Can all American literature be classified in two camps?
One of the great discoveries of middle age is that you become ever more like the person you were intended to be and care less for the opinions of others. Another great beauty is that you realize you don’t know how long you have left to live so you try to live as well as you can by pulling from the coat of your existence every unnecessary thread that serves no purpose in keeping the whole together.
As for me, my mind stays open and curious. I want to waste as little time as possible. Stuck alone in traffic, I talk to God. Stuck in a line or waiting room, I talk to the people around me. Each answers back as I need. Books that bore me, I stop reading. I will never be able to read every worthy one in an unlimited lifetime. Same with television, movies, music. No time to waste—off, off, away.
Like most people, I try to live in the moment, and like most people, I often fail at it. I wonder how things will be or reflect on how things were, never realizing that despite this lifelong practice of time traveling mentally, future-telling and reminiscing are incredibly flawed activities.
Still, sometimes it’s worth a look back, if only to remind yourself to see how far you’ve come or if you’re at the core the same as you were then. So much has fallen from me over the years. Many barnacles of living that had long clung to my hull have been scraped away. Yet what’s extraordinary is that as I look at myself and back on myself, I realize that I am still who I was: a sometimes fearful seeker, a lover of life, a cockeyed optimist, my own self above all things. And that the boy in me is still there. I’m still his curious eye, his cloud-filled head, his teller of stories, his collector of moments, his tinkerer, his soloist in a world of competing orchestras. Nothing has reminded me more of this than recently rereading some of the favorite authors of my youth: Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
I was introduced to each of them in high school, just selections scattered in a textbook, but I didn’t come to appreciate them fully until college through the most influential teacher I’ve ever had. Professor Nicholas Loprete was everything an ignorant kid like me could have wanted in a teacher. I can still see him coming into class, his collapsible wooden lectern under his arm, shirt collar open wide, a look of mild curiosity in his eyes as he surveyed us. This was in the closing days of when professors could and did still smoke in class, so he would slip his hand into his sportscoat pocket, pull out a cigarette in one deft movement, light it, then launch into the start of his lecture, which usually began with some type of pronouncement about literature that would get half the class to blanch and the other half to raise their hands in combative response. Ever provocative, Professor Loprete was not for anyone who held onto groupthink about American literature or American life. He was there to get you to question. And grow. He was the grit that helped produce your pearl of wisdom.
I learned a lot from him. But what stands out most in my memory is that he believed that all of American literature could be broken into two groups: the “Party of Hope” and the “Party of Memory.” I’m sure part of this idea stemmed from Emerson’s lecture on conservatism, but I believe much of it was his own thinking. He argued that these two strains—hope and memory—ran through all of American literature and that every writer was connected with either one or the other (or occasionally, both). He assigned Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau to the Party of Hope, who expressed a kind of American ideal in which individuals could find themselves connected with God and every other person, while maintaining uniqueness and self-reliance and a kind of singular connection to nature. In the Party of Hope, there was an ever-expanding American frontier and an ever-evolving effort toward the perfection of humanity.
Emerson and Thoreau
The Party of Memory, on the other hand, was represented by authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. These minds looked back on something irretrievably lost, often an ideal that could never be returned to. Here we find Poe’s lost Lenore, Hawthorne’s guilt over his ancestor’s involvement in the Salem Witch Trials, Melville’s quest for vengeance against the white whale that took Ahab’s leg. In the Party of Memory, there was no frontier, there was no striding, only grief-filled looks back on a dead past.
My professor argued that all of American literature since that time can be tied into one of these two strains of thought: those looking forward to some new renewal or those looking back and wondering what if. So in very broad terms, authors who made up the Beat Generation, like Jack Kerouac, would be the spiritual descendants of the Party of Hope, while members of the Lost Generation, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, were the Party of Memory. I think there were some heated debates in class about whether or not someone like Mark Twain, whose cynical wit might’ve put him in the Party of Memory, could also belong to the Party of Hope because of Huck Finn’s willingness to go against society to help Jim and his plan to “light out for the Territory” at the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
But such debates were exactly the point of those lectures. Professor Loprete gave us the great gift of critical thinking. He hammered home the idea that the point of literature was not to provide answers but to pose questions. Literature was a spyglass through which these great writers examined themselves and American society. But Professor Loprete made us not just question American literature. He helped to show us that great minds that had lived decades or centuries before us still had something to say to us as individuals and to the society we had inherited from them.
Beatnicks up to no good
In the fear-mongering media of the present, it is sometimes hard to see that the Party of Hope still has any relevance to us. Yet in my lookback at Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau, I find that they still do. Their endlessly quotable wisdom, almost biblical in nature, remains relevant for all times. The Brooklyn Ferry may be long gone, but Whitman’s feeling of connectedness to all people everywhere still rings true as his Leaves of Grass continues to sound his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Emerson’s observation about perspective and purpose also remains airtight: “The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.” As does Thoreau’s take on time and what is truly important: “When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.”
I could go on. But it’s better just to read each author in full.
Middle age feels like a good time to weigh my old professor’s parties against one another. You can stand on the tracks of your life and look a long ways back and then crane your neck to see where you might want to go. But then again, Thoreau chides me: “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”
Memories haunt us, as individuals and as a society, but the future still presents its ever-unfolding self. Even as we acknowledge all of our progress, the struggle to hope in tomorrow is real. Can we have the connectedness with other human beings that seemed to come to Whitman so easily? Can we see how the natural and the supernatural are part of a great overarching all as Emerson did? Can we be as much at ease in our own individuality and beliefs and with nature as Thoreau was?
In the end, perhaps the most important lesson my old professor taught me is that literature’s greatest importance is to remind us of the complexities of human beings. We’re not all only looking back or looking forward. We’re not all only good or bad. We’re probably most like Mark Twain—critical and observant about human history yet hopeful about possibilities of what’s still to come. Or maybe that’s just me reflecting my own feelings in his work. I look back but then, despite my human frustrations and weaknesses, warm my face to the promises of the West as my sun begins to set.
Even in middle age, the Territory still beckons.
