At Home by Gore Vidal

Author:Gore Vidal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

One is constantly surprised by the spaciousness of James’s sympathies as he got older. In time, the vulgarity of Whitman was seen for what it is, the nation itself made flesh. Edith Wharton in A Backward Glance writes,

It was a joy to me to discover that James thought [Whitman] the greatest of American poets. Leaves of Grass was put into his hands, and all that evening we sat rapt while he wandered from “The Song of Myself” to “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

On the other hand, no sentiment was ever exempt from his critical irony, and James could not resist exclaiming, at the reading’s end, “Oh, yes, a great genius; undoubtedly a very great genius! Only one cannot help deploring his too-extensive acquaintance with foreign languages.” Like the late Tennessee Williams, Whitman loved foreign phrases and usually got them wrong.

The fact that one is never told just how James’s heroes make their money was neither coyness nor disdain: It was simply a blank, as he confessed in 1898: “Those who know [business] are not the men to paint it; those who might attempt it are not the men who know it.” One wonders what his friend the author of The Rise of Silas Lapham thought of the alleged absence in our literature of the businessman—of “the magnificent theme en disponibilité.”

James was very much interested in “the real world”; and not without a certain shrewdness in political matters. Surprisingly, he reviews in The Nation (1875) Charles Nordhoff’s The Communistic Societies of the United States, from Personal Visit and Observation, Etc., a book once again in print. Nordhoff was a Prussian-born American journalist who covered the Civil War for the New York Herald. In the 1870s, he decided to investigate applied communism in the United States, as demonstrated by the Oneida, Amana, Mount Lebanon, and Shaker groups. “Hitherto,” Nordhoff writes, “very little, indeed almost nothing definite and precise, has been made known concerning these societies; and Communism remains loudly but very vaguely spoken of, by friends as well as enemies, and is commonly either a word of terror or contempt in the public prints.” Tout ça change, as the good Walt might have said.

For over a century, communism has been the necessary enemy of our republic’s ruling oligarchy. Yet before 1917, communism was not associated with totalitarianism or Russian imperialism or the iron rule of a nomenklatura. Communism was simply an economic theory, having to do with greater efficiency in production as a result of making those who did the work the owners. James grasps this principle rather better than most of his contemporaries, and he commends Nordhoff for his ability to show us

communistic life from the point of view of an adversary to trades-unions, and to see whether in the United States, with their vast area for free experiments in this line, it might not offer a better promise to workingmen than mere coalitions to increase wages and shorten the hours of labor.

Although he thinks Nordhoff

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.