American Literature Sucks

Admit it: you're bored

It’s taken me years to realize just how bad most of the “great” American writers of the twentieth century were—just how much they sucked. I used to think that when a demure magazine like The New Yorker (or a demure English teacher purporting to love books) took a writer seriously, I should too. So I would dutifully bury my nose in As I Lay Dying or The Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby. But those readings had all the savor of a can of mushy vegetables, and that’s not such a bad metaphor for things you consume because people bigger, smarter, and more important than you are compelling you to consume them. Now that I’m in my forties, I’ve given myself permission to hate the moronic dialogue in Gatsby; to abhor the drunken self-indulgence of Faulkner; to clench white knuckles at the mention of the jaundiced, prematurely jaded Holden Caulfield.

And I’m realizing that the above describes how I’ve always felt, though for decades it was impossible to acknowledge my distaste or give my own instincts as much credit as The Atlantic gave a Steinbeck or an Arthur Miller. As a matter of fact, I’ve never enjoyed a single course in American Literature—or even a single day in a single course. Like the subject matter itself, the classes all sucked: the teachers were bleak and solemn when covering The Crucible, which along with The Scarlet Letter had become a fixture in the anti-Puritan liturgy of public schooling, itself a dreary scene with dreary obsessions; they were devoutly and cozily feminist when guiding us by the hand through The Bean Trees and Their Eyes Were Watching God; and curiously dogged in traversing the gray, cubistic avenues of Sister Carrie.

I’ve given myself permission to hate a large segment of the canon

When you think about it, it’s as if the study of American Literature were designed to be as unappealing as possible to the ordinary, adventurous boy. Seriously: all it takes is a few pages of Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich to dispel one’s hope that life contains even a dallop of glory or a dash of poetry. Other people have myths and legends; we have Death of a Salesman. American letters are like American strip malls: intentionally ugly and chained to an anti-aesthetic of leaden unexceptionalism.  

What’s missing is a proper sense of what American Literature is for—what purpose it ought to serve. That question isn’t any older than the 1840’s, when a small crop of great American writers flowered for a short half-century: Poe, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Melville. In the case of Poe, the question was answered most inventively, and the crime genre was born, together with a style of Gothic horror unmatched anywhere; with Melville came a manly humor, gravitas, and encyclopedic richness of detail; and Dickinson remains America’s first poet. Hawthorne is remarkable for being the one in the bunch I loathe; he is so mannered it would take him a page to describe an apple, and he wouldn’t even get around to what it tasted like. From Hawthorne’s perspective, the Puritans were as far back as the Civil War is to us, a distance allowing for a lurid and one-sided account of the founding stock. He only took off because he was among the first to present America with something it wanted badly: a substantial novel set in America, written by an American, and tailored for Americans to read. (I know I know: James Fenimore Cooper came a generation before, and boy could he serve up a meaty tale—which must be why they keep him off the menu in grueling educational environments.)  

But The Scarlet Letter is the exception that proves the rule: something very bad happened to American letters after 1900. In fairness, something very bad was happening everywhere, a zeitgeist of urban congestion fostering a new breed of writers who could produce nothing but bile. In the British Isles, mass production of cheap liquor was driving men to drink themselves silly, but that was only to escape the coke and grind of their insufferable Industrial Age jobs. It’s no fluke, therefore, that British letters went sour after the Great Wars. Could it be that what’s lacking in modern literature is simply a knowledge and appreciation of country living? And perhaps a delight in the sea?

Take Philip Larkin as an example of the British curdling. The coulda-been poet laureate’s critique of modern verse is razor-sharp in its incisiveness:

We seem to be producing a new kind of bad poetry, not the old kind that tries to move the reader and fails, but one that does not even try. Repeatedly he is confronted with pieces that cannot be understood without reference beyond their own limits or whose contented insipidity argues that their authors are merely reminding themselves of what they know already, rather than re-creating it for a third party. The reader, in fact, seems no longer present in the poet's mind as he used to be, as someone who must understand and enjoy the finished product if it is to be a success at all; the assumption now is that no one will read it, and wouldn't understand or enjoy it if they did.

So the coulda-been laureate knew a thing or two about the modus operandi of poetry, and put the thing into words better than I could. Yet there remains a strange contrast between the enchanting anti-modernism cited above and the sulfuric spleen in his verse. It’s so bad that one is relieved he took up poetry instead of serial murder:  

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

And:

Love again: wanking at ten past three   
(Surely he’s taken her home by now?),   
The bedroom hot as a bakery,
The drink gone dead, without showing how   
To meet tomorrow, and afterwards,
And the usual pain, like dysentery.

Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt,   
Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare,   
And me supposed to be ignorant,
Or find it funny, or not to care . . . 

Okay okay, such lines encourage laughter, especially when your runaway imagination plays them back to you in Michael Caine’s percussive drawl. But with lines like these, somehow you get the feeling he was the sort of chap who followed stray girls down the pavement on a Saturday evening. The waves of envy and resentment are enough to drown whatever semblance of poetical craftsmanship he thought he was preserving. In other words, something in modern life turned out to be indelible. That’s worrying.  

In my youth, a common narrative among English teachers was that the World Wars led to modern movements in writing: with death tolls like that, there just couldn’t be a God or a notion of Beauty worth preserving. I wonder. If the Commies are any indication, fanatical belief in abstract values never went out of style. It’s more like everybody lost their sense of humor. Perusing the first pages of Typee, I’m dazzled by how funny it is for a “great” work. The laughter starts in the very first lines and never stops: laughter in landlessness, laughter in drudgery, laughter in portents, laughter in poultry, laughter in a hundred things that would have had T. S. Eliot frowning and immobilized over his coffee spoons. What happened to American writers on the way from Melville to Modernism? Did someone cut their balls off?

A fear of the world seems to be at the bottom of modernity, a fear of nature and a fear of difficulty. That’s why modern writers (and English teachers’ curricula) shun heroism: when your status quo is defeatism and victimhood, it’s uncomfortable to be reminded that something could have been done if you had just pulled up your socks and got on with it.

In high school I had an (American) English teacher who mocked, with an abundance of scorn, those immortal lines from Lovelace: “I could not love thee (Dear) so much, / Lov’d I not Honour more.” Though but a lad of fifteen, I knew she was full of shit, and was delighted when my view was confirmed several years later by a (male) English professor in college. Perhaps a 10^th-grade English teacher who had been steeped in To Kill A Mockingbird her entire career can’t be held accountable, but C. S. Lewis will lay her to rest. In his essay “Men Without Chests,” he furnishes an everlasting reminder of that bitchy lesson: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” It’s a reminder of the damage she might have done, had I taken her seriously. For in that situation, she had the power to force-feed an acrid political parable to hundreds of kids and laugh at honor while doing so. Some education.

This puffed-up dishonor is an ethos only rotten teenagers could believe in; indeed, our stories are increasingly written by a burgeoning population of cosseted city youths who have only ever been to school. Consequently, some TV dialogue sounds like it was transcribed from a Zoom call between a clique of mean girls, and I’m not exaggerating.

We’re not all Zoomers yet. The funny thing about old people—really old people—is how optimistic they are. And it’s not the optimism of a Pentecostal or a politician, but a settled, almost fatalistic optimism based on the broadest possible view, at least in terms of lifespan. It’s an optimism suggesting that the world tends to keep you afloat, if only you let it. Try telling that to the Commies, who teach that life is basically a Dickensian shithole without their equalizing interventions. That’s why modern American writers are basically a bunch of Commies: their work boils down to a dark libel that everything good is arrogant, and therefore everything must change, every brave monument fall to make it a flat world with nothing the poor little Commies have to look up to, nothing the dear sensitive souls should strain themselves to honor. So while some are ridiculed for being flat-Earthers, American writers (and their accessories, the English teachers) escape ridicule for trying to create one.