Preparing to move, I have hauled hundreds of my books to the library as donations. The process is agony, each volume representing some epoch in my life, some interest or endeavor. Discarding books feels like selecting which arteries you’re not really using while acutely aware that you might need them again later. I held in my hands books (more hundreds) I couldn’t bear to jettison, and I read.
One of these, a battered, 1,576-page college text paperback, The American Tradition in Literature, Vol 2 – WHITMAN to the PRESENT (The “present” was about 1960.), includes a few poems by 3-time Pulitzer winner Archibald McLeish. Not his famous Ars Poetica (“A poem should not mean, but be.”), but one entitled, American Letter. https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/american-letter
McLeish, along with many intellectuals, writers and artists, in 1923 had fled post-WWI American consumerist culture, seeking meaning in the old world, in Europe. But in 1928 he and his wife chose to return, and American Letter is an analysis of the world he left and the one to which he was born.
I read his poem amid the ruin of both my personal life and American democracy. He solves the mystery of both; they are the same. A beloved partner of decades turns away abruptly and irrevocably to associate exclusively with people of identical birth. While canny billionaire white men manipulate the same primitive need in half the population of a nation, thereby destroying it.
McLeish’s old-world Europeans “live together in small things,” their food and drink, their proverbs, the habits of their youth and the way they love. They are endless generations of actors playing rigidly defined roles in an inherited play that cannot change. They do not question their roles but rather, cling to them. Because within them they are never alone.
But the U.S. is not an old world and cannot provide that comforting sameness. “This is our land, this is our people, this that is neither a land nor a race,” McLeish explains. “This is our race, we that have none . . . this is our ancient ground – the raw earth, the mixed bloods and the strangers, the different eyes . . .”
“It is a strange thing to be an American.”
“America is alone . . .” Aloneness, I think he means.
It’s true and yet in us there’s an inherited memory of, and occasional longing for, the gemeinschaft, the ancient, guileless village where others are like us and always beside us. Where we are not alone. Where we are safe. The cataclysmic paradigm shift now occurring is fearful, and we are among strangers. Everywhere around us are others of “mixed blood and different eyes” who do not share our codes.
Millions now are owned by fear of the “unsameness” at the core of American culture. They are desperate to create the old-world European village McLeish loved and bravely left behind. A village of identical people in which maleness sets, and is, the god, the standard. All else – women and the entire natural world – is subject to the deadly pleasure of males. Among the terrified millions are millions of women only too happy to sacrifice all autonomy for the hapless, dreamlike safety of the village. The natural world, perishing as we watch, doesn’t even have that choice.
Did the power-mad Republican white males understand any of this as they lock-stepped toward Armageddon? Did they deliberately prey on ancient human wiring to amass votes sufficient to destroy a democracy and establish a fascist plutocracy? Nah. But they saw the fear, harnessed it by curious accident in the tiny hands of an ignorant, half-mad Caliban who only imagines he is not their slave, and they have won.
We can only watch now, aware that “We must reap the wind here in the grass for our soul’s harvest. Here we must eat our salt or our bones starve.”
The dated phrase, “to eat (someone’s) salt,” means “to be a guest in someone’s home.” Nearly a century ago McLeish told us what we need to know – that we are but guests in a nation we can only save by acknowledging, even celebrating, that it is not a village.
Thank you for this. I have not read Archibald MacLeish's work and the piece about villages and in-group identity rings true. This brought me a degree of comfort today after so many wrongly decided Supreme Court mandates. I wish you well in your life changes. I left a 16 year relationship a bit over a year ago. So much stuff and so many memories--not all bad, not all good. I wish you well.
I'm still leaking blood from a similar book donation way back in the 70ies. I can relate. The pull to be in a village, safe and same, also speaks to me. I have perhaps romanticized my growing up years in such a place. I now acknowledge...not quite celebrate...that we are not a village.