Great Josh! Especially like the Lawrence dig. Crèvecoeur is one of these like completely forgotten people. Great to see him get some love. And really like what you're doing with this series.
Great post. Proving your point, I read the book because I used to teach the American Lit survey and would assign the "What is an American" chapter from the Norton. The case I ended up making after reading the whole thing is that it is formally a novel, an ironic utopia turned dystopia, an anguished send-up of its own utopian impulse, and that its meaning is only really clear as the whole from which it's fairly misleading to excerpt the third letter:
"D. H. Lawrence characteristically heckles Crèvecoeur in Studies in Classic American Literature for posing as a natural man without acknowledging nature’s (and thereby his own) darkness. But this is only true if you neglect the Letters as a fictional design, a set of carefully-wrought missives from a utopia gone wrong. The Letters narrate the breakdown of an ideal man in an ideal world. Franklin’s wisdom and Jefferson’s idyll give way to Brockden Brown’s and Poe’s perversity. Neoclassical pastoral darkens to Gothic horror. The book’s own doubleness—its guise of plain-spoken truth concealing its status as fiction—tells us that its values and its politics cannot be taken at face value. It should be read as a novel: the first attempt, and a persuasive one, at a great American novel."
Great review. I wonder if the epistolary form and the obvious autobiographical nature of the opening letters might have prevented many readers from seeing it as a novel. Whatever it is, I agree that it belongs in fiction. And you're quite right that Letters II and III (the most common excerpts) are grossly misleading if read out of context.
Even so, James's idealism remains intact in that closing prayer. He's lost the plot of those early letters, but he doesn't believe it's gone for good. That makes it hard for me to read the novel as a satire of James's values (not sure you are suggesting that) -- but the potential for multiple and contradictory readings supports your view of it as a forerunner of Washington Irving's and Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction. (Franklin was a pioneer of short fiction, too -- love his "Speech of Polly Baker")
Thank you! I wasn't thinking satire, at least not shallow satire, more like the tragedy of irreconcilable facts and desires, as in Hawthorne. The idealism remains intact as an ideal, though, if bruised by experience.
Yes, I like that. I know the text ought to live apart from the author to some extent, but for a work as autobiographical as this one, I'd like to know more about Crévecoeur, the man, particularly in those later stages of his life. This is where we really feel the need for institutions that can house archives. As much as I love the brave new world of online education (in its formal and informal shapes), there is a lot of depth it leaves out.
Wonderful post! Probably my favorite you've written thus far! I'm currently on Letter III though, so unlike Willa Cather who I must (for now) process by reputation, here it was different.
I think the second question you asked is the most revelatory. My personal metaphor for American identity is geopolitical: a selection of distinct past and future nationalities that don't view themselves as nationalities because the US, a New World country by definition, is behind New Spain by 1 to 2 hundred years and hasn't reached that disintegrative point in history where New Spain split into different countries, and then Gran Colombia became six different countries. (Though who knows, we might be at that point now) Not counting internal divisions like North and South, there are three "nationalities" in particular: 1) White Europeans who created the country and a system based upon English Enlightenment values, 2) African descendants of slaves with a homegrown experience based upon hardship while basically living in a meta-country during Jim Crow; and 3) the various Native tribes. (One could also add the Hawaiians as separate, since they actually were their own country) The melting pot is merely the process through which Old Worlders are transmogrified into New Worlders within their respective "national" spheres, the way the melting pot was limited by religion in the 19th century.
These divisions still exist, but the essence of these "nationalities" now lies in the political divide. This is why the current divisions are not just mere disagreements about policy but serious philosophical and existential divergences that can't simply be resolved by saying "come on now, let's just get together and be friends." When Woke lunatics called the 4th of July a "glorification of White supremacy" - even though it's objectively, philosophically and definitively not, and it insults non-Whites who love America - what that really means is: we, as representatives of the 1619 "nationality," reject the importance and validity and therefore the authority of "your" national day. The White guilt phenomenon makes perfect sense when one realizes that guilty White people are those who have adopted the "nationalism" based upon the legacy of slavery at the expense of 1776. It wouldn't be too different from how a bunch of Germans moving to Israel might feel. (There was actually a movie with a scenario like that)
What I like about De Crevecoeur is how much his letters disprove the idea that romanticism has nothing to say about the human condition because of how "romantic" it is. Especially today, where romanticism appears to have become a slight of some kind. On the contrary, I think few types of literature have more to tell us about our emotional selves than romanticism. While there are facets to this work that, as you said, require a raised eyebrow or two, the valuable things Letters says about the American identity are not the kind that any form of realism would successfully convey. Realism might succeed at expressing that Americans have this quaint vision of farm life, but we actually feel it with De Crevecoeur and recognize it inside ourselves. Despite what others have said from time to time about being wary of emotions, literature has to resonate with our emotional self as much as our intellectual self: otherwise, why read it when we could just read a nonfiction book with a title like Farms in 18th Century America? Although not up to Dostoyevsky's caliber artistically, he stands next to the Master of St. Petersburg as an equal in terms of emotional conveyance: Crime & Punishment, it has often been acknowledged, tells us more about that phenomenon than a hundred legal and criminology books. And Dostoyevsky was a romantic as well. De Crevecoeur likewise conveys something very unique that most probably won't be found in farming guidebooks.
Though De Crevecoeur's conflicted loyalties are the most obvious explanation, perhaps that emotional involvement is why Letters has fallen into obscurity: Americans have a pragmatic character, and we like to see that side of ourselves more often when we look in the mirror. But we are also a lot more afraid of our emotions than we are of our facts, just as we feel more for an individual we know than those we summarize in a statistic.
For that reason, I think Letters should be made an important part of any curriculum invested in teaching Americans about who they are, just like we do with Huckleberry Finn. Though for pre-college education it might suffice to pick a few of the strongest and most important letters, rather than assigning the entire work. Like you said, it is amorphous when it comes to genre categorization.
Love this, Felix: "While there are facets to this work that, as you said, require a raised eyebrow or two, the valuable things Letters says about the American identity are not the kind that any form of realism would successfully convey."
Also this: "Americans have a pragmatic character, and we like to see that side of ourselves more often when we look in the mirror. But we are also a lot more afraid of our emotions than we are of our facts, just as we feel more for an individual we know than those we summarize in a statistic."
Excellent discourse alongside John's analysis in this thread.
Your title would suggest that all university students should read Crévecoeur, not just the “hum jocks,” as they were known in my day.
I skipped the Crévecoeur chapter in Lawrence’s book because I had never heard of him. Reading it now, I’m re-remembering Lawrence’s garrulous, disagreeable, and often quite funny voice, particularly with the long-dead people he’s arguing with, such as Crévecoeur and Ben Franklin.
Hum-jocks -- new one to me! I suppose there is something evangelistic about my message here, but I tend to get that way when I hear about universities slashing arts and humanities programs. There are dozens of figures in American literary history like Crévecoeur who deserve this kind of close reading. But given how ubiquitous the melting pot metaphor is, don't you think an American student ought to know where that analogy comes from, and that it was contradicted almost immediately by the bloody Tory-Patriot struggle? Seems like a basic part of the American birthright: to puzzle out one's citizenship with some attention to primary sources.
Don’t know if that term is a sardonic comment on men who studied the humanities, or if it has something to do with the more recent idea of athletes taking “easier” humanities courses instead of the math and science required of us nerds.
The former probably involves a fairly old stereotype. For example, Dom DiMaggio, whose Red Sox competed mightily with his older brother Joe’s Yankees, was known as “The Little Professor” because he wore glasses.
I note that Peyton Manning is returning to his alma mater this fall as professor of “practice” (whatever that is).
Perhaps worth mentioning that the lyrics to Janis Joplin’s song “Me and Bobby McGee” were written by Kris Kristofferson, a literature major in college and Rhodes scholar at Oxford.
Thank you for this! I managed to get two English-ish degrees without having read him, but I’ll remedy that. I’m curious, do you know how his wife died? I just looked her up and Mehitable Tippet (what a name!) died around the age of 31, and both of her children returned to France and were buried there... But I’m curious about how they lived in America when he was gone and how she died, if you know of a source?
I had never seen that name before. From Wikipedia: “Mehitable is a feminine given name, a variant of the Old Testament name Mehetabel (meaning “God benefits”). During the British colonial period, it was a name used in the New England colonies, as the Protestants took many of their children’s names from the Old Testament.”
This is an excellent question, and one I'm sure a scholarly biography on Crévecoeur could answer. According to this biography, Mehitable was killed in the Indian raid that destroyed their farm.
Thank you!! The picture that resolves is of a back-stabbing two-timing double-talking maybe-spy maybe-just-bullshit-artist who this woman was very unfortunate to end up involved with. "Indians had burned his farm and killed his wife" at least ascribes blame and describes something like evidence (a burned farm), but this guy definitely seems to have been talking out of both sides of his mouth. I like the detail in the second article that when he translated his Letters into French he played up the Patriot side and toned down the fealty to Britain. Do you know, is the version Americans read today the British-published version or an English translation of the French?
Another excellent question. The digital text I link to in the post is from Yale's Avalon Project, which cites its original source as the British version, published in London in 1782. This would be a fascinating question for a senior-level course or for a graduate-level project, if one had access to both versions in the archives. Perhaps there is a digitized version of the original French text...
But you've at least grasped how slippery Crévecoeur can be. And I think this is true of many historical figures in America who were often as invested in what they were forgetting as what they were proclaiming. As I suggest in the post, I think grappling with this kind of enigma in our national history ought to be essential to an American education.
It might even be possible to read the text closely and conclude, as one of my students at Nebraska did on his midterm exam essay, "May we all find our farm." But at least anyone reaching that conclusion will have a way of explaining it, rather than simply absorbing the myth unquestioningly.
Great Josh! Especially like the Lawrence dig. Crèvecoeur is one of these like completely forgotten people. Great to see him get some love. And really like what you're doing with this series.
Thanks, Sam! I can't promise to continue this series with much regularity, as it's fairly time-intensive, but I'm glad that this one landed.
Great post. Proving your point, I read the book because I used to teach the American Lit survey and would assign the "What is an American" chapter from the Norton. The case I ended up making after reading the whole thing is that it is formally a novel, an ironic utopia turned dystopia, an anguished send-up of its own utopian impulse, and that its meaning is only really clear as the whole from which it's fairly misleading to excerpt the third letter:
"D. H. Lawrence characteristically heckles Crèvecoeur in Studies in Classic American Literature for posing as a natural man without acknowledging nature’s (and thereby his own) darkness. But this is only true if you neglect the Letters as a fictional design, a set of carefully-wrought missives from a utopia gone wrong. The Letters narrate the breakdown of an ideal man in an ideal world. Franklin’s wisdom and Jefferson’s idyll give way to Brockden Brown’s and Poe’s perversity. Neoclassical pastoral darkens to Gothic horror. The book’s own doubleness—its guise of plain-spoken truth concealing its status as fiction—tells us that its values and its politics cannot be taken at face value. It should be read as a novel: the first attempt, and a persuasive one, at a great American novel."
https://johnpistelli.com/2017/02/14/j-hector-st-john-de-crevecoeur-letters-from-an-american-farmer/
Great review. I wonder if the epistolary form and the obvious autobiographical nature of the opening letters might have prevented many readers from seeing it as a novel. Whatever it is, I agree that it belongs in fiction. And you're quite right that Letters II and III (the most common excerpts) are grossly misleading if read out of context.
Even so, James's idealism remains intact in that closing prayer. He's lost the plot of those early letters, but he doesn't believe it's gone for good. That makes it hard for me to read the novel as a satire of James's values (not sure you are suggesting that) -- but the potential for multiple and contradictory readings supports your view of it as a forerunner of Washington Irving's and Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction. (Franklin was a pioneer of short fiction, too -- love his "Speech of Polly Baker")
Thanks for your thoughtful addition!
Thank you! I wasn't thinking satire, at least not shallow satire, more like the tragedy of irreconcilable facts and desires, as in Hawthorne. The idealism remains intact as an ideal, though, if bruised by experience.
Yes, I like that. I know the text ought to live apart from the author to some extent, but for a work as autobiographical as this one, I'd like to know more about Crévecoeur, the man, particularly in those later stages of his life. This is where we really feel the need for institutions that can house archives. As much as I love the brave new world of online education (in its formal and informal shapes), there is a lot of depth it leaves out.
I absolutely adore your uniquely American literature takes. Not a perspective I've seen before!
Thanks so much!
Wonderful post! Probably my favorite you've written thus far! I'm currently on Letter III though, so unlike Willa Cather who I must (for now) process by reputation, here it was different.
I think the second question you asked is the most revelatory. My personal metaphor for American identity is geopolitical: a selection of distinct past and future nationalities that don't view themselves as nationalities because the US, a New World country by definition, is behind New Spain by 1 to 2 hundred years and hasn't reached that disintegrative point in history where New Spain split into different countries, and then Gran Colombia became six different countries. (Though who knows, we might be at that point now) Not counting internal divisions like North and South, there are three "nationalities" in particular: 1) White Europeans who created the country and a system based upon English Enlightenment values, 2) African descendants of slaves with a homegrown experience based upon hardship while basically living in a meta-country during Jim Crow; and 3) the various Native tribes. (One could also add the Hawaiians as separate, since they actually were their own country) The melting pot is merely the process through which Old Worlders are transmogrified into New Worlders within their respective "national" spheres, the way the melting pot was limited by religion in the 19th century.
These divisions still exist, but the essence of these "nationalities" now lies in the political divide. This is why the current divisions are not just mere disagreements about policy but serious philosophical and existential divergences that can't simply be resolved by saying "come on now, let's just get together and be friends." When Woke lunatics called the 4th of July a "glorification of White supremacy" - even though it's objectively, philosophically and definitively not, and it insults non-Whites who love America - what that really means is: we, as representatives of the 1619 "nationality," reject the importance and validity and therefore the authority of "your" national day. The White guilt phenomenon makes perfect sense when one realizes that guilty White people are those who have adopted the "nationalism" based upon the legacy of slavery at the expense of 1776. It wouldn't be too different from how a bunch of Germans moving to Israel might feel. (There was actually a movie with a scenario like that)
What I like about De Crevecoeur is how much his letters disprove the idea that romanticism has nothing to say about the human condition because of how "romantic" it is. Especially today, where romanticism appears to have become a slight of some kind. On the contrary, I think few types of literature have more to tell us about our emotional selves than romanticism. While there are facets to this work that, as you said, require a raised eyebrow or two, the valuable things Letters says about the American identity are not the kind that any form of realism would successfully convey. Realism might succeed at expressing that Americans have this quaint vision of farm life, but we actually feel it with De Crevecoeur and recognize it inside ourselves. Despite what others have said from time to time about being wary of emotions, literature has to resonate with our emotional self as much as our intellectual self: otherwise, why read it when we could just read a nonfiction book with a title like Farms in 18th Century America? Although not up to Dostoyevsky's caliber artistically, he stands next to the Master of St. Petersburg as an equal in terms of emotional conveyance: Crime & Punishment, it has often been acknowledged, tells us more about that phenomenon than a hundred legal and criminology books. And Dostoyevsky was a romantic as well. De Crevecoeur likewise conveys something very unique that most probably won't be found in farming guidebooks.
Though De Crevecoeur's conflicted loyalties are the most obvious explanation, perhaps that emotional involvement is why Letters has fallen into obscurity: Americans have a pragmatic character, and we like to see that side of ourselves more often when we look in the mirror. But we are also a lot more afraid of our emotions than we are of our facts, just as we feel more for an individual we know than those we summarize in a statistic.
For that reason, I think Letters should be made an important part of any curriculum invested in teaching Americans about who they are, just like we do with Huckleberry Finn. Though for pre-college education it might suffice to pick a few of the strongest and most important letters, rather than assigning the entire work. Like you said, it is amorphous when it comes to genre categorization.
Love this, Felix: "While there are facets to this work that, as you said, require a raised eyebrow or two, the valuable things Letters says about the American identity are not the kind that any form of realism would successfully convey."
Also this: "Americans have a pragmatic character, and we like to see that side of ourselves more often when we look in the mirror. But we are also a lot more afraid of our emotions than we are of our facts, just as we feel more for an individual we know than those we summarize in a statistic."
Excellent discourse alongside John's analysis in this thread.
Your title would suggest that all university students should read Crévecoeur, not just the “hum jocks,” as they were known in my day.
I skipped the Crévecoeur chapter in Lawrence’s book because I had never heard of him. Reading it now, I’m re-remembering Lawrence’s garrulous, disagreeable, and often quite funny voice, particularly with the long-dead people he’s arguing with, such as Crévecoeur and Ben Franklin.
Hum-jocks -- new one to me! I suppose there is something evangelistic about my message here, but I tend to get that way when I hear about universities slashing arts and humanities programs. There are dozens of figures in American literary history like Crévecoeur who deserve this kind of close reading. But given how ubiquitous the melting pot metaphor is, don't you think an American student ought to know where that analogy comes from, and that it was contradicted almost immediately by the bloody Tory-Patriot struggle? Seems like a basic part of the American birthright: to puzzle out one's citizenship with some attention to primary sources.
Don’t know if that term is a sardonic comment on men who studied the humanities, or if it has something to do with the more recent idea of athletes taking “easier” humanities courses instead of the math and science required of us nerds.
The former probably involves a fairly old stereotype. For example, Dom DiMaggio, whose Red Sox competed mightily with his older brother Joe’s Yankees, was known as “The Little Professor” because he wore glasses.
I note that Peyton Manning is returning to his alma mater this fall as professor of “practice” (whatever that is).
Perhaps worth mentioning that the lyrics to Janis Joplin’s song “Me and Bobby McGee” were written by Kris Kristofferson, a literature major in college and Rhodes scholar at Oxford.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130907031352/http://www.pomona.edu/Magazine/pcmwin04/FSkristofferson.shtml
Love that! A very nice footnote.
Spectacular essay. I thank you, Pilgrim of Letters.
Many thanks for reading!
Thank you for this! I managed to get two English-ish degrees without having read him, but I’ll remedy that. I’m curious, do you know how his wife died? I just looked her up and Mehitable Tippet (what a name!) died around the age of 31, and both of her children returned to France and were buried there... But I’m curious about how they lived in America when he was gone and how she died, if you know of a source?
I had never seen that name before. From Wikipedia: “Mehitable is a feminine given name, a variant of the Old Testament name Mehetabel (meaning “God benefits”). During the British colonial period, it was a name used in the New England colonies, as the Protestants took many of their children’s names from the Old Testament.”
This is an excellent question, and one I'm sure a scholarly biography on Crévecoeur could answer. According to this biography, Mehitable was killed in the Indian raid that destroyed their farm.
https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/historyofus/web01/features/bio/B03.html
But even fairly nuanced summaries of Crévecoeur's life, such as this one in New Republic, are vague on the cause of her death.
https://newrepublic.com/article/113571/crevecoeurs-letters-american-farmer-dark-side
Thank you!! The picture that resolves is of a back-stabbing two-timing double-talking maybe-spy maybe-just-bullshit-artist who this woman was very unfortunate to end up involved with. "Indians had burned his farm and killed his wife" at least ascribes blame and describes something like evidence (a burned farm), but this guy definitely seems to have been talking out of both sides of his mouth. I like the detail in the second article that when he translated his Letters into French he played up the Patriot side and toned down the fealty to Britain. Do you know, is the version Americans read today the British-published version or an English translation of the French?
Another excellent question. The digital text I link to in the post is from Yale's Avalon Project, which cites its original source as the British version, published in London in 1782. This would be a fascinating question for a senior-level course or for a graduate-level project, if one had access to both versions in the archives. Perhaps there is a digitized version of the original French text...
But you've at least grasped how slippery Crévecoeur can be. And I think this is true of many historical figures in America who were often as invested in what they were forgetting as what they were proclaiming. As I suggest in the post, I think grappling with this kind of enigma in our national history ought to be essential to an American education.
It might even be possible to read the text closely and conclude, as one of my students at Nebraska did on his midterm exam essay, "May we all find our farm." But at least anyone reaching that conclusion will have a way of explaining it, rather than simply absorbing the myth unquestioningly.
PS: I'm ordering a used copy of the book Taylor recommends in that second article you linked -- thanks!! :)