Glad to the Brink of Fear by James Marcus;

Author:James Marcus;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

11

VISIT TO A COLD ISLAND

To thumb through Waldo’s account of his Midwestern tour in the winter of 1856 is to be plunged into another age—call it America in the raw. He recorded his other travels in similarly three-dimensional detail. He had a great appetite for facts and an unbeatable ear for colloquial speech, specimens of which he was constantly preserving like botanical wonders. (“Hoosiers are good to begin, but they cave,” he wrote in 1856—an assessment of the Hoosier-as-warrior that had to have been uttered in some rustic tavern, presumably by a non-Hoosier.)

All of this is to say that Waldo could have written an amazing travel narrative about his native land. At one point he did ponder such a project. Some of his peers, such as Bronson Alcott, regretted that he never did “justice to New England” at book length. The closest Waldo came, in the end, was English Traits, the very manuscript he was struggling to finish in the early days of 1856. That book was primarily a passive-aggressive valentine to the British Isles. Yet Waldo, who was composing bits of it as he trundled around the frozen interior of his own country, managed to smuggle in an oblique portrait of America around the edges.

No doubt the rough conditions he encountered during his lecture tour made for a heightened sense of contrast between the two nations. American hospitality, Waldo jotted in his journal, “consists in a little fire, a little food, but enough, & and immense quiet. In England, it is a great deal of fine food, & of fire & immense decorum.”

England’s material abundance, and its much lengthier history, made for an abyss between the great power and its former colony. In comparison, America seemed sprawling, empty, uncouth. Yet the longer Waldo slipped the mother country under his magnifying glass, the more he wondered whether it might be approaching an imperial senescence—a final flowering before it lapsed into a coal-powered, fog-anointed, scone-glutted decline.

Waldo gathered his material on two separate trips. The first followed his exit from the pulpit and nervous collapse in 1833. At that point, he writes in English Traits, he was most interested in visiting the human monuments: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle.

With the latter he would form a lifelong friendship. But in general, such encounters seldom panned out. They were a kind of cultural tourism, Waldo insisted, which encouraged you to overlook the treasures on your own doorstep. “It is probable you left some obscure comrade,” he wrote, “at a tavern, or in the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you crossed sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes.”

True to form, the two Romantic giants let him down. Coleridge, a stubby chatterbox in a snuff-spotted black suit, spent much of the time denouncing Unitarianism and recycling entire paragraphs from his oeuvre. “The visit was rather a spectacle than a conversation,” Waldo ruefully noted.

As for Wordsworth, he greeted his visitor in green goggles, which he wore to alleviate the pain from a recurrent inflammation of the eyes called trachoma.

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