Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (3 page)

There was another tax revolt in that same state in 1799. More serious still in its potential implications was Aaron Burr’s murky plot that may have aimed ultimately at the dissolution of the Union. At the outset of the War of 1812 there were numerous antiwar protests, as well as violent demonstrations in support of it, including one in Baltimore where in June a mob destroyed the offices of the antiwar
Federal Republican.
When the paper tried to resume publication from a private house, that place was also attacked by superpatriots. On this occasion, Light Horse Harry Lee, hero of the Revolution (who had also fought
against the insurgents in the Whiskey Rebellion) and who was defending the paper’s right to publish, was so severely beaten by the mob that he eventually died of his injuries. More civil but more serious was the dissension evident at the Hartford Convention of 1815, which among other things challenged the very notion of a federal system that could appropriate customs money collected by the constituent states.

This turbulent history helps explain why Washington, Adams, Benjamin Rush, Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, and others of the founding fathers viewed the American people as volatile and unruly, and why Hamilton is said to have called them a “great beast.” Whether he actually said this or not, there is little doubt that he viewed his fellow citizens with alarm. At the Constitutional Convention he observed that the masses “are turbulent and changing: they seldom judge or determine right.” Therefore, it was necessary that they be “sternly governed by the rich & wellborn”—not exactly a ringing endorsement of a democratic republic.

Perhaps no document surviving from the republic’s early moments better preserves the striking contradictions between the radical idealism that fueled the founding of the nation and the violent, anarchical, racist tendencies lying beneath this than J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur’s
Letters from an American Farmer.
Well known in its author’s
lifetime, the book has enjoyed a sustained popularity ever since as a classic example of American idealism seen at its formative, generative roots. Here were stories of nameless immigrants who had come to these shores with nothing but pluck and who had swiftly prospered. Here were the fisherfolk of New England, bearing their hardships with a ruddy fortitude. Here were the yeoman farmers—God’s chosen, as Jefferson had remarked—living lives of admirable simplicity and daily gratitude. And here too was that “fresh, green breast of the new world” (as F. Scott Fitzgerald was to put it in
The Great Gatsby),
a place of such inexhaustible plentitude as to seem positively para-disal to the newcomers. The American, Crèvecoeur writes in letter three, is in fact a new man, Adamaic in an unspoiled world and destined to carry the arts of industry ever westward, toward the gilded East that Columbus had vainly sought, and so complete the circle of human destiny.

It is true that the sustained popularity of
Letters
rests on Crèvecoeur’s almost ecstatic evocation of America in the shining hour of its infancy. But there are darker tones here as well that speak of that baffled incredulity and vengeance that were the consequences of the unlooked-for finding of the New World, and Crèvecoeur had seen too much and was too honest to write only in praise. In the
American South where he was received by the gentry he saw the “peculiar institution” of slavery at work, and in the woods of South Carolina he stumbled upon a shocking scene—the punishment of an insubordinate slave—that called into the gravest question those egalitarian ideals that had gone into the making of the American Adam.
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At that point in time the long-term consequences of this deep national contradiction could hardly, of course, have been apparent. But the contradiction itself was clear enough, and Crèvecoeur spoke it.

But more significant to him perhaps was the drama he knew firsthand, and this was the relentless advance of European-style civilization into the wilderness and what the implications of this might be. Thus, the most ringing, resonant sentence in
Letters
isn’t the oft-anthologized one that begins,
“He
is an American, who leaving behind him,” but instead the one that descends dramatically from the cloud-land of the
philosophes
to the American earth and the meeting of the furrowed with the forest: “Now we arrive near the great woods …”

In his travels—which took him as far west as the Great Lakes—Crèvecoeur had seen the ragged edges where the advance guard of white civilization met the wilderness and then camped uneasily there, and his extensive experiences conferred on him a unique understanding of the
profound
wildness
that beat at the heart of the American experiment. Few knew how vast the country actually was or understood that the hardships of settling the eastern seaboard would have to be replicated in region after region in the westward push. What Crèvecoeur saw was that these hardships would become an enduring part of the national character, not merely a developmental stage. If you want to know what America is like (and what it will be like in future years), he writes, you “must visit our extended line of frontiers” where tiny settlements and solitary huts gave some shelter but little comfort to de-falcators and drunkards, escaped criminals, runaway servants and slaves, half-hearted husbandmen who preferred the chase to the daily toil of cultivation, half-breeds and—worse—renegades who unnaturally turned against their own kind. Writing of the frontiersmen whom subsequent generations would deify, Crèvecoeur uses words like “hideous,” “ferocious,” “gloomy,” “mongrel,” and “half-savage”—and shudders to think of the consequences for America when such as these would serve as its pioneers and pass on to their children their violent and indolent habits. These people had quite naturally dreaded the inequities of the law in the Old World, he observed. But here in the New World where the law allegedly favored no class, they continued their anti-law habits of thought and behavior.
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The best that could be hoped for was that
in some long evolutionary process their sort would eventually disappear before the honest yeoman, as the sunlight of the plowed field replaced the gloom of the primeval forest.

Out of the conquest of the continent and the subsequent growth of towns and cities there arose a folklore that, if it was not entirely indigenous, was strongly flavored by the national experience and the national character shaped by that. This was a folklore that celebrated the New England Yankee, the backwoodsman, boatmen of the heartland rivers; practical jokers, mighty liars, petty criminals and outlaws of the Old Southwest; and finally, legendary figures arising out of the shadows and slums of the cities.

The Yankee of folklore was essentially comic in nature, a dry-witted, slab-sided talker who, when he had risen from his oral origins to the almanac and the stage, was given to monologue. His wit cut sharply and was invariably at the expense of others, and before anybody could
figure out who he was and what he was up to, he had vanished. His ability to change identities reflected something essential in the American experience and was not therefore ultimately limited to New England, for in this wooly, unformed New World a man might be required to play many roles.
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He might have to change his name a few times, too, and when the relentless tide of westward advance had reached the new New World—California—there was a ditty about this particular habit:

The Yankee spun his tales, performed his sleights-of-hand, and changed his name and address, all with a blank, impenetrable mask behind which was—what? Maybe only a cunning collection of personae. He was so spare a figure that if you turned him sideways, he disappeared, leaving behind the puzzled victims who had bought the very last clock he had for sale. How much Miller knew of the doings of this folk figure is in question, but here as with the brawling backwoodsman and the outlaw the influences on him hardly need to have been direct: folk heroes arise because they represent repeated aspects of lived experience. Miller was no seller of clocks, but he had a good
bit of the huckster in him and was certainly a changeable character, willing and able to alter guises as he needed to.

By contrast, the backwoodsman was so broad a character you couldn’t miss him. He was clearly shaped by his hand-to-hand combat with the continent. That battle, as brutal and intimate as the gouging contests and naked knife fights that were his sports, made him boisterous, but also changeful of mood, instantaneously veering from Gargantuan celebration to slobbery sentimentality and then to a black and dangerous depression. You might say his character was humanity writ very large; or you might say he was hardly human at all, more bestial than manlike. This latter characterization would have been more to the character’s own taste: you had to be more than a man to take on America: you had to be half horse, half alligator, as he was fond of describing himself. To an extent Daniel Boone was the historical figure this folk type was based on, a loner much more at home in the soaring solitude of the forest or the ominous density of the canebrakes than in white civilization with its crowdy ways. But the Boone of history was good for only a part of the backwoodsman’s character. Something more was needed for that boisterous, boastful part, and for this the unnamed tale spinners turned to Davy Crockett, whom they embroidered into a high-hearted, heel-cracking hero who in some of his escapades approached a status almost mythic.

One morning, for instance, it was so preternaturally cold that the earth froze fast on its axis. So it was up to Crockett to pour on the grease from a fresh-killed bear to get creation cranked over again. When he gave the cosmic mechanism a kick-start, the

sun walked up beautifully, salutin’ me with sich a wind o’ gratitude it made me sneeze. I lit my pipe by the blaze of his top-knot, shouldered my bear, an’ walked home, introducin’ people to the fresh daylight with a piece of sunrise in my pocket.

This character’s style comes out of the antebellum period when the still-new nation was flexing its muscles and feeling its oats. It comes also out of a broader tradition of a people who just loved
talk,
talk for its own sake, for the sheer sound of it, the roll and pitch and the surprise of it when the magniloquent cadences were snapped short with some arresting turn of phrase or marvelously inventive folk metaphor. Of a man howling in pain, a Tennessee writer compared him to a “two-horse mowing-machine, driven by chain-lightning, cutting through a dry cane-brake on a big bet.”
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A good deal of the backwoodsman got into the flat-boatman figure of Mike Fink, celebrated for his feats on the Ohio and then on the Mississippi, and at last on no river at all except the nameless one that flows onward into
oblivion. Fink partakes of something of Crockett’s high style and Herculean powers. But his is a distinctly darker figure, one tinged with mayhem, murder, and alcoholism. To prove his marksmanship with a rifle he shoots the heel off a black man, the scalp-lock off an Indian, and countless cups of whiskey off the heads of his willing male cohorts. But there are times when Mike shoots for keeps, and a portion of his fame rests on his reputation as an Indian killer. Here he joins bloody heroes like Michael Cresap, a militia leader in western Maryland honored for slaughtering the family of the noted Mingo chief Logan; and Tom Quick of New York, who vowed to kill one hundred Indians before they got him but who died with only ninety-nine to his credit.

Eventually civilization spoiled Mike’s sport: settlements now disfigured much of the Mississippi, and there was far less game. Maybe most importantly, there were fewer Indians to kill. Thomas Bangs Thorpe, one of the writers of the Old Southwest who wrote up some of that region’s oral traditions, has Fink lamenting that, “Six months, and no Indian fights, would spile me worse than a dead horse on the prairie.” With the old days of brawling and killing going or gone, there was little left for a man to do but to “turn nigger and work.” No true hero would do that, and so Mike drifted westward ahead of the hordes. Somewhere out there, so a version goes, he proposed his familiar
version of William Tell’s trick, shooting a cup of whiskey from the head of his old friend, Carpenter. But this time Mike aimed a tad low, killing Carpenter. “Is the whiskey spilt?” Mike asked Carpenter’s friend, Talbot. The question was over the line, even for this brand of humor, and not long thereafter Talbot saw his chance and avenged his late friend with Carpenter’s own pistol.

In his unheroic death, Fink was succeeded by other breeds of folk figures, darker still, their legends almost unrelieved by any incidents of crude hilarity or comic boasts or heel-cracking hi-jinks. If there is any relief from the monochromatic mayhem of their stories, it is only that of the grim sort of humor engendered in the part of the Tom Quick legend telling how he finally got his hundred.
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These newer figures were the land pirates of the Natchez Trace and the outlaws and gang members of New Orleans and New York who inhabited a new sort of frontier where the establishment of towns and the growth of cities provided tempting turf for those who lived in their shadows.

Of the former—the Natchez Trace land pirates—what their chronicler Robert M. Coates says of them can with justice serve as a characterization of this newer breed as a whole. They were, Coates writes, creatures of wilderness America, “the bitter fruit of the same wild seed that bred the pioneers: they reflected but in a more savage
fashion, the same ruthless audacity and fierce implacable energy which its loneliness inspired in their more honest fellows.”

The land pirates were the criminal consequence of the conquest of the eastern edges of the heartland, men who preyed on lone merchants traveling horseback along the Wilderness Road and the Natchez Trace, and also on the steadily swelling tide of boat traffic on the Mississippi. Some worked solo, others in small groups. And still others like Samuel Mason and John Murrel were said to operate gangs that in the successive retellings of their legends finally achieved the size of small armies. For all of them the work was hazardous, because every man out there went armed and frontier justice was rough, sometimes so much that its punishments almost beggared the crimes of the caught and convicted. In Tennessee, for instance, up until 1829 a convicted horse thief was branded on the right cheek with the letter H and on the left with a T. Then followed a public flogging. Finally, his ears were nailed to the pillory and cut off. This was for a first offense. Still, for the outlaws the rewards could be great, and in any case the work beat the sweat-of-the-brow labor of carving out a small farm and trying to make it support a family.