American Perspective; 1 & 2; Image of Europe; The Puritan Abroad

You Hello, as you've seen, the title of this show is American perspective. It's about books, novels mostly, but a short story or two and some literary criticism. I'm going to try to emphasize what some American writers have thought about Europe and what some European writers have thought about the United States. But, you know, the title is sufficiently ambiguous so that I should be able to say just about anything I want to.

Most of the time, it will refer to images that Americans have of Europe, of their heroes, of their warriors, something like, let's say, from James Fenimore Cooper to Gary Cooper, of their non-heroes, even of their beats. And then, as I say, sometimes it will refer to images, pictures that Europeans have of us. You know, finding a subject matter and a title for a program like this really isn't as simple as you might think. The thing I know most about is Shakespeare, and Shakespeare belongs to the ages, and Professor Baxter. And the thing I know second most about is 17th century English literature. In fact, I know more about it than anyone wants to listen to. And as you know also, there have been a number of programs on the great ideas, just generally the great ideas. There are about a hundred odd of them, I understand.

I saw them all lined up in a picture in life a few years ago. Some of them are very pressing. Then there are political ideas, there are social ideas, social great ideas, political great ideas, and so on. Well, our aim, I think, is a little more modest. Originally, I wanted to call this program the not so great ideas, but the producer didn't like this. So then I thought, most people look at television usually to be entertained, so I thought maybe we could have a program and call it ideas to relax too. And the producer didn't like that either. So I gave some thought to the idea that the really attractive shows these days are either westerns or detectives. And so I picked the obvious title, have books, will travel. And this was disapproved. So finally, finally I picked a western title. I thought we could call this program frontier bibliographer. But even this was rejected, apparently one cannot be frivolous about really serious things.

But anyway, no matter what the title is, the plan is to discuss a number of books as illustrations of themes or ideas which have appeared continuously or if not continuously continually in American literature since colonial times. There is of course America's image of Europe bound to be different when seen through different eyes. And after all Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James F. Scott Fitzgerald were seduced by Europe and a writer like Vladimir Nabokov, while he was seduced by the United States. Add a lesson in the United States of all things. And then occasionally of course a writer like Tennessee Williams tries to work both sides of the street as in the Roman spring of Mrs. Stone. There is the Puritan abroad, someone like Nathaniel Hawthorne who said all he had to say on the subject really in the marble font. Then there's that noisy red skin Mark Twain who used Lake Tahoe as a kind of liquid measuring rod for everybody of water in the world from the serpentine in Hyde Park to the Sea of Galilee.

And Lake Tahoe was always more beautiful. Childrenism, I think, can go no farther. There's the International American Girl, virtuous type of course, talked about by Henry James, well the number of novels but especially in the two early novels that I intend to talk about sometime Daisy Miller and Portrait of a Lady. Well let me illustrate what I have in mind generally by a few carefully chosen random ideas. You know there's this persistent image of American innocence. American writers have recently written books saying that American innocence isn't an end but I think contrary reports are still coming in from Europe. It reminds one of a telegram Mark Twain sent to a gathering of writers in New York in the early 1900s.

Supposedly they were at this dinner to celebrate the end of naturalism in American writing. Telegram read, naturalism not dead, let her follow us. Well put baldly, many writers have seen the United States as an escape from a corrupt old world Europe to something better because something new is more innocent, more pure, more natural and so on. It's the kind of thing that lets Kenyon, one of the four main characters in Hawthorne's The Marble Fawn, say to Donald Tahoe, the handsome young Italian, you should go with me to my native country. In that fortunate land, each generation has only its own sins and sorrows to bear. Here it seems as if all a weary and dreary past were piled upon the back of the present. Now one runs across this kind of thing all over the lot.

172 years ago a young American named Royal Tyler dropped down from Boston to New York to see a play at the school for scandal and which you know is already a very laundered version of restoration comedy. They even so Royal Tyler didn't like it. So I went back to his hotel room and three weeks he wrote something that he thought was better. It was a play called The Contrast. Well the more or less villain of this piece is called Billy Dimple. But he has other faults. He flirts with girls. He's rich and he's a strong anglophile. As a matter of fact he's a great admirer of the Earl of Chesterfield and you know he's a kind of Machiavelli in dancing pumps. Well this dimple naturally ends up a bankrupt and the hero of the play named properly enough manly and a good 200% American even in this early date turns out to be the hero. I mean that's early in our literature native American gentility is placed in contrast to effect and wicked Europeanism.

And as you know the fat, well dimples and all I suppose the fat has been in the fire more or less ever since. Royal Tyler who probably would have changed his first name is if he could have had an image of Europe in his mind which has been shared by writers from well from the 18th century right up well right up to the day after tomorrow. For instance in the 18th century Abigail, a wife of John Adams even thought that this superiority of things American extended to the birds and bees and flowers. She wrote a friend back home. Do you know that American bird that Europe's are? Do you know that European birds have not half the melody of ours, nor is their fruit half so sweet, nor their flowers half so fragrant, nor their manners half so pure, nor their people half so virtuous, but keep this to yourself or I shall be thought more than half deficient in understanding and taste.

In the 30s of the 19th century Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the Sistine Chapel while he was in Rome. This is a room as you know of Michael Angelo's magnificent murals. Emerson went there to see the elaborate blessing of the poems by the Pope at Easter. At this time he was still more or less a Unitarian and is always all his life. He bore with him the luggage of a strong Puritan background. All this Roman Catholic pomp and ceremony didn't impress him much. He said he was afraid it wouldn't be approved by an American Indian and he clearly implied that American Indian would be a proper aesthetic judge of such matters. He also, Emerson also went the opera while he was in Rome and he didn't like the ballet between the acts. He wrote when he got home.

I could not help feeling the while that it were better for mankind if there were no such dancers. I have since learned God's decision on the same in the fact that all the ballerini are nearly idiotic. Well, a few years later, and I shall talk about in a later program, Mark Twain made the trip to Europe. And this was the trip that was to result in one of his very early successes in a sense abroad. Well, one can hardly say that Mark Twain is a sort of pale face as Emerson was, but even so he had the typical, the representative attitude of the American toward things European. He didn't like things European because they weren't a moraca, and that's about what it amounted to. For instance, when he landed in the Azores, he wrote in his journal, this community is eminently Portuguese. That is to say it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy. Sounds pretty modern to me. And not so long ago, Alexander Kynance, the president of the unit, automotive company, in Sinclair Lewis' novel,

is novel Doddsworth, says to Sam Doddsworth, the hero of the novel. I don't know whether I can read this properly, but it goes like this. Europe, rats, dead store nail, placed for women in long-haired artists, dead, only American loans that keep them from burying the corpse. All this art, more art in the good, shiny spark plug than in all the fat, venous demylos they ever turned out. Well, all this is simply a way of saying that we in America, perhaps not so much today, but certainly in earlier days, have in a new land got a new chance. I think many of us, or many writers anyway, would agree with the lines of Archibald McLeish, which go east where the dead kings and the remembered sepulchars west was the grass. Now, this idea, new land, new chance, and of course, I'm not talking just about economic chance,

is one of the things that William Faulkner is talking about in a great short story called The Bear, and it's implicit in the work of a fine young American poet named Reed Whitamore, who has a recent volume out published by the University of Minnesota Press. The title of the volume is An American Takes a Walk, and it's a title of a poem I have here too. One always hesitates to close Reed for the record, because there will always be a closer reader by and by, but I think one can say that this poem says roughly, that the American gets a new chance at being saved, because, well, the natural world is simply, it's kind of a romantic idea, the natural world is simply preferable to the learning. Whitamore rhymes. In the middle of this life's journey, he came like Dante on a wood the note said stood for error, but in his case stood for good,

where his art and his prowess left him and left him become a child to whom the wild seemed milder than his old neighborhood. Had he, with those abandoned sons of fatal decrees, then been found by a shepherd and bred up to shepherdees, or retrieved like Dante by Virgil, and led through circles and seas to some brighter country, beyond his annotated trees, he could not have been more cared for. Nature was awfully kind. Hell, in that motherly habit, put hell quite out of mind. How in that ardent could human frailty be but glossed? How in that Eden could Adam be really holy, lost? Well, even today, to descend to the subliterary for a moment, temple fielding, for instance, the guidebook writer,

is pretty certain that the germs increase in Europe as you get away from Anglo-Saxon highways and moorays. Well, it's not, of course, universally acknowledged that this idea of American innocence and purity is really a good thing. Some Europeans, for instance, have quite a different view of its significance, occasionally seeing it, seeing this innocence as just plain dangerous. And this is another thing I'd like to talk about at length, sometime. As you know, these days, the American is ugly. But before that, he was quiet, at least since March 1956, when Viking press published a new novel, by the, I think, one can only say, Great English novelist Graham Green, a title of the novel, which is the Quiet American. The scene is Indochina, during the French colonial struggle from 1946 to 1954. The principal character, I think, is the narrator, an English journalist named Thomas Fowler.

But the character of the title is Alden Pyle, age 32, bachelor, a graduate in far eastern studies from a great American university and a member of the American economic aid mission in Indochina. Now, Pyle is the principal stick with which Green attacks the United States. What's the like? Well, mostly he's an innocent, a dangerous innocent, and in various places, Green says that things is this. Of Pyle. An unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart with his gangly legs and his crew cut and his wide campus gaze, he seemed incapable of harm. Or another place. My first instinct was to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always mutely asks for protection. When we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. And elsewhere he writes, green writes, I could imagine his soft dog's eyes in the dark. They ought to have called him Fido, not Alden. He'll always be an innocent. You can't blame him for that. They're always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity. God save us always from the innocent and the good. And so on. Well, Fowler is a narrator. Finally, it ranges to have Pyle murdered because he's convinced that this innocence, this simplicity, is so extremely dangerous. And one must say that given green's not, giving the plot details of his novel, you almost have to agree with him. Well, the idea is that this is not an idea I agree with, but certainly it is an idea that one sees

that Alden, Pyle, and thousands of other Americans are supposedly loose in the world with billions of dollars for foreign aid and nothing but their ignorance and innocence to protect them. And as a result, the free world crumbles under our innocent and destructive threat. And this is an apparently, and this is apparently an engaging idea to many. The quiet American was a critical and popular success, all right. And green is not alone in expressing these sentiments. I'd like to pick another example. The much more bitter and more political, really. Kurtzio Malaparte, the Italian writer, who published in 1952 under the Hooten Mifflin in Sydney or whatever it is, a book called The Skin. The story deals, in part, with the impact of beaten Italy, Southern Italy, principally upon young American soldiers. Malaparte writes of how a young American lieutenant,

Jimmy Renn, of Cleveland, Ohio, reacts to a walk through the streets. I think it's in Southern Italy. It may be Sicily. But anyway, it's in the southern part of the continent. And this is what Malaparte says. Jimmy walked through those filthy alleys in the midst of that miserable populace with an elegance and a nonchalance, which only Americans possess. No one on this earth saved the Americans can move about with such easy, smiling grace among people who are filthy, starved and unhappy. It is not a sign of insensibility. It is a sign of optimism and at the same time of innocence. Americans are not cynics. They are optimists, and optimism is in itself a sign of innocence. He who is blameless and thought indeed is led not to be sure

to deny that evil exists, but to refuse to believe in the necessity of evil, to refuse to admit that evil is inevitable and incurable. The American believes that misery, hunger, pain and everything else can be combated, that men can recover from misery, hunger and pain, that there is a remedy for all evil. They do not know, Malaparte concludes, that evil is incurable. They do not know, although they are in many respects the most Christian nation in the world that without evil there can be no Christ. Well, when Malaparte died not long ago, he left a beautiful villa on the Isle of Capri. He left this villa to Chinese Communist writers. But the sentiments expressed in the above rather long paragraph, whatever political stripe they may be given today, are as a matter of fact not really very far

from the ideas in John Milton's Ariapagitica from the 17th century where this great independent thinker writes, that virtue, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil and knows not the utmost the advice from our promises to her followers and rejects it is but a blank virtue, not a pure. The whiteness is but an excremental whiteness. Well, so much right now, there will be more later on the idea of American innocence. Besides, it is not always true that the American finds super sophistication when he goes to Europe or world-weariness or corruption. In fact, in a complicated way, the American finds just exactly the opposite. The American abroad sometimes seems not evil, but merely life.

His own puret-nism, or American puret-nism though long ago lost its religious and rational justification, remains a kind of pattern and behavior when he comes in contact with Europe and sometimes it does not, so what he encounters does not seem decadence, but vitality. The kind of thing that he is warden writes about in the age of innocence, although as a matter of fact that novel doesn't get off the west east coast of the United States to the last pages. In such novels, I'm mentioning generally now, as Malcolm Cowley points out in the literary situation, one of two things always happens. Either the Americans are morally ruined by trying to imitate peasants, or else the hero and heroine are redeemed into their natural passion itself. Americans out of a straight jacket as it were sometimes go to Europe, a beaten, defeated, has been placed, they think,

and they find not evil, but good. Sometimes of course they find not what is, but what was, and that brings up another thing. They develop toward Europe what might be called excessive cultural tolerance. What they would reject at home, they accept with enthusiasm when they go abroad, according to William Haslund, the Washington Irving, was interested not in the England of the time of his visit, but of the distant past. Haslund wrote, instead of looking around to see what we are, he sets to work to describe us as we were, at second hand, his inspiration coming from his childhood reading. Well, as you know, this attitude is still encouraged by magazine advertisements of the British travel bureau, which managed to give us the impression that life in England even today consists principally of changing the guard at Buckingham Palace,

of changing the program at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford on Aven, and of changing a tire, spelled T-Y-R-E, of course, in the Cotswolds. I mean, we sometimes get so tolerant of things European that we get denationalized. For hundreds of years, people have been getting Frenchified, Italian-aided, and spanielized. For instance, Sinclair Lewis' Fran Doddsworth, Sam's wife, did it this way. This is a quote from the text. In England, Fran had learned to say, lift for elevator, z for z, laboratory for laboratory, scenario for scenario, and she for ski. And before she had left America, she had been able to point out her Europeanism by keeping her fork in her left hand. Now she added to her accomplishments the ability, the ability, sorry, to make a European seven by crossing it,

and ardently she crossed every seven, particularly in letters to friends and zenith, who were thus prevented from what knowing what figure she was using. And in her new book on Florence, Mary McCarthy mentions that now, and then a tourist in Florence, says that he's seen a Botticelli angel on an Italian motor scooter. But she goes on, I don't agree with what she says when she goes on, but she does go on. Tourists have special powers. By the Florentines, it is accepted that their young men and women today are not much to look at. Personally, I've seen many, Botticelli angels on scooters. And then, of course, there is the image we get from the true expatriates. Those who go to Europe not to look around and come back and talk about it, but to go there to live, or try to anyway. Henry James and T.S. Eliot went to England and stayed, not apparently, just to punish themselves. John Johnson and Bernard Berenson went to Italy.

They stayed. A great many promising young American writers went to Europe after the First World War. And they stayed until the Depression chased most of them home. After the Second World War, by 1947, the GI Bill, you remember, Public Law 346, had pushed the American population of Paris to 30,000. I read just the other day that it's back to 3,000. So, what I'm trying to say is that you can like Europe, you can lump it, or you can ignore it. But it seems to me that if you're going to explain the United States, you've got to think about, as Harry Bamford Parks has said, how much we are an extension to new lands of the heritage of Western civilization and how much we represent an escape from a corrupt old world. Now, heaven's knows most of us already have an image of Europe in our minds.

We may have got some of it from experience, some of it from reading, from the behavioral sciences, for instance. These birds who today give us what we really know, what is true, and then our poor writers come along and try sometimes unsuccessfully to shape it into art. I mean, these days, I think, David Reisman and perhaps in more dilute form, Vance Packard tell us what we are like. But I think, at least I hope this is so that over the long haul, we get our images of things from great literature, our image of the frontier of Europe, of warriors, of heroes, and so on. Well, anyway, I figure that this is so, and since it is so, I intend to go on for over some odd number of times, which no commercial station could ever use, which is therefore impractical, and which is therefore, of course, educational to talk about this kind of thing, and I intend to use books as my principal evidence. And I might say, right now,

that I probably will not say anything that is particularly new, you know, the poor guy working with literature these days has a problem, not to find help, but to keep from foundering and all as he finds. I thought, for instance, that this idea about images wasn't so bad, and yet when I went to the library, I found a whole shelf of materials which would help me with what I wanted to do. So all I can say is that this un-located business, you see here, contains among other things, books, which I, some of the books anyway, which I am reading, or will read, in an attempt to establish some American perspectives. That is... .

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Thank you for watching. Hello. Getting today I want to spend some time on three novels, written about ten years apart when America was coming of age. Nathaniel Hawthorne's the marble fawn, published in 1860. Mark Twain's Innocence of Broad, published in 1869, and Henry James, novella Daisy Miller, published in 1878. Hawthorne and James are what the distinguished critic Philip Rob has called to pale faces. Gentlemen, full of ambiguities, patrician and outlook devoted to allegory and the symbolism. Mark Twain is just the opposite, a red skin, at least a hundred percent American, plebeian and naturalistic. So I thought it might be interesting to take a look at how these three

men reacted to Europe to life. Now today, however, I want to talk just about Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts. His father was a sea captain. He was killed, died at sea when Hawthorne was about four years old. His mother became and remained for the rest of her life on recluse. And it must be said that Nathaniel himself was a fairly withdrawn young man. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1825, he went back to Salem. He wrote a novel and he wrote several tales on the effect of Puritanism. That is a kind of psychology which remains after the rational and religious rationale really have disappeared of the effect of Puritanism on New England.

And this is the basic query of Hawthorne's life and work. Hawthorne's theme is guilt with running comments on salvation. And the scarlet letter is, of course, it's fine a statement of the theme, but I'm not going to talk about scarlet letter. In 1852, when Hawthorne was 48 years old, he wrote the campaign biography of his old Bowdoin classmate, Franklin Pierce, the original manifest-destinator. Pierce won. Hawthorne went to Liverpool as our consul for the next four years. Thus, at almost 50, Hawthorne's European experience begins. After four years in Liverpool, he went down to, he went with his wife to Italy where he remained for two years. Then in 1860, he went back to the United States to Concord, Massachusetts, and died four years later. Now, from Hawthorne's European experiences, we get, or we have, his voluminous European notebooks and this one novel, the marble font.

The best of the notebooks is in the marble font, really. I've read various comments on the percentage of the notebooks, which appears in the marble font, but it must run close to two-thirds. This is really standard for a travel novel, maybe 50% to thirds, travel the one-third novel. The scene of the marble font is Rome, mid-19th century Rome. Verity is writing the Sicilian Vespers, an actress. Hawthorne's cast of characters is smaller, only four characters' main characters, really. And on one level, the story is simple. Very simple. I shall try to retell it. Now, it is given abstract of it without distorting it too much, because it's really necessary to talk about what's behind it all. Kenyon, an American sculptor, is the observer commentator on the action. Miriam is a young lady of shadowy background

and a great beauty. Donatello is a young and extremely handsome Italian and finally, Hilda, a young American artist in Rome, a copyist of the great masters, and the epitome, a female Protestant virtue. Well, when the novel opens, these four characters are standing together in the capital line, Museum, a fact which allows Hawthorne to give us a quick rundown on the holdings of this institution. And it turns out that Donatello bears a striking resemblance to one of the statues they are looking at. The marble fawn, supposedly by praxitiles. Now, this fawn Hawthorne describes at really at some length. He is a natural figure, innocent, warm, and in a sense unheroic.

He has pointed ears, and Hawthorne is mighty coy about whether or not Donatello does too. To Miriam, the only really worldly character in the entire of the four main characters, Donatello gave, and this is Miriam's words. The idea of being not precisely man, nor yet a child, but in a high and beautiful sense, an animal, a creature in a state of development, less than what mankind has attained, yet they're more perfect within itself for that very deficiency. In the heart, the old, romantic idea of the golden age and the natural man. Now, Donatello is madly in love with Miriam. And Kenyon, the other sculptor, is ever so sanely in love with Hilda. Miriam sort of rejects Donatello. Well, not sort of. She rejects Donatello, constantly implying that there is something sinister about her own background, her own past, which puts her outside normal human relationships.

One day, while visiting the catacombs, the four encounter a not-so-handsome stranger, pre-tenesty Williams-type stranger, who is clearly known to Miriam, and to whom Donatello takes an instant and really profound dislike. This man follows Miriam wherever she goes to Donatello's increasing irritation. Then finally, one night, when the two are standing on the Tarpean Rock at the top of the Capitoline Hill, the Tarpean Rock from which the old Romans cast their villains to certain death. The not-so-handsome stranger approaches Miriam. Donatello attacks him, and upon receiving a significant glance from Miriam throws this stranger over the cliff to his death. Now, it's not really made Peyton place explicit by Hawthorne, but it seems pretty clear that they're brought together by this crime, and they become lovers that very night.

Unknown to them, the very pure Hilda has quite by chance seen what has happened. Well, anyway, the next day, the four are to go to the church of the Caputians to see a painting. Hilda, of course, does not appear, which is having rejected her friend. The other three do, and while they're there, they observe that a mass is going on for the dead. The dead man turns out to be our two of Ben, the not-so-handsome stranger. Well, Hilda naturally ends her friendship with Miriam. Donatello has no longer an innocent fawn. He flees from Miriam to his home in Tuscany, Miriam follows him, and they resume this guilty relationship. Meanwhile, Hilda, almost incapacitated, even by the knowledge that evil exists, goes to confession, or ends up confession in St. Peter's, temporarily abandoning the pure tradition.

Donatello cut this short, finally gives himself up to the police and is imprisoned, Miriam vanishes into the shadows from which he has originally appeared. Hilda and Kenyon are married. It's a simple story. Now, the marble fawn is not a great novel. And the matter of fact, I read the other day that it's a pre-novel of the four principal characters, only Miriam and Donatello show any real signs of life at all. The author is sometimes standing, looking over our showers, telling us what we should think standing there, and proprio persona, instead of getting the story told as he should be doing. And when the whole thing's over, there are loose ends of the plot still around the place. Hawthorne didn't help this any, by writing a kind of epilogue with a second edition in which he attempted to explain a few things. And personally, I still don't know whether Donatello had

fawn-like ears, and I don't think that Hawthorne did either. But nevertheless, having said all these disagreeable things, I want to urge the fact that this is an important book, an important book to know a little about. Two reasons. First, it's a travel book, reflecting 19th century American dilute puritanism as it looked at Europe. And secondly, as the telling of a story by a new Englander on the theme of guilt using the scene, Rome. Well, first is a travel book. Henry Jane says somewhere that the marble fawn was part of the intellectual equipment of every Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome. Well, it seems to me this tells us a good deal about the intellectual luggage of visitors to Rome in the 19th century, and it's not all unpleasant. For instance, there's a long description of the almost perverse attraction of Rome

to the visitor. And I think for my own part, it sounds very modern. It goes like this. When we have known Rome and left her where she lies, like a long decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and the fungus growth over spreading all its more admirable features, left her in utter weariness no doubt of her narrow crooked intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that tread over them as a penitential pilgrimage. So indescribably ugly, more over so cold, so alley-like into which the sun never falls and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs. Left her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storey, yellow-washed houbles, or call in palaces, where all it is jerry and domestic life seems magnified and multiplied. And weary of climbing those staircases,

which ascend from a ground floor of cook shops, cobler stalls, stables and regiments of cavalry to a middle region of princes, cardinals and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists just beneath the unattainable sky. Left her, worn out with shivering at the cheerlists and smoky fireside by day, and feasting with our own substance that ravenous little populace of a Roman bed at night. Left her sicket heart of Italian trickery, which is uprooted whatever faith in man's integrity had endured till now, and sicket stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter and bad cookery needlessly be stowed on evil meats. Left her, disgusted with the pretense of holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipresent. Left her, half lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle of which has been used up long ago, or corrupted by myriads of slaughters. Left her, crushed down in spirit

with the desolation of her ruin and the hopelessness of her future. Left her, in short, hating her with all our might and adding our individual curse to the infinite anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down. When we have left Rome in such a mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery by and by that our heartstrings have mysteriously attached themselves to the eternal city and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our home than even the spot where we were born. Now this must have been a great confession for a 19th century American writer, such as Hawthorne was. On the other hand, Hawthorne can be fairly rye about the commonplace or the historical. He describes the tyber as a mud puddle in violent motion and he complains that everyone still does.

I'm sure of the Roman attitude toward winter. This is what he says. He writes, The native Romans, on the other hand, like the butterflies and the grasshoppers, resign themselves to the short, sharp misery which winter brings to a people whose arrangements are made almost exclusively with a view to summer. Wherever we pass our summer as he goes on, may all our inclement months from November to April, henceforth be spent in some country which recognizes winter as an integral part of the year. And then because the fountain itself is so famous, I think perhaps the description of the trebi fountain might be interesting. You all know that this is the fountain which was made so famous by a movie called Three Coins in the Fountain. I think the interesting thing, one of the interesting things about Hawthorne's description is the fact that he seems to appreciate the burrow principle that a structure may be fascinating

without being in the classical sense, perfect. Is he somewhat more sympathetic than other 19th century writers on the subject? Here is some of what he said. It's night. The party descended some steps to the water's brim and after a sip or two, stood gazing at the absurd design of the fountain where some sculptor of Bernini's school actually, it was Nico LaSolvey, had gone absolutely mad in marble. It was a great palace front with niches and many ball reliefs, out of which looked a gripper's legendary version, virgin, and several of the allegoric sisterhood. While at the base appeared Neptune with these floundering steeds and tritens, blowing their horns about him, and 20 other artificial fantasies which the calm moonlight sued into better taste than was native to them. And after all it goes on, it was as magnificent a piece of work as ever-human skill-contrived. At the foot of the palatial facade

was strewn with careful art and ordered irregularity, a broad and broken heap of massive rock, looking as if it might have leaned there since the deluge. Over a central precipice fell the water in a semi-circular cascade and from a hundred crevices on all sides snowy jets gushed up and streams spouted out of the mouths and nostrils of stone monsters and fell in glistening drops. While other ribulates that had run wild came leaping from one rude step to another over stones that were mossy, slimy, and green with seg. Because in a century of this wild play, nature had adopted the fountain of trebi, of course this is what the baroque artist wanted to do with all its elaborate devices for her own. Finally, the water tumbling, sparkling, and dashing with joyous haste, the never-ceasing murmur poured itself into a great marble-brimmed reservoir and filled it with a quivering tie. But the marble font is by no means a simple

a business as I have so far indicated. Maxwell Geismar has commented that if the marble font is a travel book, it's the little as if Doystayevsky wrote a betaker. What the marble font is, as a matter of fact, what everything Hawthorne wrote, is an allegory. No, I would not be so presumptuous as to define allegory for you, but it's a matter of fact the other day well five years ago actually. I ran across a definition of allegory in the partisan review, which makes more sense than most literary definitions, and I'd like to take a crack at it and then maybe we could put it to work. It seems to me to include a number of things worth including. An allegory is a kind of yarn made up to invagal its audience into a larger idea. And the obvious difference between it and a lie

is that it is meant to lead, whereas the lie is meant to mislead. It is a simplification of a complex thing. Now it's not a complex thing made easy. For its fullest meaning, it is no easy to understand and the original ideas themselves. But an allegory is more accessible because having meaning on several planes, it can lead its audience step by step at least as far as they individually can go. It is never a complication of a simple thing. If it were, it would be a fraud. Well, now I suppose without thinking about very much that this definition would embrace ESOP's fables, parables of Christ, or Shirley Jackson's fine short story, The Lottery, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which makes a diseased Europe tuberculosis sanatorium,

Orwell's Animal Farm, 1984, Alberto Moravius, The Conformist, and of course the marble font. Now for all its simplicity, which might have so far been evident, the marble font is the retelling of the fall of man. And the Adam of this story is a beautiful, innocent, and handsome, Italian man named Donatello, the Count of Montebina. It seems to me that Hawthorne's conclusions are a little ambiguous. This may be because I can only be led so far in the allegory. But it doesn't seem to me there's anything ambiguous at all about really what he's, the main point of what he's trying to say. The conventions of 19th century novel writing prevented Hawthorne from delivering a round, unvarnished tale. But it didn't fool DH Lawrence,

and I don't think he would fool a wise modern reader. In his studies in classic American literature, DH Lawrence writes of the marble font of Hawthorne in general, you must look through the surface of art and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise, all his mere childishness, that blue-eyed darling Nathaniel knew disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out and disguise. Well, I would propose that the disguise is penetrable. Miriam, for instance, this dark, lustrous, beautiful creature is symbolically at one time or another in the novel, tied up with Beatrice Chancy, legendarily associated with incest with her father. She's tied up with Cleopatra, and a whole covey of biblical ladies,

ranging from Eve to Judas to Rachel. Her husband, the not so handsome stranger, turns out to be her husband, and he also turns out to be either her half-brother or her cousin, depending upon which critic or which page of the novel you read. In other words, incest, fratrice side, the whole works mixed up here together in Miriam. Miriam is a sinning lady, and she sees sin, or the overcoming of sin, evil, Satan, whatever word you want to use for it, as a pretty complicated process. Now, for instance, when she is gathered with her friends in the Church of the Caputians, looking at Guido Rennese, placid painting of the Archangel Michael, overcoming the devil, a painting which Hilda had thought was simply wonderful, Miriam takes one long look,

and she is indignant, she says, how fair he looks with his unruffled wings, with his unhack sword, clad in his bright armor, and that exquisitely fitting sky-blued, tunic, cut in the latest parodysical mode, what a dainty air of the celestial society, with what a half-scornful delicacy he sets his prettily sandal foot on the head of his prostrate bow. But is it thus that virtue looks the moment after its death struggle with evil? Haha, I could have told Guido better. A full third of the Archangel's feather should have been torn from his wings, the rest all ruffled till they looked like Satan's own. His sword should be streaming with blood and perhaps broken halfway to the hilt, his armor crushed, his robes rent, his best gory, a bleeding gash on his brow, cutting right across the stern skull of battle. He should press his foot down hard upon the old serpent, sorry,

as if his very soul depended on it, feeling him squirm mightily and doubting whether the fight were half over yet, and how the victory might turn. And so on. Well, the point is that to Hawthorne asked to John Milton, the battle against evil in life is not a particularly sanitary proceeding. And Miriam, clearly, I think, represents this idea allegorically. And then there's Donatella, young, pure, innocent, passionate. Miriam says to him early in the story, you cannot suffer deeply, therefore you can but half enjoy. Well, as you remember, as a result of a chain of circumstances which we don't need to go into again, Donatella commits a murder. It's a pretty violent way to get introduced to the sinning business. And so to Adam, Mr. Donatella, knowledge came with sin. I mean, the union that followed it is, well, it's cemented in sin. And the Puritan Hawthorne writes that sin is not without its pleasures.

They flung the past behind them as she counseled or else distilled from it a fiery intoxication which suffered to carry them through those first moments of their doom. For guilt has its moment of rapture too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic sense of freedom. Well, anyway, Donatella's guilt drives even from Miriam they come back together again. I mean, it's the sin that, that shocks Donatella into becoming a man. I think somewhere, Kenyon says, out of his bitter agony, a soul and intellect have inspired him. Now, as for Hilda, she's simply an allegorical ideal that she's variously associated with the Virgin Mary and St. Hilda. She never sins, but it is sort of assumed in the story that learning of the fact that evil exists and going to confession sort of catapults her into womanhood. I mean, the fact that fear results

from the discovery of evil in the world is a kind of, well, Hemingway talks about it. You know, this in a short story like the killers which Nick Adams leaves town when he finds out what a world this is. Well, where does this all lead us? I think it leads us to this conclusion of Hawthorns that without sin and suffering moral growth is really unlikely to occur. Now, here we have Hawthorne, a 19th century Puritan writer, very Puritan. He was a provincial Protestant in wise, old, decadent Europe. He wouldn't meet George Elliott, for instance, because he disapproved of her domestic setup. He thought that sculptors always sculpt their male figures in trousers and coats. And he considered the Renaissance a good deal less good than it might have been if it hadn't been for the fact that those painters

were using as models for the Virgin Mary, their mistresses. This is all true, but the real point is that he was wise enough to think, for instance, that the Sistine ceiling was one of the greatest works of art ever created. And when he looked about trying to apply his mildewed theories about how life should be run, he was obviously disturbed. He was disturbed, as disturbed as an angry young man. At one point, Kenyon thinks about how this society is going. And I may not add up what Hawthorne was thinking, but it adds up to something for a 20th century reader. It is the iron rule in our day to require an object and purpose in life. It makes us all parts of a complicated scheme of progress, which can only result in our arrival at a colder and drier region than we were born in. It insists upon everybody adding somewhat a might, perhaps,

but earned by incessant effort to an accumulated pile of usefulness, of which the only use will be to burden our posterity with even heavier thoughts and more inordinate labor than our own. No life wanders like an unfettered stream. There is a mill wheel for the tiniest, reveal it to turn. We go all wrong, says Hawthorne, by two strenuous a resolution to go all right. And that's one American perspective. This is

N E T National Educational Television. Thank you.