American Dreams
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.
by Leo Marx.
Oxford University Press. 392 pp. $6.75.
Dearborn, Michigan contains two monuments to the genius of Henry Ford. One is the huge industrial complex that bears his name; the other is Greenfield Village, a lovingly idealized reconstruction of the kind of 19th-century small town that the automobile has rendered forever obsolete. This paradoxical juxtaposition is more than a rich man's foible: it is an emblem of two contradictory impulses that appear to be basic to American culture.
At first thought it may seem rather odd that the most highly industrialized nation in the world should be so devoted to nostalgic rural or “agrarian” values, but that it is so is undeniable: Norman Rockwell, blue-grass music, Robert Frost, Western movies, and Ernest Hemingway—not to mention both Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater—are evidence that such values are central to both what is best and what is worst in American culture. In recent years several scholars (notably Richard Hofstadter, Marvin Meyers, and Henry Nash Smith) have drawn attention to this phenomenon, especially in relation to the rise of obscurantist right-wing political movements. But Leo Marx's attractive and brilliant book is, I think, the first to relate the two phenomena systematically in an inclusive theory of American culture.
The Machine in the Garden is the kind of book that sustains one's faith in the vitality of contemporary American scholarship. So long as half-a-dozen works of this caliber are produced each year, we need not be unduly alarmed by the proliferation of academic journals teeming with unreadable and (one hopes) unread monographs. In his urbane and modest way, Mr. Marx demonstrates the speciousness of the alleged distinction between “historical” and “critical” scholarship: though his book is an important contribution to the social, political, and intellectual history of the United States, its argument is based almost entirely upon the close reading of a number of classic texts, both literary and non-literary.
Ever since Theocritus, pastoral has been an important element in the intellectual and artistic tradition of the West. It embodies the dream of an almost effortlessly fertile and harmonious relationship between man and nature. The mode has not always been popular with the critics: Dr. Johnson attacked the “easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting” pastoralism of Milton's Lycidas, and both the Romantics and the Georgian poets were roughly handled by contemporary reviewers. Freud classified the pastoral dream as a puerile fantasy stimulated by the instinctual privations of civilized life; and Ortega attacked those who, “unaware of the artificial, almost incredible character of civilization,” accept material well-being as though it were “the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree”; Leslie Fiedler has interpreted the great American pastoral novels as expressions of a revulsion from full adult genital sexuality.
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However, pastoral can be more than a self-indulgent and regressive dream. It may serve as a valuable critique of the way things are: The Beggar's Opera (which Swift called “a Newgate pastoral”), The Winter's Tale, The Return of the Native, Catcher in the Rye, and even Li'l Abner can be said, in their different ways, to do this. Mr. Marx distinguishes between the popular, sentimental fantasy which he calls simple pastoral, and the imaginative and symbolic work of pastoral art which he calls complex.
The European tradition of complex pastoral as established by Virgil conjured up visions of a mythical, lush, green agricultural landscape populated by attractive and creative human beings. It was a dream of civilization, because the land has been improved and cultivated and its inhabitants are somewhat improbably well-bred. However this harmonious order is threatened not only by weeds, wolves, storms, and other natural predators, but also by civilization itself. Just beyond the green pastoral oasis, the world threatens and impinges: in Vergil's First Eclogue the shepherd Meliboeus has been evicted from his farm by an arbitrary act of the Roman government; Robin Hood enjoys Sherwood Forest at the price of continual vigilance against the Sheriff of Nottingham; Goldsmith's Deserted Village has been ruined by enclosure and industrialism. In such works, the pastoral idyll is a precarious one, almost inevitably doomed to extinction; it is generally set in the past and suffused with intimations of a legendary pre-historic Golden Age.
The discovery of America had a profound effect upon the pastoral imagination. Here was a green New World in the present, not just the memory of a hypothetical past. Was it a new Eden, inhabited by a guiltless race of “gentle, loving, and faithful” Indians (rather like pastoral shepherds), or a “hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men,” which demanded to be tamed, developed, and civilized? Mr. Marx shows that the answers given to this question often depended less upon evidence than they did upon the preconceptions of the witness. Ever since the 17th century, these contrasting viewpoints have confronted one another in America—often within the bosom of a single individual.
The belief that America is the incarnation of the pastoral ideal helps to explain why much early American literature is suffused with what D. H. Lawrence called “the spirit of place.” That easy assumption of moral superiority and innocence which Europeans found so irritating arose from a conviction that the very soil of America is a kind of guarantee against the grosser vices. Crèvecoeur, as Mr. Marx shows, was so carried away by this rather literary idea that in the Letters of an American Farmer he forgot his own sophisticated education and upper-class family background, and wrote as though he were a simple husbandman, a product of the pastoral “middle landscape” and a golden mean between European over-refinement and frontier uncouthness. He may have been the first, but he was certainly not the last American author who claimed not merely to admire but to embody the pastoral ideal (one thinks of Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi, refusing to meet critics and insisting, “I'm a writer, not a literary man”).
But the pastoral existence has proved to be as precarious for Americans as it was for Meliboeus. The opening up of the country and the achievement of prosperity demanded that a free rein be given to the manipulative and acquisitive impulses encouraged by the rival image of the land as an undeveloped wilderness. Even Jefferson, whose private life and political principles were deeply imbued with pastoral values, had reluctantly to support industrialization though he knew it was destructive to the kind of smallholders' democracy that he favored. In the United States, the contemplative pastoral ideal has had no defenses against the fearsome dynamism of modern technology: from the earliest times, every American garden has been menaced by a machine.
Of course, this might be said of every country in the Western world, but in America the conflict has been particularly intense because of the absence of mediating institutions and traditions inherited from the pre-technological past. (As Henry James noted in The American Scene, one reason why the American landscape seems so poignantly and nostalgically Arcadian is that one is aware how vulnerable it is to forces which may disrupt its idyllic harmony.) The nakedness of this confrontation, says Mr. Marx, helps to explain the dialectical and contradictory quality which Lionel Trilling, Richard Chase, and others have detected at the heart of the American imagination.
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After a perceptive chapter on “Shakespeare's American Play,” The Tempest, as a prophetic dramatization of the cultural problems of a brave new world, Mr. Marx devotes most of his book to a number of 18th- and 19th-century writers ranging from Robert Beverley to Herman Melville, and from Daniel Webster to Henry Adams. After the 1840's, he finds the confrontation between machine and garden almost everywhere he looks. Hawthorne's notebook (27 July, 1844) describes a reverie inspired by a lush woodland clearing which is shattered by the shriek of a railway whistle; Emerson records a similar experience. Trains skirt the shore of Walden Pond, and clank through the woods in Faulkner's The Bear; in Frank Norris's The Octopus an express train crashes bloodily into a herd of sheep winding peacefully through a California valley. A steamboat smashes the raft and the mood of relaxed harmony between Huck and Jim on the Mississippi.
In each case, a period of almost ecstatic contemplation is ended by the intrusion of a machine. But though the writers recognize that the pastoral interlude has been purifying and regenerating, they also know that it is incomplete and inadequate to the full experience of reality in America. After his stay at Walden, Thoreau returned without regret to the city. Christopher Newman (in James's The American) may have been influenced by the first green leaves of a Long Island spring not to make his half-million dollars, but his next decision was to desert America for Europe. Even Huckleberry Finn, though he declined to settle for the kind of “civilization” represented by the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, lit out for the new territory under no illusion that he would find there what he once knew on the great river.
These are personal and psychological resolutions, however. The authors do not try to reconcile the discordant elements in the American psyche: they merely dramatize them. Americans who insist on certainty about their national destiny usually have to settle for pseudo-solutions: they clothe technological reality in pastoral rhetoric, as Daniel Webster did (Mr. Marx does a neat job on him); they offer to end urban crime by the use of techniques appropriate to Abilene or Dodge City, as Barry Goldwater did; or, like the automobile manufacturers, they videotape new models amid the more spectacular bits of “unspoiled” American scenery. Meanwhile, as the USA becomes overwhelmingly urban and automated, the illusion of simple pastoralism ceases to be merely irrelevant and begins to be sinister.
Mr. Marx devotes his epilogue to The Great Gatsby, a profound fable of this tragic development. The action takes place on Long Island which, four hundred years after the first Europeans arrived there, still encourages the American dream, though the travelers come from the opposite direction and the valley of ashes is encroaching upon what was once “the fresh green breast of the new world.” Oblivious to the brutality and vulgarity of his surroundings, Gatsby singlemindedly pursues the memory of a Daisy who may once have existed but does so no longer. As Fitzgerald says, his is the classic American error: “to mistake a temporary feeling for a lasting possibility.” Those who, like Gatsby, still try to live in the pastoral garden, are in danger of developing his particular blend of sentimentality, criminality, and aggressiveness.
And there Mr. Marx leaves it. The trouble is, he says, that everywhere in the Western world “our inherited symbols of order and beauty have been divested of meaning.” He does not blame this on the artists, who have faithfully dramatized the crisis of values. The problem now belongs ultimately “not to art but to politics.”
No one can blame Mr. Marx for not carrying the discussion beyond this point: he has done his job by helping to clarify the discordant elements in the American dream. A reviewer in COMMENTARY, however, can hardly avoid asking some of the questions which such a conclusion implies. Is the liberalism which nurtured the pastoral dream just another episode in the history of self-deception? Is the retreat from society which is reflected in such contemporary genres as pop art and post-beat fiction a sign of the bankruptcy of American politics?
A few years ago, one might have been tempted to answer yes to both these questions. There is evidence, however, that a shift in values may be under way. What is needed is to replace the debased pastoralism of suburbia with an ideal of urban life such as inspired the builders of Siena, Urbino, or Amsterdam—and something like that may be happening. The largest American cities are probably beyond hope, but an extraordinary upsurge of civic spirit is transforming the centers of a dozen or more medium-sized communities; television, paperback books, and LP records are ending the old metropolitan cultural monopolies, and the Civil Rights movement is painfully restoring commitment and principle to urban politics. Perhaps such socio-cultural prophets as Ruskin, Giedion, and Mumford have not written in vain! There is even some hope that the promise of the Great Society may be more than a slogan. No one knows, however, whether these developments represent a genuine change of consciousness or merely a shift in the surface arrangements. And there is always the fear that what is being done is a matter of too little, too late.
