins of the novel manuscript. How can a novelist be so insensitive? he complains. How can a novelist fail to wring his hands, feel somehow guilty about the suffering masses, Nazism, Communism, “the war in S[pain, the lack of paid vacations, the housing problem, the armaments race” (239)? Jacques ignores the corrections. When Jean sees the uncorrected published version, the friendship is irretrievable.

Jacques’s father dies not long before the French prime minister Daladier announces the supposed settlement of the crisis in Czechoslovakia. Jacques realizes that Lacassagne is now his best friend, and therefore “suffered less from his father’s death together with the feeling of not being unfaithful to his father” (282). the Springtime of Life is a story about finding a friend worthy of your father. You will need one. The modern regime needs some men and women of the ancien regime within it, braver than the demi-men and demi-women of the modern regime, and also sufficiently gracious not to resent their marginal status in a regime nominally ruled by the persons—hardly to be called citizens—such a regime produces.

Jean was mistaken when he claimed that France no longer interested in men like Napoleon. In Dutourd’s view, one such man remained, Charles de Gaulle. Franklin Roosevelt suspected de Gaulle of Bonapartism in the worst sense, claiming to worry that de Gaulle would destroy French republicanism if given the chance. In the event, he saved it, twice, and left it on a firmer foundation than he had found it. But is not regime politics that Dutourd thinks of when he thinks of Napoleon. He thinks instead of greatness of soul.

“The phrase ‘great soul’ turns up over and over again in Stendhal’s life of Napoleon,” he writes in his 1957 book The Taxis of the Marne. [3]  “What historian other than Stendhal has perceived the greatness of Napoleon’s soul? Yet there lies the whole key to his character.” [4]  Stendhal writes, “This man’s whole life is a paean of praise of greatness of soul,” by which he means something like what the American Founders meant by fame, joined by courage and firmness of judgment, and exhibited in Napoleon’s calmness in exile. [5]  Napoleon was a natural aristocrat formed by an aristocratic civilization. He never understood representative government, and so his soul struggled between “the genius of tyranny and the profound reasoning powers which had made a great man of him.” [6]

De Gaulle too was “a great soul,” one which languished in the last, mediocre decades of the Third Republic, “tied down in the promotion roster of the army,” “condemned to vegetate in garrison towns, with an occasional minor command to relieve the boredom. It needed nothing less than the disintegration of the nation to liberate this great soul from his bonds.” [7]  In his Conversation with De Gaulle, Dutourd admits that he had often worried that de Gaulle might turn tyrant. What he found was that de Gaulle reminded him of Flaubert even more than he resembled Napoleon—an even more surprising comparison. Like Flaubert, de Gaulle was a great anti-bourgeois, understanding France not as “a house of commerce” but as “a work of art, a cathedral upon which one has worked for a thousand years.” [8]  France had been feminized—its government in the Fourth Republic an indulgent mother, its people “one gigantic Madame Bovary, an enormous ninny in the arms of Bohemia.” [9] A bohemianized bourgeoisie will no longer have the discipline to maintain something so modest as prosperity; what had hitherto been supposed to be the ‘low but solid ground’ will turn muddy. France needed fatherliness in order to save its republicanism. It found de Gaulle, and de Gaulle re-founded it.

For de Gaulle (Dutourd learned in conversing with him), France “had a character and a destiny, like a living creature, which one did not model at will.” [10]  This seems flatly to contradict the image of France as a work of art, a cathedral, until one reflects on the way Jacques de Boissy reads the literary artists of the past, treating them as living presences. De Gaulle was more than such a reader, he was such a ‘writer.’ Like Flaubert, in “his Herculean efforts to make one sentence with the balance of those of Montesquieu, de Gaulle strove to perfect a living work of art, France. Thus the “strange kinship” of de Gaulle and Flaubert: “their pride of solitaries, their austere love of glory, their disdain for honors and money,” their “humble placing of themselves in a French line” of succession—for Flaubert, the succession of masters of the French language, for de Gaulle, the succession of those who made France “the most astonishing nation in History.” [11]  “Politics and literature proceeded from an identical patriotism.” [12]  The patriotism of literature and the patriotism of politics proceed from a certain nature, from greatness of soul, from the soul-forming love and friendship that the great-souled have for one another. In a commercial republic, or worse, a bohemianized democracy, greatness of soul will find its rightful place not in the tyranny of Napoleon and not exactly in Napoleon’s grace in exile, but in the political man’s patient vigilance and preparedness, in the literary man’s readiness to recognize and honor such a man when, if he sees him.

 

Notes

1. Jean Dutourd: The Man of Sensibility. Robin Chancellor translation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961, 218.
2. Ibid. 219.
3. Jean Dutourd: The Taxis of the Marne. Harold King translation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957, 17.
4. Ibid. 17.
5. Stendhal: A Life of Napoleon. Roland Gant translation. London: The Rodale Press, 1956, 28, 184.
6. Ibid. 181-182.
7. Jean Dutourd: Conversation avec le général. Paris: Flammarion, 1990. 18.
8. Ibid. 31.
9. The Taxis of the Marne, op. cit., 241.
10. Conversation avec le général, op. cit., 40.
11. Ibid. 40.
12. Ibid. 40-41.
13. Ibid. 41.

 

Before the play, the myth: The first Thebans sprang from the teeth of a dragon, offspring of the war-god. Hera, goddess of (often outraged) wifehood, motherhood, generativity, hated the city. She sent the sphinx to torment the Thebans. The monster with the face of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of a raptor asked the Thebans riddles, destroying those who couldn’t guess the right answers. Riddles or secrets are one means by which gods punish, or torment, men. Gods know things men don’t know, particularly those things pertaining to the origin of man.

The famous riddle—What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, three feet at night?—has a curious answer: Man. Man walks on hands and feet in infancy, feet in adulthood, feet and staff in old age. The answer is curious because the sphinx errs about infancy. Infants ‘walk on six feet: two hands, two feet, and two knees. The sphinx conceives of infants as if they were lion cubs—as if they were her own offspring. She leaves out the ‘middle’ form of locomotion of the ‘middling’ creature, the one between gods and beasts.

Oedipus solves the riddle because he is a man who thinks like a sphinx. He is ‘leonine’ or thumotic, and therefore a true Theban, a true descendent of the god of war. The Thebans themselves cannot answer the question that might be rephrased, ‘What is man?’ They are not only thumotic but autochthonous, sprung from seeds sown in their own territory. They do not abstract from ‘their own.’ Oedipus is a Theban exposed by ‘his own,’ effectually exiled at birth. If man is an animal that always has at least two feet on the ground, Oedipus is a man ‘unfooted’—first hobbled, then cast out and reared in a foreign city. ‘Swollen-foot’ fits nowhere. He is therefore the only Theban who can—because compelled—’abstract’ from the city. He can think of man, not only of Thebans and Corinthians. But he does not understand the origin of man, the earliest ‘age’ of man, the age in which man is most dependent upon his mother, his city, the earth, most rooted or ‘footed.’ To misunderstand genetic nature, to alienate Hera, may lead to a mistaken concentration on maturity, self-sufficiency. The thumotic quest for self-sufficiency yields self-destruction, prefigured by the sphinx, the thumotic, victory-loving suicide who can’t stand to lose.

King Oedipus is the ‘footing’ or foundation of Thebes, the city he saved from the sphinx. The plague-stricken Thebans beg him to save them once more. The plague stops generativity; crops nd livestock die, women cannot bear children. Thebans blame the war-god, no friend of generativity. Oedipus hears from his brother-in-law, Creon—who says he heard it from the oracle at Delphi—that Thebes is polluted by the presence of the murderer of Creon’s father, King Laius.

A murdered king: Surely, a political motive? The suspicion arises from a probabilistic calculation; one suspects such a crime because that’s the way things so often go. To find the presumptive political murderer, Oedipus and the Thebans reason, commonsensically, cui bono? The answer will likely solve the secret of the plotters.

Creon, the initial beneficiary of the crime, and Oedipus, the eventual beneficiary, are the obvious prime suspects. To reassure the people of his innocence, the (suspiciously) foreign king begins his investigation by announcing that he acts in his own interest in trying to find the murderer(s). To further establish his bona fides, Oedipus calls upon any Theban to tell the truth, offering a (limited) guarantee of clemency. Surely such a king does not deceive his people.

The prophet Teiresias (recommended by Creon) tells Oedipus: You blame my thumos for my stubborn silence in refusing to answer all your questions, but you do not see your own thumos that lives within you. Under threat of death, Teiresias finally admits that Oedipus has lived thumotically, committing parricide and incest. Parricide destroys one source of his own life, the rightful paternal authority; it is an act of supreme self-sufficiency. Incest is mating with the other source of his life; it is the supreme act of loving one’s own.

In so informing Oedipus, Teiresias speaks not ‘politically’ but oracularly, as a slave of no man but of the god, Apollo, who, like all the gods, transcends any one city. Nor does Teiresias seek to rule other men by invoking the word of the god; he comes at Oedipus’ request, and essays no commands. Oedipus denies Teiresias’ divine enslavement. He suspects a plot, a deception spun by Creon. The man of thumos who rejects the gods and their ‘plotting’ sees human plots everywhere, all of them directed against him and his own, except those plots that he, god-like, ordains. Oedipus denies the gods, generally. He recurs to his source of political authority, his solution of the sphingian riddle, which, he boasts, he solved by his unassisted human intelligence, not by heeding some god’s revelation. Oedipus is ‘nobody’s fool’ when it comes to oracles. Natural intelligence is his ‘footing,’ not the ground of the city, sown divinely. To rely on one’s own intelligence means that one can be self-instructed. But it can also mean self-deception. Oedipus falsely suspects a human plot where there is a divine ‘plot’ or fatality at work. His very self-deception furthers the divine plot.

Teiresias says: You will soon be footloose, exiled. You do not know your own parents, your own origin. You know the answer to the abstract question, ‘What is man?’ but cannot answer the concrete question, ‘Who am I?’ Teiresias’ riddle is not the sphinx’s riddle; it is a riddle of origins, which are always cloaked from man, a matter of hearsay not sight, prophecy not reasoning. Thumotically, Oedipus replies: I do not care who I am, so long as my discovery of the murderer saves the city. He is a political man to the core, not a man of the gods. He is a man of this city more than he knows. He is the son of its murdered king and he is the city’s unwitting, salvific sacrifice to the gods.

Oedipus’ atheism (shared by his mother-wife Iocasta) threatens the city’s foundations. “The worship of the gods is perishing,” the Chorus laments. If atheism is true, chance rules the world, because chance cannot be foreknown with certainty, only probabilistically. If atheism is true, the priests who teach the certitudes underlying moral restraints lack real authority, and men are beasts with divine ambitions, properly thumotic. Oedipus calls himself a child of chance, a moon-child whose fortunes start small, end big, like the growth of a strange infant who can stand on four legs, without ever crawling. Fortune, ruled with a combination of rational calculation and thumotic daring, replaces the gods as well as real human nature’s generativity and growth. The very thumos that rebels against the gods in the name of self-sufficiency eliminates the only potential source of certainty, prophetic hearsay, while at the same time demanding certainty from the human, probabilistic calculation that is realistically incapable of delivering it. (Add to that, that Greek prophecies are typically ambiguous or double-edged, and it cannot be said that traditional Greeks were optimists.)

Iocasta undeceived remains within the circle of the self by destroying herself, like a defeated sphinx. Oedipus undeceived stands self-cursed and self-blinded. He destroys deceptive sight, which he unwisely trusted more than prophetic hearsay. “What can I see to love?” Deprived of victory and honor, he cannot even love ‘his own’—the other love-objects of the thumotic man. he tells his daughters, “a father seeing nothing, knowing nothing, [begot] you from his own source of life.” They will know their origin, as he did not, but they will be ashamed of it. ‘His own’ are now a sign of shame, as he is for them: the worst punishment for the thumotic or honor-loving man.

Sophocles teaches that the man of unrestrained thumos dreams of self-sufficiency conceived not as liberty but as tyranny, as contempt for the laws given by gods, promulgated by prophets, supplemented by oracles, guarded by priests. Such self-deceptive dreaming destroys the authority of fathers, thus destroying fathers themselves. Tyrants destroy the origin of authority, contradicting themselves in their deluded rationalism. Tyrants are “realists who know nothing of the realities.”