Lonesome: The Spiritual Meanings of American Solitude 9780755625277, 9780857714473

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‘This is a deeply poetic and focused insight into American religion; not a history of its institutions or theology, but a highly original exploration of a uniquely American sense of the religious through a prolonged meditation on one word. Through the work of Rudolf Otto, in particular, it links into the European tradition and its roots in mysticism, but in a manner wholly shaped by the experience and landscape of the New World. Kevin Lewis writes as a teacher, long familiar with the poetry, fiction and art of his country, and composes with a beautiful lyricism of his own that perfectly reflects the texts he reads so profoundly. Behind his under-stated narrative is a deep learning as well as a form of Romanticism that is embraced by his conversations with a literary tradition that is allowed to speak in its own voice and suggest to us a moving sense of the lonesome – not the lonely – which is a spiritual seeing into the other and into the self. His book ranges from the greatest of American poetry and art to popular music, opening up spaces for reflection and new insights to what is often familiar, but here again new and fresh. Lonesome is a major contribution to the field of literature and religion and should be widely read by scholars and by anyone seeking insight into what is particularly American.’ David Jasper, Professor in Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow ‘With a sweeping scope that will work spectacularly in the classroom and find a welcome reception among scholars of religion and the arts, Kevin Lewis makes original and important observations about the literature, music, art and thought of leading figures in modern American history. His book will enrich the study of American culture by directing attention to an overlooked, but widely present motif. It brings to the diverse conversation of American Studies today the theme of lonesomeness, which will be found at work in modern America as a key feature of its troubled, selfobsessed, and varied religious and cultural life. White Americans have long cultivated an ethos of individualism that treasures solitude in a way that historically marginalized groups have not always enjoyed the opportunity to practice, forced by circumstances of oppression to rely more hopefully on the resource of communitarian values. Kevin Lewis offers readers a robust account of how important solitude has been as a form of modern spirituality.’ David Morgan, Professor of Religion, Duke University

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LIBRARY OF MODERN RELIGION Series ISBN: 978 1 84885 244 0 See www.ibtauris.com/LMR for a full list of titles

1. Returning to Religion: Why a Secular Age is Haunted by Faith Jonathan Benthall 978 1 84511 718 4

2. Knowing the Unknowable: Science and Religions on God and the Universe John Bowker (ed.) 978 1 84511 757 3

3. Sufism Today: Heritage and Tradition in the Global Community Catharina Raudvere and Leif Stenberg (eds) 978 1 84511 762 7

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5: Global Pentecostalism: Encounters with Other Religious Traditions David Westerlund (ed.) 978 1 84511 877 8

6. Dying for Faith: Religiously Motivated Violence in the Contemporary World Madawi Al-Rasheed and Marat Shterin (eds) 978 1 84511 686 6

7. The Hindu Erotic: Exploring Hinduism and Sexuality David Smith 978 1 84511 361 2

8. The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian Studies Hugh B. Urban 978 1 84511 873 0

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11. Muslim Women’s Rituals: Authority and Gender in the Islamic World Catharina Raudvere and Margaret Rausch 978 1 84511 643 9

12. Lonesome: The Spiritual Meanings of American Solitude Kevin Lewis 978 1 84885 075 0

13. A Short History of Atheism Gavin Hyman 978 1 84885 136 8

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LONESOME The Spiritual Meanings of American Solitude

Kevin Lewis

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Published in 2009 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2009 Kevin Lewis The right of Kevin Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. This book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Library of Modern Religion, Vol. 12 ISBN: 978 1 84885 075 0 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Designed and Typeset by 4word Ltd, Bristol, UK Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham

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To the memory of our beloved daughter, Helen Hill (1970–2007)

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TA B L E O F CONTENTS Acknowledgements Preface

ix xiii

1.

Foundations

1

2.

The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness

23

3.

Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction

51

4.

The Numinous and the Transcendent

79

5.

Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome

109

6.

Country Lonesome

133

7.

Epilogue: Therapeutic Lonesomeness

155

Notes

177

Bibliography

191

Index

199 vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Eugene Long, Ben-Ami Shillony, Graham Howes, and several anonymous readers of earlier drafts, for their considered suggestions and encouragement as the manuscript evolved. Special thanks to country music historian Bill Malone for helpful comments on a draft of Chapter Six exploring signature lonesomeness in country music. Also: to the University of South Carolina for granting sabbatical months in which to concentrate efforts on the project; and Wolfson College, Cambridge, for productive sabbatical residencies. I have been buoyed by receptive audiences at various stages in the development of the manuscript: at the University of Glasgow; at Wesleyan College (Macon, GA); at Wolfson; at a meeting of the South Carolina Academy of Religion; and at a convivial dinner convened by the Loblollies town-and-gown society in Columbia, SC. Thank you, Becky, my anchor and best friend for over thirty years of marriage, and beautiful Helen, lost but so present to us. ix

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LONESOM E I am grateful to my editor, Alex Wright, for light offered at the end of a long, lonesome tunnel of risky enterprise.

Excerpts from The Dharma Bums and On the Road reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by Jack Kerouac. From The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, copyright (c) 1958 by Jack Kerouac, (c) renewed 1986 by Stella Kerouac and Jan Kerouac. Used by permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. From On the Road by Jack Kerouac, copyright 1955, 1957 by Jack Kerouac, renewed (c) 1983 by Stella Kerouac, renewed (c) 1985 by Stella and Jan Kerouac. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

“Easter Morning”, from A Coast of Trees by A.R. Ammons. Copyright (c) 1981 by A.S. Ammons. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright (c) 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Edward Hopper’s “Morning Sun” (1952, oil on canvas) used by permission of the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Museum Purchase, Howald Fund 1954.031. x

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Acknowledgements “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”, “Sunday Morning”, from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright (c) 1954 by Wallace Stevens, (c) renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, and Faber and Faber Ltd.

“The

Rose”,

(c)

copyright

1963

by

Beatrice

Roethke,

Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethke, “She”, copyright (c) 1956 by Theodore Roethke, “The Tree, The Bird”, copyright (c) 1961 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethke, from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke by Theodore Roehtke. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House.

“Sun In An Empty Room”, from Figurehead by John Hollander, copyright (c) 1999 by John Hollander. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. “Sunday A.M. Not In Manhattan”, from The Night Mirror, (c) copyright 1971 by John Hollander, used by his permission.

Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyright material. Should any such material appear without citation, the author and publishers will be pleased to make appropriate acknowledgement of its provenance in any future printings of this book.

xi

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P R E FA C E

“There is another Loneliness,” wrote Emily Dickinson in lyric #1116 (c. 1868), crafting the insight in her hushed and forceful way. “Not want of friend occasions it,” she observes, “But nature sometimes, sometimes thought.” Our distinctively lone and lovely poet of the nineteenth century, American to the core, testifies that “whoso” this other loneliness “befall/Is richer than could be revealed/By mortal numeral”—by any earthly measure.1 Her theme in that typically compressed poetic utterance is also our theme in this extended essay plea for recognition of the fecund “lonesomeness” of the greater American experience, and for its occasionally religious significance. Why have critics, pundits, and talk-show jockeys hitherto not explored the American “lonesome?” Perhaps because we do not always see what is there in front of us. We see what our vision is formed to see. We miss things for which we are not primed by expectation. From unexamined habit, we avoid the busy work of probing for the embedded assumptions that prevent us from taking a fuller measure of our world. xiii

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LONESO M E Shaped as it is by specific cultural and individual life formations, consciousness is always limited. The perceptions we register and the scrutiny we employ are always partial. Blind spots afflict us even when we know we should know them. The manifold of our perceptions of the world remains incomplete and flawed despite our occasionally inspired efforts to know ourselves better as individuals, thoroughly if not decisively influenced—some would say “constructed”—by the environments through which we move. Such wary skepticism is of course formative for all imbibers, knowingly or unknowingly, of modernist and postmodernist (not to speak of earlier post-Cartesian and postKantian) theories of knowledge generally. This essay addresses a phenomenon of particular word usage, word imaging, and signaled “subjective” experience that would seem to stare in the face of North American if not other native English speakers, but with which we apparently have not yet really grappled. The subjective experience named in my title—comprised as it is of feeling, perceptual, and reflective elements in varying proportions in ways generally that challenge common definition—would seem, from the testimony of a significant number of writers, visual artists, and singers to function as an authentic spiritual expression, not merely a social construction

by

language.

It

would

seem

to

be

both

simultaneously. Its currency as a private and personal experience of North American English speakers—as a state of mind that resists being reduced to or collapsed into some other sort of related

but

non-”spiritual”

experience—has

developed

in

dialectical relationship with a development in usage of the particular word which names it. Language is a social experience. Evolving usage defines and redefines what words mean. This essay suggests that in the evolution of North American English over time, and alongside xiv

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Preface other more obvious meanings, a particular kind of spiritual or loosely religious meanings has accrued for the word “lonesome,” and that we have not consciously identified and consequently not yet reflected upon its various, related meanings and expressive function. In part, the word has created the experience, as language does, and the experience has come to be reflected in the word. Or perhaps it is the other way round. Both observations are probably true. Evolving language funds evolving cultures. The concern of the essay, by way of “making the familiar strange,” is to cast light upon a blind spot in our awareness of common language usage, and to lift up for inspection a family of elusive but rich and complex meanings for a word in the North American English lexicon hitherto ill-treated by the dictionaries and ignored by the pundits. Perhaps we ignore this meaning and function because, as is so often the case with habitual blind spots, the particular phenomenon has become so ingrained an element in our commonly acculturated personal experience of and response to our world as to become invisible. “Lonesomeness” American born and bred, as I shall argue, has proven a regrettably ignored but demonstrable locus of personal and cultural religious-like meaning. The lonesomeness examined in this essay is the “lonesomeness” which in usage signals an evolved, culturespecific, subjective feeling-state whose interesting complexity students of American culture have yet to “see” or to grasp sufficiently. Apparently unnoticed, at least by conscious marking, this “lonesomeness” has gradually made a place within the repertoire of feeling-states, or, better, states of mind or perception which certainly include feeling, to be experienced (and savored!), we observe, exclusively and without exception by suggestible North American inheritors of the European-American cultural tradition. xv

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LONESO M E This lonesomeness may indeed bear a family resemblance to subjective states experienced throughout diverse cultures, any of which may combine a similar feeling-perception with a slightly or significantly different culturally determined concept word. Fieldworking anthropologists and linguists could show us this. The somewhat related Japanese aesthetic term sabi, for instance, refers to a formal quality of beautiful melancholy, from which is derived the more depressive sabishi (“lonely”) and sabishisa (“loneliness”). Although some American nature writers in recent generations, reaching to the East, may have imported and applied such a feeling response, its origin in the Japanese cultural contextual usage separates it from that of historical American lonesomeness, despite apparent similarities. And surely the same is true for any like state of consciousness linked with perception that is both shaped and evoked by the particular language of another culture. But we are focusing here intentionally upon Anglophone culture and, more specifically, upon America. Among English speakers around the globe, the meaning of “lonesomeness” that we are addressing has enjoyed currency among the sub-set of North Americans alone, as we shall argue. To limit the scope of this exploration still further we will restrict our focus to expressions arising within the culture of largely white European immigrants, their descendants, and all who by virtue of socialization into this culture speak its version of the language—its hegemonic dialect. Though it may fairly be judged to do so, ours does not set out intentionally to make a contribution to “whiteness” studies as such. Nevertheless, another essay, not this one, would be needed, is needed, to explore against another ethnic, socio-political, historical background the rich expression of loneliness and loss ameliorated, and, yes, perhaps transcended in performances inheriting and extending the African American blues tradition. We will echo this important disclaimer xvi

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Preface when addressing the “lonesome” in the predominantly “white” country music tradition in Chapter Six. True, we are hardly unfamiliar with the words “lonesome” and

“lonesomeness.”

Nor

would

the

reader—too

hastily

assuming equivalence in “lonely” and “lonesome”—readily admit to unfamiliarity with the apparent, if unexamined, meaning of these words in common use. But when do we ever stop to examine “lonesomeness” closely for the latent meaning which, though it has emerged in usage and is not exactly hidden, certainly remains unclarified by dictionaries and not yet appraised etymologically or examined by cultural critics? Our attempt to do so, as I argue, will bring unanticipated rewards. Not least among the benefits of tracing the witness of accumulated uses of the image of “lonesomeness” in the American arts, and of reflecting upon the pattern of meaning yielded by a probing of this historical-cultural linguistic phenomenon, is that of discovering a neglected locus of religious or

religious-like

expression.

Combining

description

with

interpretive, inductive speculation, this essay urges consideration of a religious dimension present under apparent disguise in this cultural phenomenon. It might be argued that Americans will know the rich complexity of this lonesomeness instinctively, simply by virtue of cultural assimilation. Perhaps so, but we have not raised to consciousness what we may indeed know or feel as thoroughly as we could. To know it better or to know it critically, or so we argue, is to grasp, perhaps for the first time, one yet unrecognized form of the evolving, multiform American religious imagination. The subjective experience of resonant lonesomeness has come to provide one of the numerous ways, at least tentatively, of feeling and being “religious” in the New World of the modern period—or so the testimony of our writers and artists would suggest. xvii

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LONESO M E The animating premise of the essay is that we have in the store of words at our command not one but two words, “lonesome” and “lonely,” for a reason. Here is an exemplary instance of an opportunity through vigilance to keep the language flexible and precise by insisting upon a useful distinction between them already present implicitly, if not consciously acknowledged, in usage. Where the meaning of “lonely” is uniformly negative, the savory meanings of “lonesome”—of which there are many—layer a positive upon the negative, at least often enough to beg notice. So we believe the evidence indicates. Ultimately, only our common, easy carelessness in speech and our lack of critical selfawareness as American speakers of English account for lingering confusion between the two words and for our all-too-common propensity to use them in haste interchangeably, effectively abetting the confusion out of habit. As we will show by way of introducing the discussion in Chapter One, our current dictionary definitions are of little help. Afflicted by haste and oversight, the relevant dictionary entries have yet to catch up with the culturally evolved usage of “lonesome” and “lonesomeness” for which I argue in subsequent chapters, enlisting the corroborating testimony of writers of poetry, fiction, and song, and (in Chapter Five) of one especially clairvoyant painter, Edward Hopper. One of our purposes is to urge a revisiting and correction of the dictionary entries for these terms. Another is to offer brief, all too brief, but strategic capsule readings of American poets (Chapter Two), fiction writers (Chapter Three), and “country” songwriters (Chapter Six), in passages where they touch upon dimensions in the American lonesome state of mind heretofore unregarded by critics. But the larger purpose should be stated as clearly as possible at the outset. Unlike Cecelia Tichi, whose purpose is to fit the core themes of country music lyrics into the larger context of xviii

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Preface traditional concerns voiced in classic American literature (in her High Lonesome of 19942), we shall explore the complexity of our lonesomeness itself as an American cultural phenomenon. In particular, we shall attempt to do justice to its apparent religiouslike character, using precedent writings in academic literary criticism, psychology, sociology, phenomenology, and philosophy of religion as guides along the way. And we shall argue that here is a case where the arts in America have for generations simultaneously conducted and reflected a significant strain of implicitly religious life in our evolving common experience as a people. As we shall argue, this rich strain of subjective, tenuously “religious” observance over time and still today has accompanied, here and there like a repeated grace note—though unacknowledged as such—the many ways in which Americans have negotiated their privatized, non-traditional religiousness. We are living through an evolved and evolving American age or period in which guidance from traditional faith tradition has less and less regulated what we still prefer to call the “religious” (as distinct from the amorphous “spiritual”) experience of an increasingly heterogeneous America. In the American cultural context—that is, in the context of current differential usage of these two terms—we observe that “religiousness” still points to a deeper subjective experience of consciousness and reflection (and often commitment) than does the “spirituality” all too often linked with the marketing of voguish, New Age, alternative, panacea visions packaged by this new guru or prophet or that. As phenomena of popular culture, these variant “spiritualities” du jour of course have attracted some attention among a significant portion of the population and subsequently among Americanist academics. At the risk of discarding too hastily the term “spirituality,” and despite its accretion of profound historical meanings in our inherited faith traditions, here we bracket and put it aside as xix

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LONESO M E deflated currency at present, in preference for “religion” and “religiousness,” which we think more adequately describe the kinds of meaning we detect in “lonesomeness.” We will address this issue again in Chapter Four, directly addressing the religious dimension. In the individualized American experience then, and increasingly now (despite the resurgence of visible and contentious Fundamentalist expressions of belief and practice in some quarters), the “lonesome” begs “religious” description. Throughout our young nation’s history—Alexis de Tocqueville provides an exemplary observation to this effect3—an openness to non-traditional, personal religion has accompanied and informed the native that supports our “pursuit of happiness.” This openness has characterized those clearly or tenuously claiming adherence to particular, evolved denominational or faith traditions, as well as the religious and “spiritual” freelancers. In the introductory chapter, we shall touch upon relevant insights of Americanist culture critics, especially those of Giles Gunn, who with sustained delicacy has considered how the personal inward experience of American religiousness has so often been a matter of sensing, in one’s own terms, fortunate access to a never clearly defined “otherness” (if not an “Other”) into which one feels integrated and therewith fulfilled—the sort of “access,” that we will suggest, is to be marked in evoked and original experiences of lonesomeness. It would follow that, as it expresses or marks moments of deeper

self-perception,

lonesomeness

can

and

should

be

addressed, if only briefly and in our conclusion, as a passing experience of privileged self-fulfillment, prophetic, as it were, of desired, sustainable self-integration, a deeper well-being and sense of self-worth. As such it could be of interest, we will suggest, to the clinically depressed (the “lonely”) and to the counseling practice of psychologists generally. For those so afflicted might benefit from acquiring from deeper exposure to xx

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Preface this particular cultural heritage a hopeful openness to the native feeling state of authentic lonesomeness, un-commandable though it may be. We will suggest in Chapter Seven that lonesomeness can function as a kind of unbidden gift of spiritual self-therapy. Its therapeutic possibilities, or at least our increased awareness of them, might find a small place among the various counseling initiatives of the day. To identify and to cultivate a redemptive significance in lonesomeness may prove a useful means of mitigating the increasing experience of loneliness, understood as “relational deprivation” (see Chapter One), as Americans, by percentage, increasingly live alone amid a “lonely crowd.” But credit the imaginations and sensitivities of a diversity of American artists with prompting our somewhat narrowly focused project in cultural study. In its undertaking we hold no brief for any particular comprehensive higher theory of culture of the moment. No particular explanatory theory drives our enterprise, and no expressly theological purpose. In an attempt to gain insight into promptings and contents of lonesomeness, the essay offers, modestly we hope, one kind of hypothesis among many that could conceivably be put forward. It offers the kind of argument that an academically trained Americanist religionist critic might propose—one who remains warily skeptical of the limitation of polling results that seem to show that Americans, measured by their claims of churchgoing and of formally held religious beliefs, are widely committed primarily to institutionalized religion; one who is daily made aware of the compartmentalization of and low public priority placed upon religious expression throughout our heterogeneous common life, shaped as it is by freedom, diversity, eroding skepticism, hypocrisies of convenience, the information deluge, and intensifying secularized self-consciousness. Though modest in length, this essay reflects ongoing enchantment by the “great experiment,” culturally as well as xxi

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LONESO M E politically, which is America, and by the historically ambiguous consolations of “religion.” Unabashedly interdisciplinary and experimental in nature, it hopes to make a modest contribution ultimately to the field of American studies, populated as the field has been and must remain by scholars in diverse and complementing disciplines. This essay is precipitated by years of training, reading, research, and teaching at home and abroad in the interdisciplinary academic field professionally conducted under the rubric Arts, Literature, and Religion. It is a work in praise of the timely comfort of occasionally illuminated and restorative solitude, of loneliness transfigured and redeemed in an elevated, integrative experience of “otherness” by “something more.”

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1 F OU N D AT IONS

Everybody’s got to walk that lonesome valley, You got to go there by yourself, Ain’t nobody here can go there for you, You got to go there by yourself. Nineteenth-century popular revival song

When you hear them old sad songs, Do you hang on every word? Do you swear a cryin’ fiddle Has the sweetest sound on earth? If you shudder at the music Of a hoot owl in the pines, You’re on lonesome standard time. “Lonesome Standard Time” (Jim Rushing and Larry Cordle, 1992)1

1

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LONESO M E That “lonesome valley” is uncharted territory, known and felt perhaps but unstudied from a sympathetic and critical point of view. A criticism of culture and the arts wanting to explore an unremarked, putatively “religious” dimension of life in America, as do we, by examining the native experience of “lonesomeness” must tread carefully. Without benefit of previous similar explorations undertaken in any field (with which, as it were, to converse), such a project must find its own experimental way, borrowing strategically now from this field of inquiry, now from that. Though the project belongs more to the humane than to the social sciences, though the subject and one’s approach to it be more qualitative than quantitative, though the claim be modest, we must clearly mark the path we make, that others may follow. The way onto this path must be negotiated in stages. Although we may take it for perhaps more than he intended— we cannot be sure—country-western song-writer Larry Cordle’s “Lonesome Standard Time” provides a choice figure for an experiential zone of perception, feeling and “something more,” through and in which, I believe, the American mind habitually travels, as the arts in America would seem to testify. Expressive passages and images in our arts, collectively regarded, seem to suggest, as I will argue, that a religious or religious-like encounter awaits us in this particular “zone” to be imagined as parallel to or simultaneous with any of the four clock time-zones into which America is divided. In this vein, one might say that in experiences of “lonesomeness” we tend to “zone out,” that is, we temporarily take leave of the sense of being fixedly connected to our immediate physical and emotional surroundings. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. How exactly are we to make good on such a claim? And what does such a claim mean in the first place? It is a truth of language understood as a cultural product that the meaning of particular words evolves under the influence of 2

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Foundations the historical experience of people who make use of language as, reciprocally, language makes use of them. We commonly observe that the use and meaning of words can and does shift slowly under the pressure of the evolving experience of the people served by language. The relationship is evolving and dialectical. In the case of the English word addressed in this essay—the adjective “lonesome” or, alternatively, the noun “lonesomeness”—we hope to show that an as-yet unexplored native North American meaning or significance of this term has grown up over the course of many generations. The American experience has gradually contributed a new linguistic meaning of the word, a meaning with which the dictionaries have not yet caught up, doubtless because usage experts have yet to call our attention to it. My subject is that which is often, but by no means always, meant by “lonesome” in the usage of primarily white North Americans. Others might wish to address its use among black North Americans also. But to do so would raise a set of issues which we will set aside in this essay, out of respect for the different if parallel social and cultural experience of African Americans. “American lonesomeness,” in the sense of it for which I will argue, is a product and expression of European American culture. Readers in other parts of the native-speaking English world, as in other cultural pockets of America itself, may look with puzzlement at the narrowed focus of such an enterprise. But I hope they, too, will read on, in curiosity and shared interest in the evolving agency of language. This is not the sort of essay a trained linguist would produce. But the drawing of an essentially linguistic distinction is essential here at the start. The distinction, we grant, is hardly observed self-consciously by most Americans, who blur it habitually in everyday speech, and who might upon first hearing resist our claim. Our subject is not the lonely but the lonesome, not 3

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LONESO M E loneliness but lonesomeness. Though perhaps not often observed in the spontaneity and flux of American English usage, this is a distinction crucial to what follows in this essay. To draw it persuasively, I believe, is to make a small contribution to the ongoing work of preserving the flexibility and effectiveness of language as a medium of communication. Those who tend to use these two words interchangeably do not do so because, as chance would have it, the two words have acquired exactly the same cluster of meanings. They do so, rather, because they have not considered the subtle difference between the respective acquired meanings of the words. And so in the casual confusion of them in everyday speech they understandably see no harm. Although the dictionaries are not much help, no more for “lonely” than for “lonesome” in fact, an essay on the neglected meaning of the latter should begin with such help as the dictionaries give. And, in the process, we should trace the meaning of the former, with which the latter is so often carelessly twinned, weighing the one against the other. The entries under “lonely” in the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (OED) suggest that, while the word was employed from the seventeenth century on to mean simply a state or a place of solitude, it was the Romantic period that brought into currency the new emotional meaning “dejected because of want of company or society; sad at the thought that one is; having a feeling of solitariness alone,” with Byron providing the first cited illustration. By contrast, the OED attributes to its cousin “lonesome,” from its first-cited appearance in the seventeenth century, a “chiefly emotional sense,” whether descriptive of “persons, their condition, feelings” or of localities, “solitary, unfrequented, desolate,” in both cases expressing a sense of the “forlorn.” Thus in the minimalist OED account of the evolved usage of these two terms, “lonely” is seen to have taken on over time (with the Romantics generally) some of the 4

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Foundations same affective meaning which “lonesome” carried from its first documented appearances. The OED sources are decisively British. All instances of “lonely” in illustrating passages are drawn from English texts. Only three of the nineteen illustrating instances of “lonesome” are drawn from American texts. The OED is a caretaker more of English spoken and written in the British Isles than of English spoken and written in America. We expect the ears of its editorial staff to be tuned more to nuances of usage in native speakers of the home-grown Queen’s English than to nuances of American English usage, although, to be fair, of course the OED casts a wide net and its writers do their best to record variant meanings grounded in cultural differences. The definitions cited above were published in 1903. The 1976 OED Supplement added only two new relevant usages. In the one, “lonely” and “lonesome” have come to be used interchangeably, as, for example, in the expression “by or on one’s lonesome/lonely,” meaning “all alone without company or assistance.” The earliest examples are drawn from D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. As for the other of the two, as in the expression “lonesome for” (under “lonesome”), the Supplement is of even less help, offering no new meaning, citing only two examples (from the 1905 The Smart Set and M. De la Roche’s Young Renny in 1935). The hefty American Random House Dictionary (2nd edition, unabridged, 1987) is of less help still. Effectively drawing no distinction between “lonely” and “lonesome,” where the OED had linked the two terms under “forlorn,” the more hip Random House prefers the more clinical “depression.” And it emphasizes the subjectivity of the same feeling state described by both words. Lonesome, like lonely, is not well served by the dictionaries because neither social scientists nor trained critics of the arts (in which expressions of both can be found in profusion) have 5

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LONESO M E chosen to theorize formally or to explicate the feeling states evoked by uses of these terms. Who or, for that matter, what kind of expert to begin with can reliably tell us more than these dictionary entries tell us about the feeling? To be fair, the experience of loneliness has received some attention. But lonesomeness has received none. Perhaps this is understandable, since the dictionaries encourage us to attribute much the same meaning to both. But in American usage, we insist, they do not always mean the same thing. At certain moments, in certain usage, lonesomeness is to be set quite apart from loneliness— linguistically, as it takes on a quite different meaning, for which current dictionaries provide hopelessly inadequate explanation. My path is not that of a linguist, or rather not that of a linguist alone. Still less is it the path of a social scientist observing behaviours, sending round questionnaires, consulting statistics, and drawing verifiable (or falsifiable) conclusions. But a small body of slightly relevant precedent observation in the social sciences does exist, to be noted by way of reminding the reader how loneliness if not lonesomeness has been addressed in the academic context of the last fifty years. Two generations ago, following the appearance of David Riesman’s influential The Lonely Crowd (1952), fellow sociologists began to weigh the applicability of the particular polar terms Riesman introduced in his extended commentary on the forces at work in post-war America. In his scheme, the “inner-directed” traditionalists of the older generation were increasingly to be found in conflict with the “outer-directed” products of the post-war age of information and anxiety.2 Such was the impact of this work and the authority of its conclusions that non-social-scientific discourse within the academy, as well as public discussion outside the academy, was affected. Riesman was applauded for defending “inner-direction” as a beneficial if perhaps bygone product of a society that rightly 6

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Foundations prizes rugged individualism, and as a better foundation than diffusive, perhaps disorienting, “other directedness” for social, political, and cultural prosperity. Riesman neither defined nor discussed the term loneliness as such. If loneliness held any negative implication at all for Riesman, this negative was an acceptable price to be paid by a society, he reckoned, that needs the reconstructed, building-block strength of disciplined, selfmotivated individualism—a traditional value not to be put by. A few years later, another sociologist, Philip Slater, offered a shorter but eloquent rejoinder to Riesman, in an essay with a title that effectively begs but similarly avoids the issue of what “loneliness” is and does, The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970).3 Observing the seismic social change heralded by the behavior of the younger generation in the 1960s, Slater addressed a changed society in which the widened generation gap itself now demanded worrying attention. His plea was widely heard if not so trumpeted as Riesman’s, with whom he took issue. Slater recommended that Americans temper their individualism, which he viewed as being pushed to damaging extremes, with willingness to forge through negotiation more effective, more co-operating communities. His concern that Americans across the spectrum of the ages listen to each other more effectively, like Riesman’s previous concern lest we fail our children by not teaching them independence of mind, made a thoughtful response to the social problems of his day. Like Riesman’s plea, Slater’s now seems dated. But, like Riesman’s, it still seems to hold some value at the beginning of a new century. Neither, however, told us anything of lasting value about the personal experience of loneliness. And neither even mentioned lonesomeness. At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we note that yet another sociologist, specializing in the behaviors and experiences of the religious, Robert Bellah, the celebrated initiator of the 7

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LONESO M E scholarly discussion of “civil religion” in America, if without glancing directly at lonesomeness, has helped prepare the way for our exploratory essay. In the chapter “Transcendence in Contemporary Piety” in Beyond Belief (1970), where he announces that his interest lies not in “the substance of that which is claimed is transcendent” but rather in “the function of the claim itself,” Bellah offers the notion of a general sense of “fulfillment” experienced by individuals, though initially inexpressible, as “the chief ‘inner’ dimension of transcendent reality,” an experience “as much immanent as transcendent,” and which overcomes the “deficiency need” of a structural “loneliness” in each individual. His argument, to which we will return in Chapter Four, is at least as relevant in our present, problematically “secular” circumstances, if not more so, as it was some forty years ago.4 Moving to the perspective of psychology, we remember especially Robert Weiss in a small landmark in clinical psychology: the report he filed on the results of studies of isolated individuals in the Boston area, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation (1974).5 A few other psychologists before Weiss had tentatively introduced the subject: notably Frieda Fromm-Reichman (1959) and Clark Moustakas (1961) to mention but two.6 All were aware of working in an area previously unexplored, hence hampered by the lack of reliable theory or data to guide the shaping of new approaches or to increase confidence in the piecemeal findings they were able to achieve. This was Weiss’ theme as well, as he struggled to describe the “symptomatologies of loneliness,” without however being able to capture adequately what he learned to respect as the elusive “feel” of loneliness among the subjects surveyed. As a clinician, he could describe loneliness as a “deficit condition” and a “response to the absence of specific relational provisions” among the recently divorced or the recently re-located to homes 8

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Foundations in new residential communities, for example. He could usefully distinguish loneliness from clinical depression itself and from grief, conditions with which he granted loneliness has affinity. But the interview data compelled him to respect a difficult-todescribe “something else” in what the interviewed subjects described as their loneliness, and he did not attempt to describe or to label it. He expressed distrust of any and all attempts to “cherish” loneliness as, for example, a possible test of character or as a useful stage in some sort of “vision quest,” or as a “demonstration of one’s singularity.” He knows that the feeling of emotional or social isolation is genuinely distressing and can be painful, and accordingly he rejected any and all instances of “flimsy and self-congratulatory denial.”7 Everyone’s life is threatened by loneliness, by relational deprivation, he concluded, observing that of no other feeling state are those who have suffered from it more apt to block out or to dissociate the memory of it when relief comes, so discomfiting is the memory as well as the experience. This dissociation may well account for the continuing lack of scholarly treatment of the subject. To this day we lack a “secure taxonomy of types of loneliness,” he observed, and perhaps this situation will continue.8 A clinical treatment, such as Weiss’, helps by suggesting that, at least to date, psychology has little insight to offer enterprises such as ours here beyond what seem like common-sense helpful findings. One can deeply respect the work of clinical and analytical psychology, but conclude that, in pursuit of the “lonesomeness” beyond loneliness, one must look to other material and other methods. And so we are propelled beyond both sociology and psychology to search for precedent approaches, if any, to be found among the humane sciences or Humanities traditionally conceived. Although his theme in Solitude: A Return to the Self (1988) that “solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support,” especially 9

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LONESO M E for the independent and creative, might seem to further or at least to complement research on lonesomeness, the psychologist Anthony Storr is engaged in a very different project.9 His purpose is simply to redress an imbalance in theory of personality generally. Where “object-relations theorists” want to persuade us that we seek meaning in life invariably by forming interpersonal relations, Storr argues that the happiest lives achieve a balance between interpersonal relationships and impersonal interests. His corrective theoretical concern for the value of the individual’s solitary work of healing and integration is appealing. But he offers no basis for extending or deepening the discussion of subjective experience into the area of the spiritual and the religious. He does not address the lonely-lonesome distinction. (Nor of course does the Australian-English critic George Watson, in his spirited essay, “The Bliss of Solitude.”10) In search of emotional and spiritual meanings in lonesomeness or in loneliness, too, one might have hoped for more than was delivered collectively by the participants in the Boston University Institute for Philosophy and Religion program for 1996.11 The twenty-eighth in a series of yearlong symposia addressing a single theme focused upon “Loneliness” in that year. The proceedings, published under the same title, with one interesting exception, suggest that scholarly work in the Humanities had hardly advanced or made use of the previous discussion among the few social scientists noted above. If what one would like to find are steps taken toward production of a useful field theory of loneliness or, better, of lonesomeness, the published essays contributed to this volume primarily by trained philosophers disappoint. The writers appeal to Royce, to Heidegger, to Moses and Zen Buddhism; they speak with approval of solitude; they push and pull “loneliness” (never “lonesomeness”) in several directions. But they offer little 10

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Foundations comment on that something extra, that description-eluding element for which Weiss maintained a modicum of respect. They avoid the lonesome altogether. With one exception. Christopher Ricks, the one literary critic contributor, in an essay, “Loneliness and Poetry,” momentarily leads the discussion, up a path tangential to the symposium discussion but of far more practical import to the concern of this essay. He introduces the testimony of several poets, the figurative language of whose art provides a far more congenial, more expressive medium through which to explore the lonely and the lonesome. The expressive language of poetry, equipped as it is to express perception in which the affective and the cognitive are inextricably mixed, conveys the personal truth of these feeling states more effectively and with more authority. Ricks persuasively demonstrates, without ever formally arguing the point, that the abstract language of social science and philosophy must yield in this particular matter to the privilege of poetic utterance. He draws his examples from the art of E.E. cummings, Larkin.

Emily

Dickinson,

William

Barnes,

and

Philip

12

Dickinson is Ricks’ major exhibit, and with good reason—we shall return to her poetry in Chapter Two to propose an alternative reading of a cluster of poems linked by the lonesome theme. Rather what I note here are Ricks’ exceptional if glancing observations on the difference between lonely and lonesome, throwaway observations unhelpful to our project, illustrating the divide in usage between the British and Americans. (As the famous saying has it, Americans and the British are two peoples divided by a common language.) But here is at least one critic, alert and well-read, who has drawn some small attention to the distinction crucial in this essay, a distinction so obvious under our very noses that we simply overlook or trivialize it. 11

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LONESO M E As Ricks canvasses the OED for meanings of “loneliness,” he dismisses one by one all the other historical variant terms akin to lonely (including the still-born “lonedom,” “loneful,” “lonelihood,” and “loneness”) as though perversely determined to ignore the living “lonesome.” He even nods knowingly at the difference between languages that evolve in different countries, e.g., “the French cannot say ‘lonely’ any more than they can say ‘blush.’ They can evoke loneliness and blushing, but the language has no word that is manifestly the word for either.”13 Then, two pages on, in citing T.S. Eliot, inadvertently he touches on the issue of American lonesomeness—but without pursuing it! Ricks notes that in 1933, in complaining of what he regarded as the excessively Romantic religious sense in I.A. Richards, Eliot observed in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism that: Loneliness is known as a frequent attribute in romantic poetry, and in the form of “lonesomeness” (as I need not remind American readers) is a frequent attitude in contemporary lyrics known as “the blues.” But in what sense is Man in general isolated and from what? What is the “human situation?” I can understand the isolation of the human situation as Plato’s Diotoma expounds it, or in the Christian sense in the separation of Man from God; but not an isolation which is not a separation from anything in particular.14 Leaving aside for the moment Eliot’s linking of lonesomeness with the blues, and stepping away from Ricks, we would make two responding comments. As a shrewd observer of language, Eliot notably observed, if only in passing, that American culture 12

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Foundations has made a different sort of investment in lonesomeness than has the British. Though his example of the blues, deriving as it does from the African American experience, does not point the issue as I would—I adduce a different and more compelling, if related, body of evidence—he was of course right in intuiting a different cultural meaning in the American experience of lonesomeness. Secondly, Eliot’s notorious theology and politics presumably help account for the failure of imagination that prevented his sympathy for American expressions, arguably spiritual in nature, for a quality of isolation “which is not a separation from anything in particular.” The Anglophile Eliot, as quoted by Ricks, was trans-cultural enough to observe the difference in lonely and lonesome, but not American enough to take lonesome seriously as the expression of an interesting emotional or spiritual state. A few pages later, as he introduces the poetry of the Victorian William Barnes, Ricks adds this cryptic linguistic observation: “The word ‘lonesome’ was already, even then, en route to mawkishness and furry self-fondling.”15 In the absence of any previous discussion by Ricks of lonesomeness across the noted divide of our common language, should we not assume that he speaks generally for a common, well-educated British sense of what lonesomeness has come to mean—for the British? American writers, by contrast, as I shall show in subsequent chapters, have left a trail of evidence indicating use of the term to express feeling and perception of an entirely different order, conveying a richness and depth of experience which the British will only be able to recognize, perhaps, under some other name. The two different respective cultures construct the American and the Briton in different respective ways. This particular linguistic issue clearly illustrates the difference in cultural making, or molding or shaping. Neither Ricks nor apparently the expatriate Eliot “get” American lonesomeness, nor am I proposing that they 13

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LONESO M E ought to. What I observe is that, just as the French have no exact word for what has come to be meant in English by “lonely,” the British do not connect with “lonesome” anything like the personal experience that Americans connect with it. (We bracket out here the case of the not inconsiderable numbers of current British fans of American and American-inspired country music.) Ricks’

disparagement

of

lonesomeness

as

a

hopelessly

sentimental, shallow, and self-indulgent feeling would perhaps not surprise students of comparative languages. Nor can he be faulted for observing trenchantly what he feels to be the case, as an extraordinarily gifted reader and writer of the language. But what he does not or perhaps cannot feel is the distinctively American experiential content of the feeling-perception we are exploring. It is a mistake to suppose that all human beings experience exactly the same emotions across cultural differences. Against such an essentially romantic, perhaps “existentialist” belief, we set the observation that different cultural systems, animated as they are by respectively different visions and valuations of individual and collective human life, emphasize certain feelings as well as traits, while at the same time suppressing others. Though we cannot divert the discussion here to follow the arguments in support of it, certainly there is truth in the proposal that we are indeed constructed by language—that is, by the particular language we grow up speaking, our “first” language. Taking this perspective, we risk the observation that only Americans can feel the American lonesomeness. Somewhat similar states of consciousness doubtless can be inhabited by peoples of other cultures and languages, but lonesomeness however translated into a foreign tongue is not a term employed to convey or to frame figuratively these kindred feelingperceptions elsewhere. The language spoken by our culture 14

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Foundations plants expectations and possibilities in us from birth and sustains them throughout life. It shapes and orchestrates, if it does not actually supply, our repertoire of possible emotional responses to the world. As an American, one must not expect to feel exactly what an Englishman or a Frenchman, let alone a Chinese, will feel in a closely parallel situation. In America, lonesomeness has evolved dynamically from symptom to value, a value which, of course, the pop culture country-western song-writing tradition has worked so hard and so long to exploit. As I hope to show in subsequent chapters, no one feels lonesome, no one can celebrate the lonesome nor live off it, the way Americans do. The feeling state is arguably culture specific, at least in theory, and, when we allow nuances to decide the matter, also in fact, in practice. Although we will offer a fuller definition of this state of mind and feeling, paying particular attention to its religious-like character, let us be as clear as we can at the start of our exploration. For our purpose, we define it thus. Mature, adult lonesomeness is a recurring ingredient element in the constructed cultural experience of American solitude. It presupposes depressive loneliness as a ground, but it lifts those who experience it, in what feels like a gift, above mere loneliness for a transitory, savoury, nearly-but-probably-not-quite epiphanic moment in the old sense of that term as descriptive of a moment of illuminating revelation. Lonesomeness includes loneliness and melancholy. But, on the evidence I will present below, it transfigures—it transcends—the state of feeling sorry for oneself. It can momentarily redeem that negative state. Lonesomeness is not itself a depressive state, although it commonly rises from and may indeed fall back into emotional distress. Rather, in lonesomeness one experiences something like—these are my own analogies—a sense of coming into one’s own, of taking confident possession of oneself on a crest of savored, transcended 15

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LONESO M E melancholy filled with “something more,” if only for a brief delicious moment. Religion is an historical phenomenon. Times and cultures shape and re-shape it variously. America, for the duration of our Founding Fathers’ ongoing “great experiment,” will continue to live through processes of secular questioning and re-formulation of needful religious and “religious-like” expression, rejecting, rephrasing, recovering, and reworking it in response to everchanging cultural, historical circumstances. Decades ago Geoffrey Hartmann commented in this vein, urging readers to a greater sympathy in response to American literature where it witnesses, even against appearances, traces of the sacred inscribed deeply in our language. However generally or superficially skeptical our literature may appear to have become over the years, our homegrown language, he observed, manifests here and there “evidence of archaic and sacred residues ... a Presence which is not to be put by.”16 It may take an unusually sensitive as well as a close reader to discern the reworked and of course post-traditional religious expression in our literature. The mixture of cultures in America, of course, can defy generalization. But central to the broad cultural experience historically has been the resilient impetus to free exploration of an individual’s appropriate response to what R.W.B. Lewis described as the abiding “tug of the transcendent.”17 As we shall see in subsequent chapters, not all but many and certainly some of our greatest writers (as well as painters) have provided memorable images of a lonesome which exceeds loneliness upon which it is founded by so great a degree that it can only be approached, I believe, as though “religious” in character if, at the same time, thoroughly non-traditional. These suggestive images are to be mined in writers who seem intuitively, emotionally in touch with the mainstream culture of 16

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Foundations the dynamic “great experiment of the Republic,” with its offering of individual freedom, as Tocqueville noted, even in the realm of religious self-definition, with its avid anti-traditionalism, its diversity, its parochialism, and its mix of reinvented traditions with unapologetic secularism and materialism. Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Eugene O’Neill, James Agee, Jack Kerouac, and Edward Hopper, to name a few, give us passages in which they tap into an unaccountably neglected cultural imagination of lonesomeness which is the heritage of all North American English speakers. This feeling state is of course a product of the historical American experience in which religious inclinations have had to find expression or release where they will, in the absence of church-state support, on a stage conceived as a frontier in the great theater of history, and in an age when increasingly modern, post-Enlightenment skepticism and selfconsciousness have eroded the authority of traditional doctrinebased religions. Here we enter a caution. We adopt and modify significantly Eliot’s principle, enunciated in the 1935 essay “Religion and Literature,” that criticism of any of the arts is improved by and ultimately fulfilled in reflection not from his formally “theological standpoint,” but rather from a standpoint sympathetic to the larger concerns of intellectual and cultural history.18 The criticism of literature and other arts, where appropriate, may indeed invoke, as here, reflections from different angles on theology of culture loosely defined (while it may not necessarily wish to be completed in expressly theological language, as Eliot would recommend). For our purposes we leave any Eliot-like, governing “theological standpoint” to others. The criticism we will conduct in subsequent chapters, and that we are initiating in this chapter, borrows from the relevant religious concerns and findings of psychologists, cultural critics, philosophers, and sociologists, only 17

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LONESO M E by way of advancing from an appropriately broad base a general discussion of the arguably religious dimension to the culturespecific American lonesomeness. The intellectual ferment in American studies in recent years, which, it is to be hoped, will turn more Americanist scholars toward the appraisal of religious beliefs and behaviors, of course has been anticipated in the work of recent religion-and-literature specialists, some of whom have worked all along with one foot in American Studies, most notably that of Giles B. Gunn.19 Others— Nathan Scott, Wesley Kort, Robert Detweiler, Ralph Wood, and Ann-Janine Morey, among others—have produced influential interdisciplinary essays insightfully characterizing the mutual inter-penetration of the religious and the literary imaginations on native grounds. But in his modest, pragmatic, and more humanistic than traditionally theological approach, Gunn has steadily, over several decades, performed the services of a helpful watchman at his post, alert and sensitive to the diverse ways in which the individualism of the inherited cultural tradition has, in numerous writers of fiction and poetry, prompted striking, nontraditional expressions of religious feeling, consciousness, and desire. The impulse to see more deeply into American experience and experiences, risky as attempts to do so may now be regarded by many Americanist scholars, has influenced him. In an earlier generation, R.W.B. Lewis, in The American Adam (1964),20 and Tony Tanner, in The Reign of Wonder (1965),21 combining literary criticism with thematic intellectual and cultural history, stand out as brilliant interpreters of unifying trends in the American national experience. But the risks to be taken in their sort of cultural criticism have in subsequent generations of critics apparently seemed too great. Americanists of the past half-century or so have been drawn more to examinations of “diversity” than to tracings of continuity and unity in our evolving culture—the 18

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Foundations simile of the “salad bar” has all but displaced that of the “melting pot.” Clearly proven respectful of diversity on one hand, on the other Gunn hand has spent a career modeling for students and other scholars in the field acts of careful, well-conceived, speculative critical interpretation of our native literature, of a kind that “reads” for common religious significance where warranted. Gunn’s scholarly reflections, conducted along lines of inquiry sympathetic to the religious impulse, as much if not possibly more than any other Americanist culture-critic of texts and the religious imagination,

have

paved

the

way,

we

submit,

for

our

“interrogation” of lonesomeness expressions, collectively speaking, as an historical site of non-traditional, open-ended religious expression among speakers and writers of American English. It was Gunn who helped initially prepare the way for the sort of exploration and argument we are pursuing here when, in The Interpretation of Otherness (1979), for example, he posed the possibilities for scholars sympathetic to the multiform expressive ways of homo religiosus Americanus in this way, pleading that: ... discussion of the relations between literature and religion, between culture and belief, has taken a fresh turn in recent years, and ... it is now necessary to widen the terms in which it is conducted: to reconstitute the discussion on the plane of the hermeneutical rather than the apologetic, the anthropological rather than the theological, the broadly humanistic rather than the narrowly doctrinal. Both literature and religion are cultural forms, Gunn reminds us, and each in itself is a “form of cultural studies.”22 In following the broadly humanistic rather than the narrowly doctrinal path—the latter had been the practice of many in the 19

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LONESO M E theological and seminary camp in search of means of supporting a traditional faith commitment by pressing into the service of that faith the otherwise non-committal if “serious” and sympathetic work of novelists and poets past and present—Gunn urged reconsidered respect for what would seem a decisive shift in the historical American “mind” or imagination that occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then, as he puts it, the “Other” projected by the Puritans and their followers shifted away from the Other “revealed in scripture and vouchsafed to the tradition,” to, in subsequent generations, the otherness of “their own innately human (though for some simultaneously divine) capacities to redefine and regenerate themselves in response to their experience” of the order of things they were encountering at first hand. Gunn discerns this as a then recurring pattern that has “worked its way down over the generations into our national consciousness,” and that has been expressed by certain of our classical writers so consistently that it “took on the shape of a fully developed paradigm”.23 This paradigm, Gunn continues, depicts a solitary self “falling, so to speak,

into

[new

and

challenging]

experience

and

there

encountering an ideal ‘Other’ in response to which he must, at the minimum, redefine himself and, at the maximum, virtually recreate himself.” This “Other” of Gunn’s may confront the self “in the form of God, the wilderness, Nature, other selves, history, the city, or the machine,” or, as he quotes R.P. Blackmur, as “the numinous force, the force within the self, other than the self, greater than the self, which, as one cultivates it, moves one beyond the self.” And in this vein, Gunn adduces a supporting comment by Wallace Stevens, revealing, as Gunn puts it, that we “are Emerson’s children still.” Stevens, he recalls, urged production of a literature that provides “the satisfactions and consolations formerly guaranteed by faith, by mediating ‘for us a reality not 20

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Foundations ourselves,’ by revealing something ‘wholly other’ by which the inexpressive loneliness of thinking is broken and enriched.”24 In a time of what Gunn perceives as over-commitment, among scholars in literary and cultural studies, to narrow theoretical positions, he invokes a methodological return to a strategic pragmatism as “a way of doing intellectual work” that supports whatever processes of reflection that will place us in better, meaning more effectual, touch with the rest of our experience.25 Risky as such an approach perhaps could prove to be, were it to encourage a paralyzing relativism, for Gunn it enjoys the advantage of accentuating “the singularity and concreteness—to put it more exactly, the alterity—of facts, details, particulars, individuals, exceptions, mutations, idiosyncrasies, discrepancies, discontinuities.” Such an approach differs from that of the “theorist” pre-disposed to fixed categories and closed systems, a habit naturally ingrained too often in religionists set in motion by a particular, framing theological vision. The value Gunn places upon “alterity” lies at the heart of the uses to which his pragmatism should be put. The theme of “the so-called Other” and of the diverse forms of “its constituted ‘otherness’” is central to what Gunn is recommending. He is the Americanist whose critical writings on our native expressions of “otherness,” appreciated as an indigenous religious-like cultural phenomenon, effectively provoke and can naturally be extended in our treatment here of lonesomeness. Although he is not at all using “religious” language in this summary of his contribution, and though even the “religiouslikeness” of his language can be disputed, we take support from Gunn’s postulating of a paradigmatic American hunger for some “wholly other,” encouraged as he is by Blackmur’s observation quoted above and by Stevens (who, as we shall see in Chapter Four, inspires Robert Bellah, as well). Gunn argues that: 21

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LONESO M E “The Other” is to be understood not simply as the opposite of the self but also as, at the very least, a kind of construct of the self, a construct one might say, of, whatever else it is, the self’s own imagined alterity. At any given historical moment, when such a distinction is in play, this not only makes “The Other” integral to the self’s own constitution—the self knows itself in part only by constructing something “other” over against which to define itself—but confirms the fact that internal to the self is a potentiality for, even a predisposition toward, “otherness” that frequently encourages the self to define itself in opposition to whatever is presumed to exist outside of and over against it.26 In Gunn’s terms, our dilating moment in which loneliness or mere solitariness lifts into the elevating feeling-perception expressed in lonesomeness might well be described as a particularly inspiring intimation of an inviting “otherness,” even an “Otherness,” that bids to draw the self beyond itself, even “over against” the self. And this, as we see it, invites description as a religious moment. In the following two chapters—the first devoted to poetry, the second to fiction—we proceed through primary source surveys of lonesomeness testimony borne by classic American writers. The reader may judge for himself the significance of these passages in which the experience of loneliness as “relational deprivation” is apparently mitigated and perhaps redeemed for imagined American figures standing in for the rest of us increasingly living out our solitary lives in that “lonely crowd.”

22

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2 The P OET I C I M A G I N AT ION of L O N ES O M ENESS It is a lonesome Glee— Yet sanctifies the Mind— With fair association— Afar upon the Wind A Bird to overhear Delight without a Cause— Arrestless as invisible— A matter of the skies. Emily Dickinson (No. 774), c. 18631

Yet O my soul supreme! Knows’t thou the joys of pensive thought? Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart? Joys of the solitary walk, the spirit bow’d yet proud, the suffering and the struggle?

23

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LONESO M E The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings day or night? Walt Whitman, “A Song of Joys”2

I think of the rock singing, and light making its own silence, At the edge of a ripening meadow, in early summer, The moon lolling in the close elm, a shimmer of silver, Or that lonely time before the breaking of morning When the slow freight winds along the edge of the ravaged hillside, And the wind tries the shape of a tree,... Theodore Roethke, “The Rose”3

For nothing quite so much as the qualities of their respective solitudes do we rightly hold up Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as our greatest nineteenth-century poets, our crucial forbears in the American tradition. Nowhere in our poetry before or since them, their lives being roughly parallel, do we meet more appealing “selves” than in their two poetries, as differently as their familiar, idiosyncratic voices do speak to us now from out of the heroic, nation-building past of the nineteenth century. These two “selves” seem reported from an earlier, more innocent time. They seem constructed by passionate, disinterested intellectual and imaginative work, uncorrupted by the pathologies of excessive self-regard with which our writers of a later century have made us all too often aware. The “lonesomeness” in each of their poetries is profound, and in each, albeit in different ways, it expresses experiences and perceptions at the limits of what 24

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness language seems capable of expressing. When we trace American lonesomeness in these and other more recent poets of our tradition, we find this image employed—occasionally substituted by its cousin “loneliness” when that term crosses over, in a particular linguistic context, to evoke the fuller lonesomeness—as another of what T.S. Eliot in “East Coker” calls poetry’s obligatory “raids on the inarticulate.” Following the native cultural imperative to re-invent religion for themselves, our poets, and especially these two from the previous century, have found again and again in lonesomeness a descriptor open-ended, suggestive, and positive enough to use in expressing original, fugitive, “religious” states of feeling-perceiving-knowing that, as we shall be reminded by Rudolf Otto4 in Chapter Four, precede the reflex to understand by interpreting them through traditional symbols and myths. We are exploring that moment represented or expressed in American poetries when perception is altered by a swell of feeling into an extraordinary subjective experience for the description of which “lonely” and, especially, “lonesome” have occasionally seemed appropriate though hardly adequate. Call this a complex feeling state, if we understand by this an experience that may include some manner of knowing and perceiving with feeling in a mixture difficult to disentangle. This feeling state is more apt to be expressed under the term lonesome than under the term lonely, although because of lexical similarity, the lonely is occasionally used to express what lonesome, by virtue of associations gathered from previous uses, seems better equipped to evoke. This is an unbidden, unsought though welcome state of mind and feeling. It would seem to be usually of brief duration, although this is not always clear from the testimony. In older times, such an experience might have been described as a “visitation” by a spirit, or as a privileged state of 25

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LONESO M E response to the world freely given by an intervening power beyond one’s control. And, like those religious experiences across the traditions of coming into and remaining briefly “in the Spirit,” the experience of label-begging, oceanic American lonesomeness is of course significantly if not exclusively programmed by the larger culture, or so and with good reasons the “linguistic turn” of post-modernism would suggest. In many if not all of its defining features, this lonesomeness is distinctive to North America. It is a homegrown product of what Rudolf Otto and others

have

called

“homo

religiosus”

(add

the

qualifier,

“Americanus”) in the non-traditional, secular culture of the Republic. And we are prompted to feel it and to “know” something of the transcendent through feeling it first in our poets, and in particular in the immense influence of Walt Whitman, the first American poet of international stature and the great precursor founding father of the distinctively re-inventive and “kosmic” in American poetry. No other native poet has done more to open up “lonesomeness” for use by Americans to signify a positive, “up-lifting” access of illumination and happiness paradoxically experienced in personal contexts of what Robert Weiss describes as “relational deprivation.” Whitman is our iconic master of loneliness transfigured and redeemed. We will cite several passages from the carefully orchestrated death-bed edition of his completed lifework in life writing, Leaves of Grass (1892), to suggest this is so. One looks for appearances of the word “lonesome,” of course. But Whitman’s is a voice—Theodore Roethke’s is another, if in lower register—which habitually conveys that “something more” than mere self-pitying loneliness. We recognize it in his characteristic, impetuous “dilation” of the spirit, and in the indiscriminately wide embrace of his yearning. His moments of melancholy are lined with glory. His lonesomeness in the sense 26

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness we have been evoking is the steady undersong playing throughout his work as a whole. In the “I am afoot with my vision” section (#33) of “Song of Myself,” we meet, perhaps for the first time in American literature, the image which subsequently became a beloved cliché: the poet traipses in his poetic vision “where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,”5 reminding us that lonesomeness has been adopted famously as a defining attribute of the empty and Romanticized Western landscape. Similarly, we meet the mix of positive with negative in these scene-painting lines from his elegy for General George Custer in “From Far Dakota’s Canons” (1876): Far from Dakota’s canons Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lonesome stretch of silence, Haply to-day a mournful wail, haply a trumpet-note for heroes.6 Among the “Calamus Poems” in “Recorders Ages Hence,” Whitman gives instructions as to how he wishes to be remembered: Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover, The friend the lover’s portrait, of whom his friend his lover was fondest, Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love within him, and freely pour’d it forth, Who often walk’d lonesome walks thinking of his dear friends, his lovers.7 27

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LONESO M E Here the lonesome walks are full of remembering and reflection. The experience is expansive and gratifying, not untouched by the characteristic sense in Whitman of the “oceanic.” For he knows the “joys” of “the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart,” to echo the epigraph at the head of the chapter, and he recommends them to his reader. Nor is he false to the lonely, as I have characterized it, in order to puff the lonesome. The “Joys of the solitary walk” are indeed taken in “the spirit bow’d yet proud, the suffering and the struggle.” The paradox he expresses is truly a paradox. Not for Whitman the avoidance behavior of a Pollyanna. The light is to be discovered in the darkness—he offers a lonesomeness of “the agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings day or night.” A particularly apt passage, from “Proud Music of the Storm”, needs to be cited at length: I Proud music of the storm, Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairie, Strong hum of forest tree-tops—wind of the mountains, Personified dim shapes—you hidden orchestras, You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert, Blending with Nature’s rhythmus all the tongues of nations; You chords left as by vast composers—you choruses, You formless, free, religious dances—you from the Orient, You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts, You sounds from distant guns with galloping cavalry, Echoes of camps with all the different bugle-calls, Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, 28

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness bending over me powerless, Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber, why have you seiz’d me? II Come forward O my soul, and let the rest retire, Listen, lose not, it is toward thee they tend, Parting the midnight, entering my slumber-chamber, For they sing and dance O my soul.8 Storm winds become orchestras and choruses, nature’s “rhythmus” merges with a Pentecostal babble of the world’s languages, accompanying vatic dances blend in this joinery with the thundering cacophony of battlefield and waterfalls. And all of these strains flooding together in irresistible tumult “part the midnight,” break open his solitude and, by engorging his “soul,” create the high, epiphanic lonesome moment. In this 164-line poem his apostrophized soul goes to school to wild hymns, symphonies, operas, and dreams conflated with violent inspirations of wind and spirit to find a “new rhythmus fitted for thee.” The poem throws up a vivid symbolic assertion that his career in poetry proceeds from a solitude enabled by such transfiguration “... into such a lonesomeness to ‘go forth in the bold day and write’ poems that bridge the way from ‘Life to death.’ ” Whitman is our great native voice of yearning, always holding together in unity the yearnings of body and of soul, of intellect and of emotion—the adult ever illumined by the memory of childhood, ever pressing for restored relation to meaningful others and for re-consummated human embrace, never forgetting the deepest truths of the heart. In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” as elsewhere but nowhere more 29

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LONESO M E powerfully expressed in his poetry, the note struck is elegiac and supernal, bittersweet, and triumphant. The poet wanders the beach on Long Island where he played as a child. He connects the voice of his own musing with the calling song of a single mocking-bird, whom he once observed caring for his mate “with bright eyes” crouched in a nest over four light-green eggs spotted with brown. But the female has vanished, leaving the male heartbroken to sing his loss all summer long “in the sound of the sea, and at night under the full of the moon.” The poet calls the bird “brother,” identifying with his perpetual plaintive cry, saying of the bird, “He pour’d forth the meanings which I of all men know.” Here is Whitman “translating the notes”: Low hangs the moon, it rose late, It is lagging—O I think it is heavy with love, with love. O madly the sea pushes upon the land, With love, with love. Whitman displays the gift of the spirit-filled mystic to reconcile opposites, to find serenity in paradox. Typically, in this poem, he describes the ultimate unity of love and death, lifting elegy for lost youth and lost love into a celebration for which the joyous associations of the carol as a special song genre are invoked: Shake out carols! Solitary here, the night’s carols! Carols of lonesome love! death’s carols! Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon! O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea! O reckless despairing carols.

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness But soft! sink low! Soft: let me just murmur, And do you wait a moment you husky-nois’d sea, For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me, So faint, I must be still, be still to listen, ... He addresses the bird finally: O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you.9 The poet listening as he sings is never more illuminated and strangely happy than at this moment, the human spirit in him filling with a blissful calm. And so he concludes, “O if I am to have so much, let me have more!” Whitman’s lonesome, achieved by strenuous emotional work, makes a powerful, influential image. Christopher Ricks, in “Loneliness and Poetry,” as discussed in the previous chapter, dismisses the self-indulgent mawkishness of the feelings that for him the word “lonesomeness” describes. As formed by the culture of a native-born Englishman, he is hardly concerned to explore what Americans feel in this moment of spiritual fullness born of loneliness, as represented in our poets writing an English shaped by another cultural tradition. Indeed, when he reports his findings upon examining the dictionary definitions of “loneliness” and kindred terms that the language has thrown up in the past, he studiously avoids mention of “lonesome.” But when he finds, as anyone must, that the dictionary definitions are “often immediately inadequate,”10 he is

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LONESO M E effectively suggesting that the subject is ripe for further inquiry, as so it surely is. It would be useful here, in further pursuit of this inquiry, to clarify by re-thinking the relation of lonesome to lonely, as found in Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and their inheritors who give voice to the American lonesomeness in this century. In a word, the feeling state itself must be our primary concern while the choice of term to describe or to evoke it remains secondary. “Lonesome” is our term of choice, for reasons laid out in the first chapter. But “lonely,” as well, when employed by some poets in some passages similarly, it would seem, expresses the redemptive sensation of fullness for which “lonesome,” as I am suggesting, seems the more appropriate word, for American writers and readers. This is the case, and dictionary discriminations as well as definitions prove “immediately inadequate,” because we, the users of the language, have not yet clarified the distinction in consensus usage. And this is the case, doubtless, because the forces of “secularization” and of re-invention and bricolage in the spiritual life of individual Americans (as described by the sociologists) have produced a kind of frontier arena of emotionalspiritual life in which language (and concept) is perpetually catching

up,

but

is

never

adequately

caught

up

with

experimental, subjective reality itself. It is no surprise, under these conditions of fluidity, to find “lonely” where I am suggesting “lonesome” is the more appropriate descriptor of a somewhat amorphous feeling state, perpetually provoking expression in individualistic poetic language differing from individual to individual. If Whitman is a master of yearning, affective lonesomeness, Dickinson is a specialist expert in metaphysical lonesomeness. With refreshing intellectual severity and cryptic precision, refusing false comfort of any sort, she explores both the idea of 32

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness the unknowable transcendent and how reflection on the idea feels. A number of passages in her poetry illustrate capture of the privileged lonesome moment, and in that characteristic idiom whose delicacy serves not so much to dispel as to increase appreciation of the mystery for which religious myth proves an inadequate container or vehicle. When Dickinson observes, There is another Loneliness That many die without— Not want of friend occasions it Or circumstance of Lot But nature, sometimes, sometimes thought, And whoso it befall Is richer than could be revealed By mortal numeral— (#1116, c. 1868) she is evoking the epiphanic lonesome to be discovered or given through the lonely, or so it would see. Her “another loneliness” here is not a “deprivation of relation” to another human being, for no “want of friend occasions it,” but rather a richness of feeling and perception akin to Otto’s encounter with “the Wholly Other,” as we shall see. That which is “revealed” would be more than merely a feeling as we ordinarily define that word, for “thought” as well as “nature” is credited with “occasioning” it. And the description of this special other kind of loneliness, which, as she observes, many never feel—she does not tell us why not—inevitably proves impossible in human language. Dickinson’s depressive loneliness can be devastating, as reflected in “The Loneliness One dare not sound” (#777, c. 1863), where the state is imaged as “The Horror not to be surveyed—/ But skirted in the dark.” But the Dark Night moment only serves 33

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LONESO M E to validate the probing, courageous voyage of discovery she makes within and through the perils of this “dark.” If at moments in loneliness to be “skirted” she might propose avoiding

a

confrontation

with

it

(“With

Consciousness

suspended—/And Being under Lock—”), at another moment she might choose to open herself to it: I tried to think a lonelier Thing Than any I had seen— Some Polar Expiation— An Omen in the Bone Of Death’s tremendous nearness— I probed Retrieveless things My Duplicate—to borrow— A Haggard Comfort springs From the belief that Somewhere— Within the Clutch of Thought— There dwells one other Creature Of Heavenly Love—forgot— I plucked at our Partition As One should pry the Walls— Between Himself—and Horror’s Twin— Within opposing Cells— I almost strove to clasp his Hand, Such Luxury—it grew— That as Myself—could pity Him— Perhaps he—pitied me— (#532, c. 1862)

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness What is to be prized or recovered out of the “Clutch of Thought” which imprisons even as it structures inquiry? Dickinson may not have known Kantian philosophy, but she appears to know and to feel in this poem the Kantian categories as the irremovable obstacle (“our partition”) on the path of her quest for apprehension of the ultimate source of her loneliness and, simultaneously, its relief. The poem is theological in that she reflects on the question of a transcendent God figured in the tradition as incarnate in Christ (“Creature/Of Heavenly Love”) and on the notion of her creation in the image of that God. But utterance ends in defeat and pity—she cannot break free of the clutch of thought within mortal conditions of space, time, and causality. Here and as in what she calls elsewhere (in the later poem, “There is a solitude of space,” #1695) her “polar privacy,” two irreducible terms are forever joined, forever modified, and muddied the one by the other: “Finite infinity.” Nor is it possible to pretend that she can. And yet, on her way to defeat and pity, in the ordering of this utterance, she passes through a moment of metaphysical loneliness nearly overcome: “I almost strove to clasp his Hand.” She finds “Luxury” in this moment, and furthermore “it grew”—a moment of fleeting plenitude certainly sensed if not fully grasped. If this poem uses language echoing that of religious myth which Dickinson intentionally rejected when she refused cooption by evangelical revivalism as a girl, this one uses her more characteristic, more elusive, gnomic language: The lonesome for they know not What— The Eastern Exiles—be— Who strayed beyond the Amber line Some madder Holiday—

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LONESO M E And ever since—the purple Moat They strive to climb—in vain— As Birds—that tumble from the clouds Do fumble at the storm— The Blessed Ether—taught them— Some Transatlantic Morn— When Heaven—was too common—to miss— Too sure—to dote upon! Putting aside the question of the source of this puzzling imagery, here we come as close as perhaps we will come to a tag motto for anti-traditional

and

experimental

Americans

fixed

in

the

ambiguities of spiritual freedom and “secularized” culture: “lonesome for they know not What.” The poet may be referring here to flowers in her garden reaching for the sun, comparing the force propelling plant growth (or the movement of the stars) with that which sends birds climbing the sky, even if, inevitably, they tire and “tumble from the clouds.” In these cases, aspiration struggles for the unattainable, and struggles on. This is symbolic language for a spiritual, if not to say a metaphysical, struggle, compelled by force beyond one’s control, doomed to frustration. “Lonesome” here describes the religious yearning for belief in a transcendent reality, a yearning not capable of being fulfilled for more than a tantalizing, fleeting moment, but at least for that. The poem ends, however, without striking a skeptical note. The actual lonesomeness described belongs to flowers or stars, after all, not to self-conscious human beings. The language of the third and final stanza is positive. The returning morning sun, rising from across the Atlantic in the east, “taught them” to “dote upon” the “Heaven” too obvious, “too sure,” “too miss”— reminiscent of Thoreau’s buoyant ave atque vale at the close of 36

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness Walden (1854), “The sun is but a morning star” to steer by. Though the symbolic “Eastern Exiles” climb “in vain” ultimately, and though birds “Do fumble at the strain,” this poem, in its confident sense of connection to a “Blessed Ether” beyond the common “Heaven,” embodies the American lonesome capacity to be momentarily transfigured. It suggests Otto’s “numinous” experience of the unnameable but (given the constructive function of religious myth) always to-be-named “Wholly Other.” Dickinson’s utterance here makes the lonesome a positive feeling state. We would read the poem wrongly if we took lonesome automatically to mean the depressive state of loneliness. The poem tells us rather that hers is an aspiring not a depressive lonesome fixed upon the Blessed Ether beyond the Heaven “too common” and “too sure.” For good reason we have placed “It is a lonesome Glee” (#774, c. 1863) at the head of the chapter as an epigraph. This is a sister poem to “The lonesome for they know not What,” and, if anything, presents still more positive a feeling state signaled by lonesome, suggesting that it has a religious character and that the poet has a religious purpose, non-traditional and paradoxically inclusive of devastating skepticism as that character and her purpose may be: It is a lonesome Glee— Yet sanctifies the Mind— With fair association Afar upon the Wind A Bird to overhear Delight without a Cause— Arrestless is invisible— A matter of the skies. 37

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LONESO M E In nature an individual consciousness can be lifted and filled with “sanctifying,” “lonesome Glee.” Again, here “Glee” defines lonesome, not depressive loneliness, as similarly lonesome defines her “glee.” Dickinson is a poet of changing moods and intellectual complexity. The glee in her lonesome fades in and out. In #947 (1864) she asks rhetorically—here it fades: Of Tolling Bell I ask the cause? “A Soul has gone to Heaven” I’m answered in a lonesome tone— Is Heaven then a Prison? Eden as well as heaven is associated a more melancholy, a lonely lonesome, as in #413 (1862): Because its Sunday—all the time— And Recess—never comes— And Eden’ll be so lonesome Bright Wednesday afternoons— Religious belief itself is correlated with lonesome in the late “The Bible is an antique volume” (#1545, c. 1882): Boys that “believe” are very lonesome— Other Boys are “lost”— Had but the Tale a warbling Teller— All the Boys would come— Orpheus’ Sermon captivated— It did not condemn— Here, casting a dubious eye upon the evangelical revivalist either/or of co-opted belief or self-”damnation” by refusal of that 38

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness co-option,

the

poet

acknowledges,

we

gather,

that

such

“believers,” although comforted and even gladdened by their belief, must in the marketplace of testable ideas feel an isolated loneliness for the cost they have paid in what she regards as intellectual dishonesty. The biblical myth does not sufficiently enchant or convince. But the mood in Dickinson swings again. When not venting displeasure with what must have seemed the fraudulence of evangelical appeals and the indignity of the emotional pressure exerted by evangelists, she was capable of evoking the unknowable and unnameable in a figure simple and powerful, charged with Otto’s sense of the “mysterium tremendum:” Gathered into the Earth, And out of story— Gathered to that strange Fame— That lonesome Glory That hath no omen here—but Awe— (#1370, 1876) If these passages are not familiar, this last poem, much anthologized, certainly is. And its supernal concluding stanza is lonesomeness itself—in hindsight, it looks forward to the idiom of the painter Edward Hopper, visited in Chapter Five: There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter afternoons— That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes— Heavenly Hurt, it gives us— We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the meanings, are— 39

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LONESO M E None may teach it—Any— ‘Tis the Seal Despair— An imperial affliction Sent of the Air— When it comes, the Landscape listens— Shadows—hold their breath— When it goes ‘tis like the Distance On the look of Death— (#258, 1861) The utterance concludes in the exquisite poise of that long-kept, silent regard in held breath, as though to hold and to hold more truly that crystallizing moment in which the reflective listening of the speaker is greeted by the projected listening of the landscape under a thinning slant of winter light and lengthening shadow. The light goes. The dark suggests death. But the poise includes the moment of haunting light given way to the dark. This is the characteristic

Dickinson

lonesome:

tough-minded,

austerely

evanescent, uncomforted, braced by an irresistible chill. Among the inheritors of Whitman’s and Dickinson’s lonesome, we would include especially Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, A.R. Ammons, and James Wright—to offer illustration from the twentieth century. The sense of the lonesome varies among them, however, as of course we would expect; for these are distinctive, individual voices. We will consider examples from the work of each to round out the chapter. The deceptively simple Frost, whose air of the homespun philosopher (whose philosophy is not to be taken so seriously as such) and of the amiable naturalist has made him a set text for schoolchildren, earned his popularity through a prolonged struggle with himself and the language. Never a poet of romance or of “spilt religion,” more like his fellow New Englander 40

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness Dickinson (and, before her, Emerson and Thoreau), he reads his natural surrounding as a landscape of signs and signals communicating practical home truths. One apt illustration will suffice here: “Desert Places,” from the 1930s, in which the lonely is pushed inexorably into a lonesomeness paradoxically as vast and majestic as it is matter-of-fact and close to the bone. Not to read into it a religious-like feeling where there is none, but the poet’s refusal to “scare” in response to the lonely white-out snowfall in the surrounding woods does make an assertion of spirit, against his “absent-spiritedness,” in a reflective moment of reclaimed self-possession. He adds courage to the American lonesome when, foreseeing still “blanker whiteness” of more “benighted snow,” symbolic of death and oblivion, he asserts that the mastered fear of his own interior “desert places” shores him against the greater fear of extinction in the ultimate white-out: Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last. The woods around it have it—it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; The loneliness includes me unawares. And lonely as it is that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less— A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express. They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars—on stars where no human race is. 41

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LONESO M E I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.11 And then there is Wallace Stevens, lonelier in his career solitude and legendary self-reserve than we can imagine any other American poet. But in his life-long exploration of the capacities and reserves of the unfettered imagination he pursues a project that cannot be belittled as mere estheticism. The woman in the well-known “Sunday Morning” knows that we live in “island solitude,

unsponsored,

free”—free

of,

that

is,

but

also

uncomforted by, traditional religious myth. Her material life is comfortable; the natural world in its physical beauty gives her joy. And yet: She says, “But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.” As she “dreams a little” during the course of the poem’s exposition, she thinks, “Divinity must live within herself.” Her solitary meditation culminates in an affirmation of an “as if” which will suffice—an imagined “boisterous devotion to the sun, /Not as a god, but as a god might be”—to replace the discredited religious myth. And the famous concluding lines of pure lyric, beginning “Deer walk upon our mountains ...,” redeem the loneliness of her spiritual “island solitude” in a hymn to natural beauty. The feeling conveyed is that of the transfiguring American lonesomeness. In that same early collection, Harmonium (1923),12 Stevens included the shorter “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” which also, if in briefer compass and in the high-flown, imaginative idiom of the poet, offers another representation of such a numinous moment: 42

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself. What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there? Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea. I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.13 In “the loneliest air” the speaker comes into the fullest, oceanic possession of himself, through the experienced power of imagination, and in a high modernist moment of self-recapture or self-reinvention. The skeptical poet claims that this experience came “but from myself,” in other words, not from any guessable transcendent power. But to find himself therein “more truly and more strange” is to echo that “Awe” of Dickinson’s and to suggest at least a religious-like state of mind. In this effusive evocation of a passing state of illumination, the boundary between consciousness and the outer world collapses. The speaker merges with the world and, reciprocally, the world (“the compass of the sea”) becomes his projection. “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” looks forward to the later “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” which for flooding fullness of spirit expressed through beauty of phrasing cannot be matched in his work. Other readers may with justification find other elements and themes in 43

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LONESO M E these two poems. But, for us, these are both impressive renderings of precisely the moment in the American lonesome we are purposing to establish: the numinous sensation of unnameable, unknowable Otherness combining feeling and perception in a “religious” state of mind. The concluding nine lines of “Final Soliloquy” (1950) deserve quoting: Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. Within its vital boundary, in the mind. We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.14 Whether alone or in the company of others, the speaker speaks not to any others but in “soliloquy” to himself. The “we” who overhear him are a non-functional collective: all of us as individuals in our essential solitude. The brotherhood/sisterhood of “being there together” in the last line is an existentialist description of our common condition, in the last analysis, as solitaries. But the sharing of the common condition is indeed a bond, as is the hoped-for shared belief that “The world imagined is the ultimate good.” This is a high modernist version of the numinous, redeeming lonesome. Theodore Roethke does not use the word “lonesome.” But he characteristically pushes his self-hugging songs of quest for stability and place in the world from the lonely into the realm of the lonesome. His Romantic lonely reads like lonesome—this is a 44

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness property of his voice. With “I was that lonely” he concludes “The Geranium.”15 In another lyric in the late collection, The Far Field (1964), “The Tree, the Bird,” he tells us: The willow with its bird grew loud, grew louder still. I could not bear its song, that altering With every shift of air, those beating wings, The lonely buzz behind my midnight eyes;— How deep the mother-root of that still cry!16 The

poem

proceeds

from

this

moment

of

Whitman-like

identification with a bird’s unbearably melancholy song to, at the very end, the speaker’s elicited sense of a “last pure stretch of joy, /The dire dimension of a final thing.” “Dire,” balancing “joy,” keeps the poise of which Roethke at his best is capable, and, in the process, stamps out another instance of the American lonesome. Much of Roethke touches on this sort of moment: visitations by beauty too beautiful to bear in what appears a lifelong quest for validating exaltations of the spirit. “I love the world; I want more than the world,” he pleads in the poem, “The Exulting,” from Words for the Wind (1958).17 The language of his poetry follows this lead. The moment of rapture in solitude (lonesomeness in loneliness) comes in the passage from “The Rose,” used as an epigraph for the chapter: I think of the rock singing, and light making its own silence, At the edge of a ripening meadow, in early summer, The moon lolling in the close elm, a shimmer of silver, Or that lonely time before the breaking of morning When the slow freight winds along the edge of the ravaged hillside, And the wind tries the shape of a tree. 45

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LONESO M E We meet it again in the love poem, “She,” from the same collection: I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? My lady laughs, delighting in what is. If she but sighs, a bird puts out its tongue. She makes a space lonely with a lovely song. She lilts a low soft language, and I hear Down long sea-chambers of the inner ear.18 “Lonely” is not a misprint in the key and most poetic line of this passage: “She makes a space lonely with a lovely song.” Precisely. And we may co-opt this lonely to the lonesome. We may find in this image, in the lonely-making beauty of a “lovely” song, an echo of the beauty almost too painfully beautiful to bear of “The Tree, the Bird.” Roethke’s lonely—one and the same with our lonesome—is a transfiguring state. The 1981 collection A Coast of Trees, by A.R. Ammons, includes the powerful, often-anthologized “Easter Morning.” If American poetry has evolved a sub-genre of Sunday-morningalternative-to-churchgoing lyrics (in the mode of Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”), this is surely one of the finest. The poem begins in loneliness as a personal given, a fatality, a condition thrust upon the speaker from his youth: I have a life that did not become that turned aside and stopped, astonished: I hold it in me like a pregnancy or as on my lap a child not to grow or grow old but to dwell on.

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness The speaker has returned to his childhood home and to the cemetery of “my home country” in order to call up in memory a circle of older family members, teachers, and others “all in the graveyard/assembled, done for, the world they/used to wield, have trouble and joy/in gone.” Standing in the cemetery, the speaker realizes that the child stunted in him (“the child in me that could not become”) remains with him, demanding attention. This child almost materializes beside him “crying out for help,” unheeded by the adults, in pain seemingly that cannot be relieved. But is the child himself as a child? As a child, the speaker suffered the loss of a brother in a “mishap” on a road nearby. Now: I stand on the stump of a child, whether myself or my little brother who died, and yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for for me it is the dearest and the worst, it is a life nearest to life which is life lost. Memory crushes him, intensifying what he feels: deserted and bereft, alone and thwarted by a hopeless life pattern of “incompletions.” But then he chances to look up. The beauty of the natural world impinges upon his consciousness. A vision of “two great birds,/...oaring/the great wings steadily” overhead flying north lifts his spirit. How the two birds then behave in flight becomes a hieroglyph to be read for solace and instruction. The speaker invests them with transcendental significance. He reads their movements as a sign of a redeeming orderliness suffused through the brokenness of a life experience such as his own: 47

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LONESO M E ... then one bird the one behind, veered a little to the left and the other bird kept on seeming not to notice for a minute: the first began to circle as if looking for something, coasting, resting its wings on the down side of some of the circles: the other bird came back and they both circled, looking perhaps for a draft; they turned a few more times, possibly rising—at least, clearly resting— then flew on falling into distance till they broke across the local bush and trees: it was a sight of bountiful majesty and integrity: the having patterns and routes, breaking from them to explore other patterns or better ways to routes, and then the return: a dance sacred as the sap in the trees, permanent in its descriptions as the ripples round the brook’s ripplestone: fresh as this particular flood of burn breaking across us now from the sun.19 This is a moment of transfigured lonesomeness. One more illustration of the movement from lonely to lonesome will suffice. Ammons grew up in the South. In the same generation, James Wright grew up in the Midwest, and then wrote his poetry out of an abiding sense of that region as his place of origin and destiny. His work is often depressive, darkened by identification with failure, set in a regional 48

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The Poetic Imagination of Lonesomeness landscape haunted by the tragic. In this poetry come moments when Wright lifts out of a flattened loneliness into a richer gift of lonesomeness. Occasionally, in a fleeting magic moment, his otherwise saddened lives of his speakers would get lucky, and it would tend to happen in the presence of animals. Here, in the poem titled “A Blessing,” he walks into a field to observe more closely two ponies. “There is no loneliness like theirs,” he writes, and then: I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realise That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.20 Poetry is of course a privileged use of language. In the alchemy of words, poets keep the language up. They expand the inherited capacity of language to clarify experience through suggestiveness by re-making language creatively in the crucible of imagination— by making it new, the watchword of the Modernists early in the twentieth century. The poets I have cited have contributed memorably to the shaping of American English, a variant English tongue evolved in North America to record and transmit the experience of, at first, primarily the European American response to the social conditions and the natural landscapes of the new nation. Closely to examine the poetry I have exhibited is to discern a native imagination at work probing for always a personal means in language of expressing authentic, adventuring, 49

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LONESO M E non-traditional, religious-like life of the spirit. Other readers of this body of poetry will inevitably read it in other, perhaps complementary ways. To propose that these examples record an ongoing, evolving attempt to give expression to a numinous American lonesomeness of the kind we are exploring here is to bid for but one possible way of reading these poets among many possible other ways. But the native lonesome is not merely a matter for poets. The testimony of other genres and other arts can be invoked to strengthen the argument for this approach. This strain of religious-like lonesomeness in American emotional and spiritual life, difficult as it may be adequately to capture conceptually, is corroborated in our painting, our popular country music, and, as we shall see in the following chapter, in our tradition of fiction.

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3 L O N ES O M ENESS in F I C T I ON and N O N -F I C T ION ...then for about an hour there wouldn’t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see—just solid lonesomeness. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1885)1

The silence is almost terrifying. One conceals oneself standing silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a reflective tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes. Sherwood Anderson, “Sophistication” (1922)2

The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past

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LONESO M E childhood or past manhood and all the living and dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958)3

Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the center of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)4

Every now and then a writer with a point to make, wanting to open a vista upon American writing as a tradition, refers us to Ernest Hemingway in The Green Hills of Africa (1936). Much in that account of hunting big game in East Africa has been deservedly forgotten. But the author’s opinionated evaluations of classic American prose writers, elicited in the dialog written in the first chapter, teasing and summary as these opinions are, have understandably attracted responding critical attention over the years. Hemingway’s famous affirmative observation in this passage from The Green Hills of Africa, dicker with it as we may, rings as true today in the vale of literary post-modernism as it did almost seventy years ago: All modern America literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn....it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from 52

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.5 However one evaluates Hemingway’s throw-away appraisals of individual writers and what one can infer from his cryptic assertions about the strength of American writing generally, however much that passage begs explanation, and it does, this singling

out

of

Twain’s

masterpiece

has

instant

appeal.

Hemingway’s instinct here is true, it is just. Huckleberry Finn is a miraculous work. And it contains, at the close of one of its classic descriptive passages, the most memorable use of the word lonesome to evoke a transfiguring, dilated state of mind in all of American literature. The seed that grew into the idea inspiring this essay was planted in the delight of re-reading that passage, in Chapter Nineteen, when the boy Huck tells us in plain-spoken, clairvoyant language how morning dawns on the Mississippi. Huck and the runaway slave Jim steer their raft down the current at night in order to minimize contact with people on other river craft who might threaten Jim’s bid for freedom. Huck relishes participation in this fugitive flight to achieve his own high-spirited dream of freedom. They run at night. They tie up and rest during the day. In this evocative passage they hide the raft by the bank before dawn. They throw in their fishing lines and swim together. And then ... A little smoke wouldn’t be noticed now, so we would take some fish off the lines and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep. Wake up by and by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat coughing along up-stream, so far off towards the 53

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LONESO M E other side you couldn’t tell nothing about her only whether she was a stern-wheel or a side wheel; and then for about an hour there wouldn’t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see—just solid lonesomeness. Of course, when we meet Huck on the first page of the first chapter, he describes himself in his orphan plight under the regimen of Aunt Polly’s attempts to “sivilize” him as “so lonesome I could die.” Huck’s initial lonesomeness is indubitably a depressive loneliness. Not only is he “relationally deprived” (of parents and friends), his supremely independent spirit is crushed by what he regards as his aunt’s overly severe program of domestication. The raft trip on the river liberates his rebellious spirit, infusing his narrative subsequently with the sense of personal expansion and of entitlement to infinite possibilities of self-realization. His is the symbolic voyage upon the open frontier which, in nostalgia, we associate with the original, archetypal American experience. The magic quality of the passage in Chapter Nineteen consists in its vivid description, especially in the watching and listening of that earlier lonesomeness now redeemed (ratcheted up into an affirmation), and in the sharing of the experience by the two otherwise unlikely companions in escape down the wide thoroughfare of the symbolic river. It is all the more magical read against the sweep of the narrative context surrounding it, in which the two fugitives come through fog and other dangers, through mishaps, trickery, and loss of innocence to the achievement, in Huck, of the moral vision permitting him, famously, to decide he cannot betray Jim, even if it means “going to hell” for it. The “solid lonesomeness” of Huck’s (of Twain’s) expresses a perception and a feeling, culturally constructed in its general form perhaps, but pressed further in substance, by inter-textual 54

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction echoing linked to Whitman’s “dilations” of the self, in one perfect instance capturing the youthfulness of the national psyche mediated in the hopeful American myth of the New Adam in the New Eden. Is this to claim too much? Huck’s lonesomeness here, as morning comes, touches the spiritual dimension of the self in a feeling of rapt attunement to no particular thing and to no particular transcendent being or order of things, but simply to the fullness and splendor of the creation before his eyes. The feeling or perception—it is both, of course—is of unobstructed integration into that plenitude of being. This is the open-endedness of the American lonesome, taking the particular form of the individual’s own responding subjectivity at a “peak” moment. It is composed here of becalmed watching and the kind of reflective “listening” we meet in Emily Dickinson. It reflects the nineteenthcentury romantic belief that nature gives moral and spiritual nourishment, and will guide all who open themselves to its counsel toward self-realization as individuals in search of their unique but not-immediately-evident identities. Experiences of this culture-abetted, induced rapt lonesomeness, I suggest, are to be expected in native fictional accounts of lonely, reflective solitude—allowing, of course, for individualized variant forms. And, because of the American cultural inheritance of romanticizing of nature, such experiences are all the more to be expected in settings of affecting natural beauty and tranquillity. But, as we have seen, Huck’s great lonesome moment occurs not in solitude but in the company of Jim. Here it has a social component. The inviting landscape and the described moment of response to it contribute to the amazing grace of the partnership. Spontaneously Huck employs the pronoun “we.” Before turning to other, similar but characteristically private moments of transcending lonesomeness in American fictions, we 55

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LONESO M E should glance respectfully, in passing, at accounts in well-known non-fiction writings of those who more intentionally open themselves to illumination, of whatever sort, by going into “the wild” to record heightenings of their experience. The writings of contemporary naturalists or solitude-in-nature specialists such as Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, or Gretel Erlich6 have touched numerous readers and are justly praised. But, to the extent that their reflections upon the natural world proceed programatically, as it were in conscientious dedication to the extraction of wisdom from the observation of natural processes and environments, we observe the intentionality in these writers inevitably marginalizes the unbidden emotional-spiritual response to be found in the lonesomeness we are exploring. At the very real risk of being unfair, and begging the indulgence of the reader—the feeling state we are tracing is indeed unbounded and irrepressible—we leave these essayists aside for treatment on another occasion. For we judge that in their nature-focused investigative projects they leave little room for the unpredictable, spontaneous eruption of the genuinely numinous experience of the lonesomeness that rises in individuals in other settings, as well as in dedicated communion with nature. By contrast, the art of fiction offers scope and creative means more conducive to accounts of the serendipity of the real thing. Our lonesomeness cannot be forced. Nor can it be summoned credibly or easily by the descriptivespeculative discourse of the essayist meditating upon nature, as, for instance, in “Transcendentalists” Emerson and Thoreau. We touch upon Emerson in Chapter Four, but only to note one particular personal experience, an experience by which he was surprised and which he evokes through striking metaphor. For our purposes, the rich American literary tradition of nature writing, memorably initiated as it was by Thoreau especially, is not to be confused, we argue, with the sub-stream of 56

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction lonesome writing in prose fiction that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. The contrast to be drawn between the two kinds of writing is instructive, and we can draw it by glancing at the case of Thoreau. To look for the American lonesome as we are characterizing it in Thoreau’s much admired writings on nature is to be disappointed, perhaps surprisingly so. If this seems unfair or even perverse, consider that on every page Thoreau presents himself only as a reflecting intellect, never as a feeling, sentient being. He does not submit his whole self, as we view it, to his project or to nature itself. On every page he is to be found shaping and controlling a solely intellectual response to his woods, pond, and river. Ours may indeed prove a controversial, unnecessarily dismissive reading. But look in Walden and, more precisely, in the chapter “Solitude” to see what he is up to. There he writes: I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life.7 That one hour is counted a lapse in self-possession. It was a lonely hour to be sure, and untouched by any supervening gift of the elevating lonesome. As he tells it, the sound of the rain falling in the woods rescues him from the grip of this fleeting oppressive mood. He adds that he was able to sense in the experience of this demoralizing loneliness that it contained “insanity.” He claims that he never felt it again. Neither immersion in nature nor the opportunity of solitude guarantee the numinous encounter of loneliness transfigured, as the testimony of the well-defended Thoreau indicates. But we do take to heart what would doubtless 57

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LONESO M E be his reply to those who might suppose that loneliness must have more often than this oppressed him in the woods alone. We imagine him replying that it is not physical closeness that brings men together, but rather an intellectualized human sympathy generally, and, in his case as a natural solitary, from afar perhaps more effectively than in close company. Not all personalities are formed as Thoreau’s to undertake with ease the solitary work that made him a classic American writer, philosopher-naturalist, and hermit. “We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers,” he writes in the “Solitude” chapter, perhaps telling us more about his own psyche than about the human condition. The man was not as susceptible or as open to the lonely or the lonesome as are others. Nor did he wish to be, fearing the “insanity” in it. To stave off the horrors of his “lonesomeness,” as a good New Englander, he kept himself busy. Like the farmer all day hoeing or chopping, Thoreau kept himself “employed” lest he “feel lonesome.” As result, his language, evoking the transcendent when opportunity arises to do so, is always intellectualized and, yes, by contrast, self-disciplined, unbuoyed by emotion. Nor do we meet the American lonesome in those occasional moments in Henry James when he or one of his characters struggles within heightened consciousness to apprehend more and more refined configurations beyond the manifold of immediate perception. This may be for some perhaps too nice a distinction—readers may wish to disagree—but in James, as in Fitzgerald on the famous last page of The Great Gatsby (1925), I judge that we meet expressions of “wonder” or wondering which fall short of lonesomeness by expressing more a feeling of wanting, perhaps of wanting dearly, but of not having. The element of transfiguring is absent. The depressive feeling state 58

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction triumphs eloquently—it is not to be relieved in these two writers. Neither James nor Fitzgerald provide us in their fictions with “variant” instances of loneliness momentarily rising into savory lonesomeness. To address the classic example, we turn to that well-known passage of forgiven over-writing in our literature, the final page of The Great Gatsby. Nick Caraway, revisiting Gatsby’s mansion alone at night, “brooding on the old unknown world,” feeling out of place, about to return to the safe Midwest, reflects in solitude. He meditates on the “fresh, green breast of the new world,” imagined in the dream projections of earlier “Dutch sailors’ eyes,” and on “Gatsby’s wonder” when he picked out the light on Daisy’s dock across the Sound. Fitzgerald constructs in this passage a romantic American wonder in which we want to believe, as this wonder panders to our collective embrace of the national mythos.8 The wonder so evoked is a wanting without a having, a “wondering” permeated in the narrator Nick by disillusionment, his innocent youthful desire dissatisfied and defeated by the story he has told to its bitter end. In another chapter we address the lonesome expressed in the country music tradition in which it has long been a staple of archetypal cowboy solitude in the mythic, as in the actual experience of the empty spaces of the American West. Here, in anticipation of that chapter, I would note a resonant lonesome moment scene to be found in a novel rightly assigned to the category of children’s literature but with a long history of popularity, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (1935). In the chapter “Texas Longhorns,” we meet description of a traildrive encampment near the family’s newly built house on the high plains. This passage points us directly to the legendary theme of lonesomeness in the myth of the West. Toward evening the travelling cowboys settle the herds for the night, and then: 59

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LONESO M E The mournful lowing sounded over the prairie till the night was dark. Then the cattle were quieter and the cowboys began to sing. Their songs were not like lullabies. They were high, lonely, wailing songs, almost like the howling of wolves. Laura lay awake, listening to the lonely songs wandering in the night. Farther away, real wolves howled. Sometimes the cattle lowed. But the cowboys’ songs went on, rising and falling and wailing away under the moon. When everyone else was asleep, Laura stole softly to the window, and she saw three fires gleaming like red eyes from the dark edge of the land. Overhead the sky was big and still and full of moonlight. The lonely songs seemed to be crying for the moon. They made Laura’s throat ache.9 We will return in Chapter Six to consideration of the “country” tradition that grew partly out of such songs. But here, in the aching beauty of these songs heard as though “crying to the moon” is a salient instance of the moment when lonesomeness or maybe something deeper within lonesomeness breaks through the manifold of experience in consciousness, eliciting an emotion difficult to characterize: it “made Laura’s throat ache.” The esthetic, the emotional, and, I would argue, the inchoate spiritual combine suggestively in the response described by Wilder. A wide-ranging reader of American fiction might question the aptness of this and other examples I offer, and urge better ones. But the concept of lonesomeness at the heart of this essay does not admit of such strict definition that the range of possible examples will be fixed and clear-cut. The same is to be observed, of course, of the variety of experiences that Rudolf Otto collects under the rubric of the “numinous.” Our aim is modest: We are suggesting a 60

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction possible way of understanding under one interpretive rubric similar, imagined perceptual-feeling states evoked in fictions quite differently expressive of the American experience itself, varied as it is over time and across regional communities. These are moments of evoked feeling for which the language of prose tends to give way to the heightened, more suggestive language of poetry. There are and will be other ways to appreciate and to grasp the sense of these moments. Far from superimposing a rigid pattern upon these selected instances, we are suggesting that we gain insight into the American experience by considering the degree to which in their diversity they bear a family resemblance as embodiments of the religious-like native lonesome. Sherwood Anderson, a classic of the canon, gives memorable voice to the American lonesome. The survey of American literature syllabus still includes Anderson’s vivid fictional portraits of inhabitants of small-town America of a century ago, before the migrations from without and from within the country launched the slow, steady process by which the metropolitan areas mushroomed, changing us demographically to a nation of urban and suburban dwellers. His influence on other writers was immense. He deserves notice here as a great and representative fiction-writer poet of the superseded small-town lonesome, other illustrations of which could be drawn from the work of Theodore Dreiser, Hamlin Garland, Zona Gale, and the portrait-poet, Edgar Lee Masters. Loneliness in the unredeemed, untransfigured sense of the word was Anderson’s stock in trade. Many high-school and college graduates with an American Literature survey on their transcripts remember the sympathetic portrayal of the forlorn Wing Biddlebaum, the chronic loner-victim at the center of the story “Hands” in the collection Winesburg, Ohio (1922). The sadness in the mood hovering in that first story carries over to 61

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LONESO M E the other stories in the collection, as Anderson examines in a melancholy light the small tragedies and the small acts of defiance and self-assertion in people repeatedly thwarted by isolated, small-town claustrophobia. But against this background of cultural loneliness elevated to the universal, occasionally moments of the oceanic lonesomeness erupt. At the close of “Hands,” for instance, as though peering through a window from the dark outside his house, the reader glimpses a luminous snapshot image of Wing Biddlebaum, in which the religious symbolism is explicit: A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of a devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary.10 In the story “An Awakening,” Anderson’s young alter-ego figure, the bookish newspaperman George Willard, on a January night, on an impulse turns from the dimly lighted street into a dark alleyway where the smells of animals, barking dogs, crying children, smoke from chimneys, and glimpses of ordinary family life proceeding inside the kerosene-lighted windows engulf him in a pungency thick, rife, illuminating: George went out into a vacant lot and throwing back his head looked up at the sky. He felt unutterably big 62

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction and remade by the simple experience through which he had been passing and in a kind of fervor of emotion put up his hands, thrusting them into the darkness above his head and muttering words. The desire to say words overcame him and he said words without meaning, rolling them over on his tongue and saying them because they were brave words, full of meaning. “Death,” he muttered, “night, the sea, fear, loveliness.” George Willard came out of the vacant lot and stood again on the sidewalk facing the houses. He felt that all of the people in the little street must be brothers and sisters to him and he wished he had the courage to call them out of their houses and to shake their hands.11 In the final story but one, “Sophistication,” George is again visited by a feeling combining in equal measure loneliness and fullness—on a summer night before he departs the fictional Winesburg to take up life and work in Chicago. As Huck feels a “solid” lonesomeness in the silent company of Jim, George has this inner, private experience in the company of the more “sophisticated” but equally needy Helen White, with whom he sits in silent mutual understanding in the darkened grand-stand on the town fairground: There is something memorable in the experience to be had by going into a fair ground that stands at the edge of Middle Western town on a night after the annual fair has been held. The sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people.... Farmers with their wives and children and all the people from the hundreds of little frame houses have gathered within these board 63

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LONESO M E walls. Young girls have laughed and men with beards have talked of the affairs of their lives. The place has been filled to overflowing with life .... now it is night and the life has all gone away. The silence is almost terrifying. One conceals oneself standing silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a reflective tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes.12 Anderson’s writing is dated—the lack of irony tends now to discredit him—the Winesburg stories fall into what we now judge to be the naive and the sentimental; his talent does not match that of his deservedly more acclaimed student, William Faulkner. But undeniably, Winesburg is suffused with affection for the human spirit. Undeniably, Anderson loves his characters especially for their

struggle

to

make

meaning

and

value

in

difficult

circumstances. And when the verisimilitude in him permits, he gives them moments of incandescent lonesomeness. In exuberant youthful flights of over-writing, Thomas Wolfe gives similar moments of rapturous self-discovery to his alter-ego hero, Eugene Gant, in Look Homeward, Angel (1930). Here lonesomeness gushes as it never had before and has not since in American fiction. One particularly effusive instance occurs in his narrative when Wolfe presents the boy Eugene waking long before daylight to run his paperboy route through the Negro section of Altamount: ...it was now necessary for him to get up at half-past three in the morning with darkness and silence making an unreal humming in his drugged ears. 64

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction Strange aerial music came fluting out of darkness, or over his slow-waking senses swept the great wave of symphonic orchestration. Fiend-voices, beautiful and sleep-loud, called down through darkness and light, developing the thread of ancient memory. Staggering blindly in the whitewashed glare, his eyes, sleep-corded, opened slowly as he was born anew, umbilically cut from darkness. Waken, ghost-eared boy, but into darkness. Waken, phantom, O into us. Try, try, O try the way. Open the wall of light. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O lost. Ghost, Ghost, who is the ghost? O whisper-tongued laughter. Eugene! Eugene! Here, O here, Eugene. Here, Eugene. The way is here, Eugene. Have you forgotten? The leaf, the stone, the wall of light. The passage goes on like this. Eugene’s is the loneliness of the gifted, sensitive soul buffeted by a broken family, the loss of a beloved brother, a struggle with the limitations of language, and confusion of ambition. His lonesomeness, as evoked in this and other passages like it, consists in dawning, grappling discovery of vocation as a writer propelled by a hope of capturing with a torrent of words the sense of “otherness” in his experience. The heroic self-possession expressed in this later peroration exhibits the lonesome numinous distorted nearly beyond recognition by a corrupting Romantic sense of selfimportance and of the power of language: I shall lift no stone upon the hills; I shall find no door in any city. But in the city of myself, upon the continent of my soul, I shall find the forgotten language, the lost world, a door where I may enter, and music strange as any ever sounded.13 65

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LONESO M E From a similar school and also from the American South, but the writing tighter and less self-indulgent, come the italicized passages inter-leaved with the primary narrative in James Agee’s A Death in the Family (1957),14 published posthumously. Two in particular deserve mention: the long fear-of-the-dark meditation beginning “Walking in darkness, he saw the window,” in which his father Jay, in singing young Rufus to sleep, for a moment falls into a transfiguring possession of a memory of similar comfort given him as a child by his mother; and the more famous opening meditation, “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” added to the manuscript by his editor after Agee’s death. In the first, Agee gives us the child he once was and still remembers, feeling at first the peacefulness of the sleep-inducing dark as he lies in bed awaiting sleep listening to the voices of parents, uncle, and aunt talking in another room behind a closed door. Unable to sleep, he begins to interrogate the mystery of the night. The dark personified begins to speak to him threateningly, not so much out of the loneliness projected by the child as an echo of the child’s fumbling first awareness of death and oblivion. Darkness harbors a fearful eternity imaged as lying “bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar.” Monsters disclose their unseen presence in the corners of his bedroom as he thinks to himself “this little boy whom he inhabited was only the cruelist of deceits.... he was but the nothingness of nothingness.” His ensuing cry of distress is answered by his father who, in singing him tenderly to sleep, touches within himself a buried chord of the lonesomeness he addresses in his son. The father feels the sound of lullabies stealing “upon the child’s near sleep like a band of shining angels,” and for an instant that he treasures for its sweetness and would sustain if he could (but he cannot) “tears came into his eyes.” He envisions lying “under the hand” of a mother or a father as his son lies, now comforted, under his. And 66

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction he muses, “How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves.” In “perfect limpid remembrance,” in bittersweet nostalgia, one realizes this adult alienation from a lost childhood innocence as tragic. And it hits one hard enough, “the little while it lasted, to break your heart.” The feeling state is that of the lonesome. “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” a portion of A Death in the Family set by Samuel Barber in a haunting tone poem for the soprano Eleanor

Steber,

strikes

much

the

same

note

of

aching

bittersweetness, its emphasis falling all too briefly upon the sweetness. In this meditation we again meet Agee exploiting sentimental memory of childhood, playing undiluted childlike joy and wonder against nebulous childlike fear so awful it makes one sick. Agee writes not only of children, but of the isolation of the fathers in the neighborhood remembered: “each snail-like, withdrawn into the quietude” of the after-dinner custom of watering their lawns. The beauty of the spray from the nozzles of the hoses, like the moment when families lie back on blankets on their lawns to look together at the stars smiling down in “great sweetness,” is magically transformative. It momentarily assuages the isolation and sadness in which Agee’s people struggle with their solitary lives, both within the family circle and without. As in lonesomeness elsewhere in writers already mentioned and in writers I am leaving out, the power and very character of the feeling evoked overwhelms Agee’s ability to find words adequate to convey it, which is not to say that he, in company with other writers, does not explore the expressive limits of language to the best of his ability. Open-ended as the feeling-state is, these representations in Twain as in James, in Anderson as in Wilder, in Wolfe and Agee, are each different in their similarity. Lonesomeness is a response elicited under the conditions of a specific locale and the 67

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LONESO M E subjectivity of a particular individual. To re-phrase our definition, we are speaking here of a privileged, unbidden, fleeting, ultimately description-begging experience of melancholy rising or dilating into a sense of plenitude and splendor, produced as an element in the drama of one’s response to one’s immediate surroundings. The integrity of its religious-like significance for the one who experiences it is not to be compromised by interpretation which seeks to conceptualize it in terms borrowed from traditional religious myth and symbol. This lonesomeness is, however, just the sort of experience of encounter with an unnameable Otherness that Rudolf Otto describes as “numinous.” To draw this parallel is to help us understand the emotional experience as fundamentally mixed with what, for lack of language more precise, we call spiritual or even religious experience. The particular feeling-state or perception of the lonesome—we follow Otto in insisting that it should be analyzed as both—is apparently a cultural product of the North American experience of European Americans. Despite the continuing confusion in popular usage of the terms lonely and lonesome, a confusion this essay is attempting to dispel, lonesomeness, the experience

herein

described,

has

become

a

self-fulfilling

expectation of life experience uniquely among native white North Americans, a moment of redemptive “dilation” to be savored and cherished. Hemingway, revered for his unadorned prose and his rugged male characters of very few words, provides an illustration of the lonesome shaped in his own unique, minimalist way in “Big Two-Hearted River.” The story of Nick Adams off by himself on a fishing trip beyond the reach of human contact, containing his closed-down emotional life with outdoorsman ritual, might seem an unlikely choice. No flights of poetic reverie here! But we note a variant instance of the lonesome in Nick’s spike of strong 68

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction feeling, half suppressed and barely articulate, at the end of a day spent hauling his supplies in a heavy pack into the Michigan pine woods where he meticulously sets up camp, fixes a meal, and enters his tent to sleep. The obsessive detail in the narrative reminds one of Thoreau in later years examining every leaf and twig. But, unlike Thoreau, for whom a fact, pressed hard enough, might flower in a truth, to quote from his Journal, Hemingway’s Nick seems locked in an obsessive inner struggle, unconscious though it may be, for control of a life that is too much for him. Loneliness here is sublimated, deflected. In anticipation of going mano a mano with the beautiful, unforgiving wilderness, his “heart tightened” and “he felt happy.” This is all we are told, all that Nick can tell himself of his feelings. The fruits of his daylong labor of love rewarded, he crawls into the tent feeling “happy” where “nothing could touch him.” The savory moment crests: “He was there in the good place.” He marks the moment in a terse exclamation: “‘Chrise,’ Nick said. ‘Geezus Chrise,’ he said happily.”15 The lonesomeness so clear in expansive, nineteenth-century writing responding to the open, unsettled spaces of the land, and to limitless opportunity generally in the fresh, new imagination of America—this feeling state evolves through changing forms in the twentieth century. Our writers who seem especially drawn to a probing of the layers and depths of the variegated American experience ring their own changes on the archetypal lonesome moment. One of these, John Cheever, in his chronicling of easternseaboard, uber-WASP social patterns and rites of love and death, gives us memorable passages of loneliness transfigured. In solitary reflection and in dreaming, insightful recognitions visit his male protagonists. In the midst of relationships with spouses and children, in spite of their privileged walk of life, fighting 69

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LONESO M E restlessness and existential angst, these men open themselves to their sense of drifting without purpose and to an abiding inner loneliness. Occasionally they permit a sense of unreflective, spontaneous joy to rise, breaking through depressive, dark reverie, enabling these men temporarily to feel totally present to themselves and others. The male characters dreaming in bed at night at the close of the two stories “A Vision of the World” and “The Ocean” nicely illustrate this inbred, drifting loneliness rising into the transitory, ephemeral state of high lonesome, unbidden, fleeting, but difficult to grasp and apply. A sample instance of one of these Cheeveresque moments demonstrates how Cheever works as a writer to evoke an evolved sense of transfiguring lonesomeness in our fiction. In “The Country Husband,” the tiring commotion of dinner with his wife and children puts Francis Weed “into a thoughtful mood.” He retreats to his back garden to listen in solitude to the “evening sounds” of his privileged neighborhood: A door slammed. Someone was cutting grass. Then Donald Goslin, who lived at the corner, began to play the “Moonlight Sonata.” He did this nearly every night. He threw the tempo out the window and played it rubato from beginning to end, like an outpouring of tearful petulance, lonesomeness, and self-pity—everything it was Beethoven’s greatness not to know. The music rang up and down the street beneath the trees like an appeal for love, for tenderness, aimed at some lovely housemaid. The mood of the moment, settling as it does on Weed, culminates not in a deepening of the feeling evoked in the music drifting through the night, but in a sudden interruption reminding Weed, 70

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction locked as he is into his prison of class and commitment, that rebellion and freedom remain impossible possibilities. His melancholic peacefulness is shattered when the notoriously freespirited, uncontrollable dog belonging to a neighbor bursts into the garden: “Here Jupiter, here, Jupiter,” Francis called to the Mercer’s retriever. Jupiter crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth.16 The admirable rapscallion Jupiter ignores him, prancing away “shaking the hat in his white teeth,” a symbol of the serendipity and the irrepressible which tantalize but threaten the adopted order of lives like Weed’s and many others in Cheever’s fictions. The chewed white hat of ever-elusive explanation, of intriguing chance foreclosed, and of forbidden transgression departs with the dog as suddenly as it intruded. And Weed’s responding reflection following the disruption by the “gallant” dog, whose eyes were gleaming with mischief, seems to voice envy of the qualities exhibited by this alert, intelligent animal. In this fugitive, throw-away scene, a lonely moment is momentarily and metaphorically

relieved

with

the

intrusion

of

the

dog’s

“lonesome” mischief. Then there is Jack Kerouac in his roman-à-clef, The Dharma Bums (1958), whose alter-ego, climbing a peak in the Sierras with the Gary Snyder character, gives us this writerly description: ... it seemed that I had seen the ancient afternoon of the trail, from meadow rocks and lupine posies, to sudden revisits with the roaring stream with its splashed snag bridges and undersea greennesses, there was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as 71

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LONESO M E though I’d lived before and walked this trail, under similar circumstances with a fellow Bodhisattva, but maybe on a more important journey, I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of a forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstasy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and the feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass.17 In lonesomeness, in wonder and reverie like that of Fitzgerald’s Dutch sailors, long vistas beyond the horizon of landscape and locale can open up. In an earlier passage, Kerouac recalls with pleasure a boyhood friend whose remembered vision invites comparison with that of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, always “eyes to the distant horizon.” Beyond the reach of natural eyesight, in the depth of Kerouac’s sense of this particular forested mountainside as a place, in wonder, he “recovers” a universal, lyrical childhood. Of coming down the mountain track under moonlight, he writes: I had never had a happier moment in my life than those lonely moments coming down that little deer trace and when we hiked off with our packs I turned to take a final look up that way, it was dark now, 72

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction hoping to see a few little deer, nothing in sight, and I thanked everything up that way. It had been like when you’re a little boy and have spent a whole day rambling alone in the woods and fields and on the dusk homeward walk you did it all with your eyes to the ground, scuffling, thinking, whistling, ... ; that singsong little joyful solitude, nose sniffling, like a little girl pulling her little brother home on the sled and they’re both singing little ditties of their imagination and making faces at the ground and just being themselves before they have to go in the kitchen and put on a straight face again for the world of seriousness.18 In On the Road (1957), in San Francisco, stood up by his Marylou, alone one night, having “nobody, nothing,” Kerouac writes an exhilarated variation on the theme of the lonesome-road-as-siteof-epiphany that we will meet in Chapter Six on country music, giving it an urban setting. Scavenging cigarette butts along a Market Street interchangeable with Canal in New Orleans and 42nd in Manhattan, he writes, “I was delirious.” As the paragraph goes on and on, he hallucinates his mother’s remembered admonitions: “Lost boy! Depart! Do not haunt my soul.” But then, immediately, his train of thought leads to this: ... for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all 73

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LONESO M E the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds....19 Passages like these help trace the American lonesome inherited through the generations like a gene producing replications under evolving forms. Kerouac’s “Beat” culture Buddhism is of course not representative of the writers of his time or of the writers in decades to follow. But Kerouac’s writing, nearly always semiautobiographical as it is, captures a vital moment in the cultural history of North America, expressing youthful rebellion against post-war social and cultural “bourgeois” conformity, together with the ebullient optimism and idealism so characteristic in the North American experience. Kerouac’s lonesome, on the evidence of passages such as these, echoes the “dilation” of the spirit we cherish in Whitman, albeit with Buddhist overtones. It echoes the bittersweet nostalgia for childhood in Agee. It echoes the writers who seek from communication with the unspoiled natural landscapes persona,l moral, and religious sustenance. It expresses the quality of the eternal youthfulness in the American experience, a quality especially evidenced in the cultural belief that we enjoy the liberty and the power continually to renovate and, if need be, to re-invent the self. Kerouac professes “familiarity” with the lonesome. He naturally uses the term to describe a peak moment in his youthful travel of self-discovery. And he is nowhere more an American writer than when he writes these personal moments of transfiguring lonesomeness.

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction And then there is Oedipa, the intuitive, inquisitive pilgrim heroine of Thomas Pynchon’s arresting fiction, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). We will add nothing here to the critical appraisal of this intriguing female character other than to argue that her moments of revelation—”She was to have all manner of revelations”—contribute memorable instances in our history of native lonesomeness. Here we meet solitary epiphanies visited upon a receptive young woman who apprehends her portion of America, the far West, as though shaped and sustained by a mysterious “magic” that attracts and, equally, resists her efforts to fathom it as she can. Oedipa’s prepossessing, self-sufficient inner life, reinforced by her chronic sense of disconnection from others, marks her as an alienated, lonely soul. But the reader admires in her a powerful imaginative grappling with the circumstances of her odyssey through Pynchon’s narrative. Her revelations are tantalizingly suggestive and always incomplete. But they give her, if only instantaneously, the feeling of reaching almost but not quite a privileged gift of insight that, attained, would usher in the wisdom and the self-possession she yearns for. One example is the “religious instant” she experiences looking down upon the city of San Narcisco in Southern California from a high road, driving a rented Chevrolet Impala. The tableau below her reminds her ... of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern

75

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LONESO M E Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narcisco, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the center of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.20 The novel, of course, sends Oedipa on a questing voyage of exploration of an elusive but impinging reality or surreality of personal “religious” import, the discovery of which, she hopes, would dial her into this “other frequency.” The conclusion of the narrative leaves Oedipa teetering, in assertive self-knowledge, between acceptance of an ecstatic paranoia on one hand, and a perhaps culminating discovery of a “transcendent meaning” read successfully into the “hieroglyphic streets” on the other. Thoughout The Crying of Lot 49 prophetic post-modern grandiloquence and irony give form to the imagination of lonesomeness as Pynchon addresses the idea of America itself. His instrumental female character is lonesome-prone, given as she is to the sifting of memory and immediate experience for traces of supervening magic beyond the desultory appearances, or, as Oedipa puts it, traces of “the truth’s numinous beauty”—whatever it may turn out to be. Her lonesome dwells in the combined sense of redemptive Otherness just beyond her baffled reach and of the sure connection to it she feels in moments of revelation. 76

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Lonesomeness in Fiction and Non-Fiction In each of these examples we encounter dramatizations of our ingrained cultural belief in the richness and authority of the interior resources to be exploited within the unique individual self. Expressive of habitual exploration of the uses of solitude, and of stoical enduring of the distress of loneliness, these fictional representations all bear a family resemblance to the American lonesome as I have characterized it. Collected and linked, they make a continuing theater of loneliness transfigured if in different senses and by different means in individual writers—a theater in which to see ourselves mirrored suggestively. The feeling-state we have been descrying in poetry in Chapter Two and here in fiction is not the province of writers alone, however. We will turn to American painting and to country music for further testimony. But first, in the chapter following, where we touch at greater length upon the already invoked Rudolf Otto, we construct a basis for identifying the religious dimension of the intriguing private experience often expressed in the American lonesome.

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4 The N U M I NOUS and the T RA N S CENDENT

I shall speak, then, of a unique “numinous” category of value and of a definitely “numinous” state of mind, which is always found wherever the category is applied. This mental state is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1917)1

Yet our descriptions of the being of human existence seem to suggest that we participate in a wider range of being, in reality that transcends all particulars or combinations of particulars. Here we come up against an ontological notion of transcendence, an otherness within our experience as transcending beings. Eugene Long, “Quest for Transcendence,” The Review of Metaphysics 52 (September 1998)2

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LONESO M E The inner experience ... of fulfillment has always been the chief “inner” dimension of transcendent reality ... . The experience of fulfillment tends to overcome all opposition, to be as much immanent as transcendent. Robert Bellah, “Transcendence in Contemporary Piety,” Beyond Belief (1970)3

In

this

chapter

we

draw

upon

approaches

taken

in

phenomenology, philosophy, and sociology by scholars whose work contributes to opening the path we are taking in our exploration of the religious dimension of American lonesomeness evoked by the poets and fiction writers noted in the two previous chapters. We will specify the particular sense in which we are deploying a “religious” critical approach to the individual works of literary, pictorial, and musical art “read” in Chapters Two, Three, Five, and Six, and to the cultural experience of lonesomeness they reflect. Self-definition is obligatory. But first a word concerning our preference for the defining term “religion” in contrast to the term “spiritual.” All definitions of terms are effectively strategic, of course. And of what two terms could this be more true than of “religion” and “spiritual.” Our essay is not theological in the sense of intentionally aligning our argument ultimately with one or another form of commitment to a particular religion. It is not the intent of this essay, either explicitly or implicitly by disengenuous maneuvering, to co-opt American lonesomeness for confessional or “apologetic” religious purposes. Nor does the essay intend in any way a continuation of “God-talk”—the coinage of professional theologians—by other means or by another rhetoric. Readers inclined to define religion more narrowly, in terms of a particular religion, religion “institutionalized,” or of theism generally, may well refuse to 80

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The Numinous and the Transcendent recognize something so elusory as “open-ended” religious experience. So be it. But for others more sympathetic we are here exploring a phenomenon which, as William James put it—we will consult him in the concluding chapter—belongs tenuously to “the general sphere of religious life.” Other Americanist “religious” critics, other scholarly explorers of cultural expressions that are not explicitly “religious,” may legitimately of course and with honest avowal of intent, if they wish, seek to discover themes congruent with and even perhaps supportive of the specific religious beliefs they or others may hold. Other writers may in fact wish to make use of our cultural expressions of lonesomeness for personal evangelical purposes, in the process perhaps leaving questions as to their ability to respect the integrity of the writers or artists whose work they co-opt. Initial confusion with regard to the intent of a writer of “religious” criticism is standard. To use the term “religious,” as in the phrase “a religious criticism,” is to risk misunderstanding, if our intention is to respect the individual integrity of utterances evoking loneliness transformed into something else, something more positive, and if only momentarily, while simultaneously reflecting on our own sense of a present “religious” dimension in these utterances. We shall use the term “religion” in spite of this risk—encouraged by the examples of Rudolf Otto and sociologist Robert Bellah (see below)—acknowledging that, for clarity sake, we might equally choose to describe ours as a philosophy-ofreligion criticism (or even a phenomenology-of-religion criticism!), too cumbersome a term but one which might better signal a critical approach less in service to a particular religion and, likewise, more bound by academic conventions of “objective” analysis and reflection. Phenomenology and philosophy of religion in the past century, at least in certain quarters, have borne witness to a 81

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LONESO M E sustained interest in exploring and naming, where academic language permits, the character of claimed subjective religious (not “spiritual”) experiences, and also of “transcendence” considered not only as an attribute of a transcendent “Other,” but as a quality or attribute of human life.4 At issue in philosophy of religion accounts has been the kind or kinds of “truth” to be ascribed to unverifiable, uncorroborated personal experiences, and especially—in relation to the Western heritage of faith claims concerning divinity, that is—a transcendent Divine creator. When we examine this intermittent but certainly ongoing metaphysical, epistemological, and ontological discussion, we note a steadily increasing influence of secularization understood as a conveyance of rational-empirical, “positivist,” skepticism regarding confessional and metaphysical claims generally. The discussion has been carried on against a prevailing backdrop of post-Kantian, postFeuerbachian hermeneutical suspicion, and especially where the at least culturally connected work of psychology of religion and British-American philosophy of religion is concerned. We have no need of tracing these evolving separate but not unrelated multisided conversations, but we acknowledge their integrity and force. Both Rudolf Otto cited below in this chapter, and William James cited in the concluding chapter, acknowledge standing in the post-Kantian tradition, as do we. We note their respective contributions

and

with

the

guidance

of

more

recent,

AngloAmerican philosophies of religion—and then of Bellah— move toward a proposal of the religious character of our native lonesomeness. But what of the “spiritual?” Other explorers of this particular state of consciousness may wish to describe the contribution of elements in lonesomeness other than merely the cognitive and the emotional, elements which, under the term “spiritual,” may appear to elevate the whole of consciousness. Traditionally, if we 82

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The Numinous and the Transcendent come forward as traditionalists, we of course embrace the notion of the indefinable human spirit as a “something more” operating in the consciousness of religious and religious-like individuals alike. Moreover, we speak commonly and reflexively of motivation, in one degree or another, by “spiritual” as well as “religious” concern. A discussion of what we can and do mean by “spiritual” and “the spiritual” could continue ad infinitum, and this is obviously not the place for it. Lonesomeness as I address it may plausibly of course be characterized as in part, in large part, a spiritual experience. But our particular approach to lonesomeness here has been influenced by growing reluctance to adopt and then adapt a term which has been used in so many ways in recent generations so as to suggest vexed overuse. The same can be said of “religion” as well, of course. But still “religious” carries more weight—it has earned (in usage) our greater respect. It evokes a deeper seriousness, if not always helpful specifics, where “spiritual” too often evokes transitory market-driven alternative panaceas of diverse description. The two terms seem less interchangeable now than ever they may have been in the past— at least in the American cultural context. For “spiritual” in evolved and evolving usage has come to signal a considered refusal of the term “religious” when defining how one feels and what one thinks about the larger, elusive meanings of one’s life. (We are all too familiar with retorts such as, “No, I am not religious, but I am spiritual.”) “Spiritual” has come to function as a “softer,” more ambiguous, passively defensive description of an individual’s conscious leanings toward non-material and nonspecifiable “belief” (not only ephemeral but perhaps risking the superficial), especially where an otherwise religious individual may shy away from “religious” in an age influenced so thoroughly by Enlightenment skepticism. Readers may judge this 83

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LONESO M E too fine a point, or too cynical. But when we examine recent usage closely we judge that Americanist religionists can no longer responsibly

use

these

terms

interchangeably

without

qualification. We must decide which of the two terms serves us more accurately. And in this essay we prefer use of the term “religious” to “spiritual” in describing lonesomeness as a matter of considered personal choice. We prefer in this essay to stand with

predecessor

scholarly

writers

who

are

clear

about

addressing phenomena that fall within James’ “general sphere of religious life.”

I About American religion as a whole it is dangerous to generalize within the compass of so brief and so narrowly focused an essay. Nor do we wish to, apart from observing that much of the earliest, formative American religious experience set itself against the outgrown, inhibiting burden of Old World traditional forms, both from within and from without “organized” religion. Homo religious Americanus is a robustly heterogeneous species. Though it is impossible and irrelevant to trace the countless individual ways

in

which Americans

have

regarded

themselves

as

“religious,” we would note as we proceed the vast improvisational “text” of assenting and dissenting American religiousness, into which multitudes of individuals continue to “read” and “write” themselves. It is this strain of New World individualism that attracts us. As much if not more so than in any other modern world culture, the religious imagination has been let off its leash to pioneer new forms on these shores. We may safely note that great numbers of Americans, naturalized as well as native-born, continue to give themselves permission if not necessarily to 84

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The Numinous and the Transcendent depart from then at least to revise or to rework inherited forms of religious thought, feeling, and practice—to suit individual needs. Without this phenomenon to help explain them, polls would not indicate, as consistently they do, that Americans are an unusually “religious” people at this point in the history of Western societies. Not only have traditional forms of religion given way to experimental new forms, but religious traditions in America have witnessed a refurbishing from within, consciously seeking to honor,

in

encouraged

consciousness

of

new

historical

circumstances, particular elements of inherited tradition while compelled to discard other aspects as anachronistic or irrelevant. But, more to the point of this essay, non-traditional, hybridizing, ad hoc forms of religious experience and expression have proliferated in a climate politically and socially conducive to radical individualistic religious free-lancing. Following the First and Second “Awakenings” of the late colonial and early national periods and then southern frontier evangelical revivalism, despite the influence of Methodist circuit riders and the institutionalization of formal religion in the northern cities, and then abetted by the lack of trained clergy in the sparsely populated lands opening up for settlement, “religious” Americans by whom Tocqueville was so impressed were left largely on their own. This is the legacy of the nineteenth century. Americans of the new nation lived, as it were, on a spiritual frontier. The “Turner Thesis,” advanced in the 1890s, noting the constructive force inexorably ingrained within the American character by the promise and recourse of western lands available for re-starting life anew, throws considerable light retrospectively back upon the conditions of opportunity faced by earlier religious Americans.5 From the national period on, ours has been a culture in great part dedicated (in word if not always manifestly, in later generations, in outward deed) to the encouragement of the unique identity of 85

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LONESO M E the new American individual, to a cultivation of the new Adam in the new Eden, to a “restoration” of human innocence and undiminished capability. The enabling text in personal as well as in public life is the “Declaration of Independence.” Twentieth-century America inherited this legacy of libertarian, spiritual self-making and remaking. Far from being excluded, as it were, from the blanket licensing of constructive self-remaking of the American self in American life, the religious practice of this new man and new woman has occupied a place now loudly but more often quietly at the core of our life as individuals. The “great experiment of the Republic” has been conducted not only on the political and social but also on the religious plane as well, and, of course, against a background of challenging but also enabling secularization. And it has found encouragement and vivid diverse expression down through the generations. One great expression of this strain, one whose continuing influence appears to remain life-giving and strong while indubitably difficult to trace or to establish definitively in recent generations, is the Emersonian tradition. In the famous essays, none more influential and beloved than “Nature” (1836), in which the great themes of his bouyant “transcendentalism” are enunciated, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave us licensing cultural support for individualized, anti-traditional reflective affirmation of the Divine by whatever name we might call upon it. Perhaps because he avoided addressing the problem of evil in nature as well as in history, upon which even his most sympathetic critics agree, his ideas won the innocent affection of countless learned and unlearned Americans both in the earliest years of the new nation, when his popularity as barnstorming public lecturer was immense, and then in subsequent generations liberated and energized in many ways by the ongoing “great experiment.” Emerson is not a particularly apt example of American 86

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The Numinous and the Transcendent lonesomeness—the disposition reflected in his writing generally is too sunny to evidence the shadow of a depressive loneliness overcome. But with affection we remember and forgive the mediating hyberbole in the famous recording of one particular moment of rapturous hierophany. In this self-description we meet one important forefathering of subsequent moments of sudden transfiguring lonesomeness in the lives of other Americans, whether experienced and perhaps recorded privately or imagined in an artistic medium. No matter that skeptical, ironical readers in Emerson’s time and ever since have been want to smile at this evocation: Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts an occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing. I see all; the currents of the Universal being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.6 Kindred spirits and the curious are drawn still to the wording of Emerson’s description of his rapture, to his verbally constructed simulacrum of a subjective personal truth. And in the more pedestrian language of the Lowell Lectures of 1926, Alfred North Whitehead acknowledged the prepossessing individualism of the matured nation’s religious life when he observed, “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.”7 But we turn to more adequate descriptive languages to capture the movement from a depressed to an elevated 87

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LONESO M E consciousness, from loneliness to lonesomeness (and back) in an individual’s religious life. We turn to languages capable of grasping the religious character of feeling states for which the subject does not automatically resort, in description, to traditional “God-language.” That students of religions and religiousness in America have not yet heeded the “religious” dimension of our cultural lonesomeness can be explained as the continuing failure generally of a materialistic, “rational” culture—it influences the study of religion as everything else—to take seriously the languages employed by the creative imagination in the utterance of its non-rational, “religious-like” truths through means afforded by the arts. Although we are indeed witnessing innovative explorations of religious life in the realm of “material culture,”8 we are not yet adequately taking the measure of other, more subtle cultural phenomena that, as it were, do stare us in the face but to which we remain effectively blind. To suggest that the feeling state of lonesomeness can have significant religious dimension, despite its lack of specifiably religious rhetorical content (that is, in spite of its non-theistic, open-ended character), is simply to point to its elusive, perhaps inchoate, but rich flavor as one variety of American religious and generally spiritual experience. But the “poetic” character of this lonesome state of mind has evolved in a cultural system which values individualistic self-definition and has wanted to view nature and man’s response to nature in the largest sense as revelatory. This is as true of our intractably cheerful, postEmersonian spiritualities of wide description as it is of other realms of American social, political, and technological practice. Lonesomeness, we argue, is a culturally embedded, subjective platform for unscripted, spontaneous American “religious” experiences. It is of course but one among other vehicles or platforms to be discerned by penetrating observation—others, 88

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The Numinous and the Transcendent that is, yet to be discerned that we have similarly not yet shaken free of confining habit to notice. We are reminded again, by the old popular gospel song, a cross-over from black to white culture, its author unknown, of the importance assigned to the individual’s questing exploration of higher resources to be discovered within and often in solitude: “Everybody’s got to walk that lonesome valley.” As Americans following in our own new tradition, we are urged to discover our own authentic personal religion, our own perhaps hard-won spirituality, as individuals as much alone apart from others as also, if secondarily together with others in supportive groups: “No one here can go there for you.” Finding one’s religion, through serious inner struggle, in a personalized embrace of the traditional religion of one’s upbringing, or of some other or combination, is of course a welldocumented phenomenon. And, in general, the authorizing Protestant principle of collective but lonely autonomy in the cultivation and maintenance of religious life flourishes, aided and abetted by cultural forces, alongside (occasionally inter-related with) the ministering, occasionally hectoring guidance (and “controlling”)

of

formed

communities

of

traditional

and

untraditional faith. But the lonesomeness phenomenon begs our attention: its “religious” dimension.

II The definition of the implicitly “religious” dimension of lonesomeness at which we arrive will be incomplete and tentative, necessarily so in light of the individual, if not to say unique character of the experience where we find it expressed, 89

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LONESO M E and where we find it in ourselves. And not all voicings of “lonesome” convey meaning that rises above the desultory “lonely.” But many do. And the savory, pungent, higher meaning abides in the word potentially for all Americans. The meaning of each “lonesome” moment is, finally, to be explored by placing it in the context of an individual’s total life experience. It is to be placed in the context of the unique formation and “becoming” of each individual’s mind as a whole. At the same time, we note elements common to experiences of this particular, greater state of mind. We understand it as comprised of more than cognitive perception or grasp, including emotion or “feeling” as well. We approach lonesomeness as an integrated, integrating, if transitory experience, drawing together all the elements of consciousness for which we may employ useful names. Lonesomeness is functionally a religious experience, despite in expression its general lack of interpretatively traditional religious content, the presence of which would of course make it analytically “religious” to the strict traditionalist. (But recall Emily Dickinson’s varying use of the word occasionally to evoke traditionalist beliefs themselves.) Common to the experience, to expand upon the observations above, is an integrating, vivifying sense of self-affirmation and ease set within a broader affirmation and grateful acceptance of the greater surround in which the self finds as it “loses” itself. It is this sense which invites the description “transfiguring,” for the experience is temporarily transformative. The self is experienced as transcending its normative limitations or boundaries—that is, its usual and customary consciousness—not in a sense of withdrawing inward away from the environing world but of greater, fuller, more comfortable participation in that outer world. Lonesomeness is an unbidden gift to self-consciousness. It bears resemblance to what 90

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The Numinous and the Transcendent the Greeks called ekstasis, an ecstatic moment in which one is lifted out of the mundane and beyond one’s ordinary self from being deeply touched within. When those who are traditionally religious pass into such an experience, they may interpret it in received religious terms, as, for instance, a privileged moment of grace. And when they do, they are thinking in theistic terms—such a gift is given by a transcendent, loving Divine. But American lonesomeness as we find it across the American experience and as expressed in our arts may include in its expression specific faith interpretation, but it does not depend upon prior religious faith for its common defining

content.

Rather,

the

momentary

sense

of

self-

transcendence in feeling absolutely, gratefully at home in and with oneself, and, simultaneously in the world of other selves, temporarily overcomes our sense of confining finitude. Turning to the language used by “existentialist” writers, we might credit these lonesome moments with temporarily overcoming our defining “estrangement” from the possibility of a less finite, “higher” existence. The “otherness” (or “Otherness”) engaged in the experience provides another apt figure. A lonesome moment might additionally be described as a temporary overriding of the confining finite limitation upon self-consciousness. Functionally, then, this is what privileged moments of lonesomeness can be said to do to us—or for us. One need not extend this attempt at description very far to add that this feeling or combination feeling-and-knowing state— however in its raw, inchoate reception it may elude rational description—also invites description in religious terms as the experience of what mystics in the tradition have called “plenitude” (and what, as we shall see below, Robert Bellah calls “fulfillment”). We would mean by plenitude a rapt and quieting sense of benign amplitude in the cosmos into which the 91

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LONESO M E individual, however small, feels that he or she fits without being diminished. The term “plenitude,” like the term “oceanic,” has a bibliography—see the concluding chapter—but our purpose is served here adequately without tracing the emergence and the uses made of them respectively by previous writers to describe by analogy states of “higher consciousness.” Here we wish only to make the claim that the experience of North American lonesomeness ultimately can be interpreted as a form of nontraditional, open-ended “religious” or certainly “religious-like” perception, or feeling programmed in this specific culture to evidence homo religiosus appearing everywhere always in local clothing. One may begin to see in this lonesomeness a combination of both the depressive loneliness of the clinicians (in its pathological dimension) and a larger and redeeming sense of the oceanic fulsomeness that can transport loneliness into an extraordinary moment of heightened self-possession, or, to use another figurative term, into an all too transitory moment of “coming into one’s own.” Nonetheless, an untranslatable element in the experience

remains.

The

“religious”

dimension

is

to

be

established. This untranslatable, inchoate element in lonesomeness begs further description. And for this we turn to the pursuit of phenomenology and philosophy of religion among scholarly writers

sympathetic

but

appropriately—in

a

post-Kantian

universe—careful and modest in their findings. First, we will consult the path-breaking work of the German, Rudolf Otto, who, early in the last century, famously applied to similar individual experiences or perceptions the method of approach he had learned from the originator of “phenomenology,” Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). And then we will enlist certain AngloAmerican analytical philosophers of religion who focus attention 92

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The Numinous and the Transcendent upon self-consciousness itself, and who guardedly appeal to the “truth” of personal experience as a locus for a qualified, human “transcendence” to be discerned through reflection on this selfconsciousness, rather than through what the psychiatrists reductively call “projection” or what Kierkegaard called the “leap” (beyond reason) of faith in the transcending God of the Abrahamic traditions.

III To more fully understand the “religious” uses of representations of “lonesomeness” in the American arts, we turn to a line of investigation which, though followed outside the arts in response to questions formally raised in the field of phenomenological and epistemological of inquiry, includes literature and the other arts among the phenomena it addresses. In 1917, a student of comparative religion, Rudolf Otto, published in his native German a descriptive-analytical study of the non-rational dimension of religion, Das Heilige. This masterpiece of practical phenomenology, translated expeditiously in 1923 by John E. Harvey (as The Idea of the Holy), has proven one of the half-dozen indispensable works to appear within the field that has come to be known in the twentieth century as “religious studies.” Together with Paul Tillich in numerous writings—and, like Tillich, now through writers both have influenced

respectively—Otto

continues

to

exert

profound

influence in the present. We turn to the insights to be found in The Idea of the Holy to suggest how appropriate it is to find an essentially religious dimension to American lonesomeness. Otto is especially helpful in urging us to observe the ideal and irreducible “harmony of contrasts” in the great religions of 93

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LONESO M E the world. The concept of this harmony is foundational in Otto’s argument. On one hand, he grants that religion, in its two major elements of belief and practice, must always make use of rational concepts, including the “rational” conceptuality to be found in myths of the supernatural—where the rational is defined primarily as the conceivable (as distinct from the believable on grounds of compelling evidence). Then, on the other hand, he insists, religion in our time has become deformed by excessive attention paid to the rational (as the “warp”) at the expense of appreciation for the balancing non-rational (the “woof”), that is the non- or trans-conceptual element in all religious experience. Lest it remain deformed under the powerful but excessive influence of Western rationality, our sense of what it means to be religious must be corrected, Otto argues. He urges us to restore the balance in our view of religion by acknowledging the equally important, contrasting element of raw, pre-conceptual subjective experience of encounter with the “wholly other,” where the “other” is a symbol for the unnameable mysterium, and ultimately for Otto (for the Protestant theologian in him), of Divinity itself. In authentic, universal religion, Otto proposes, the language of conceptualizing rationality and the immediate experience of “otherness” that necessarily eludes all descriptive language must be dynamically, “harmoniously” related—one must not be devalued for the sake of the other. The non-rational and the rational, or, as he explains it, the moment of raw pre-conceptual experience followed by the spontaneous, reflexive moment of conceptualizing interpretation and naming (plus the inferences drawn from it), complement each other in a “harmony of contrasts.” Otto argues forcefully by suggestion as well as by analogy—in the process appealing for epistemological recognition of “faculties of knowledge and potentialities of thought in the spirit itself”9—that homo religious is marked primarily by the 94

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The Numinous and the Transcendent recurring experience of a sui generis core “state of mind” or consciousness which precedes the division into subject and object. Both the “wholly other” experienced and the state of mind itself he calls “numinous.” In this ground-breaking work in comparative religious phenomenology, owing as he did a debt to Edmund Husserl’s earlier work, Otto gives us new terms, most famously this encountering “numinous” and the “mysterium tremendum and fascinans,” encountered through the “numinous,” to describe this mental state in which elements of cognition and of feeling are merged to produce a raw, primary experience of inexplicable “otherness” beyond the self. He argues that this “numinous” experience cuts across cultures and traditions, providing the original datum of all personal religious experience. Immediately following the initial undifferentiated experience, and only then, as he puts it, when the individual seeks to interpret and to express the awe-inspiring, pre-conceptual “numinous,” does he or she bring into play the conceptualizing terms of “rational” symbol and myth. For this “numinous” issues from the deepest foundation of cognitive apprehension that the soul possesses, and, though it of course comes into being in and amid the sensory data and empirical material of the natural world and cannot anticipate or dispense with those, yet it does not arise out of them, but only by their means. They are the incitement, the stimulous, and the ‘occasion’ for the numinous experience to become astir.10 In reflexive response to the “numinous,” then, one so predisposed will conceptualize the “seeing” of visions, the “hearing” of voices, the encountering of spirits and gods generally, thereby 95

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LONESO M E summoning involuntarily the results of one’s formation in a particular faith tradition. When he reflects on the variety of ways in which one may experience the universal pre-conceptual “mysterium tremendum” dimension of the Holy/the Numinous, he includes the calm feeling of it flooding over and through a person like a gentle tide. In canvassing common “numinous” experiences which, in consciousness,

precede

naming

and

conceptualization—

experiences which Otto insists are conveyed by “faculties of knowledge and potentialities in the spirit itself,” though impossible through any rational methods to explain—he includes experiences which, in contrast to those of daunting “awefulness” and “majesty,” instead stir an entrancing “fascination” marked by a “strange ravishment.” When raised to its highest power, as Otto regards it, and “stressed to excess,” the state of fascination becomes an experience of what he calls “the overabounding” (Das Uberschwenglische). And he cites recorded historical mystical experiences as examples of such moments which combine the initial “overabounding” with immediate response of reflexive “rationalizing,” interpreting conceptualization. Though Otto goes on to cite instances of this particular form of “numinous” experience in the lives of specifically Christian believers, he does first observe that “a trace of it [the ‘overabounding’] survives in all truly felt states of religious beatitude.” For Otto, one important means by which we identify homo religious is the evidence of such (for lack of better words) euphoric, oceanic numinous experiences of “fascination.” And important to Otto is always the non-rational, “unutterableness” of “what has been yet genuinely experienced, and how such an experience may pass into blissful excitement, rapture and exaltation [even] verging often on the bizarre and the abnormal.”11

96

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The Numinous and the Transcendent One of Otto’s points in particular leads toward the next stage in our exploration as we consult more recent philosophers of religion on the subject of “relocated” transcendence. Following all that he has previously argued in his text, he comes to an observation that echoes more recent philosophical anthropology. He briefly steps away from the theistic preoccupations that occupy him throughout the text. He writes: In us too all that we call person and personal, indeed all that we can know or name in ourselves at all, is but one element in the whole. Beneath it lies, even in us, that “wholly other,” whose profundities, impenetrable to any concept, can yet be grasped in the numinous self-feeling by one who has experienced the deeper life.12 This “numinous self-feeling” is a concept with which to conjure, as we will note below especially in the more secularized, less theological accounts offered by Anglo-American philosophers of religion in the past few decades. Here Otto’s theism has momentarily dropped away. Here the numinous is not necessarily connected with the difficult-to-explain “knowing” (through the “wholly other”) of, ultimately, a transcending Divine. (The mystics of several traditions supply Otto with a great deal of his supporting evidence—historically, he notes, the “numinous” has been a defining feature of the traditional mystical path.) It is this appeal to non-rational “numinous self-feeling” that links Otto with a number of philosophers, British and American, much later in Otto’s twentieth century but also standing in the Kantian tradition, who in different but related ways probe what Otto calls “self-feeling” for evidence of a kind of qualified “transcendence”

97

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LONESO M E that helps us to specify the qualified religious dimension of lonesomeness, as we shall see below. American lonesomeness, we submit, plays a variation upon Otto’s feeling-perception of overaboundingness. It wells up as a powerful and peaceful experience of self-integration and atoneness with the universe, perhaps as an example of this extreme form of Otto’s “fascination.” In Otto’s terms, it may arrive unexpected and perhaps as a following element in an experience of “awefulness” and overwhelming “majesty.” It may express a lifting of one, as it were, into a higher state of a numinous expansiveness all the more powerful for having arrived through an enabling sense of littleness—in our terms, a lifting of the lonely into the lonesome. In these terms, lonesomeness would not be identical with this “numinous” itself. Rather it would be the culturally given, reflexive, interpreting, secular expression of this flooding, calming experience of the “numinous” by Americans. Though it begs further qualifying below, we find in lonesomeness a striking expression of Otto’s sui generis “numinous” specific to the American experience. What our lonesomeness cannot be framed as offering the individual—in this we differ markedly from Otto—is certain, uncanny knowledge of revealed Divinity itself. Where Otto ultimately hoped to advance the cause of Protestant Christianity, our aim is not at all confessional or “apologetic.” It is more modest. It is simply to re-affirm the practical usefulness of his findings as a phenomenologist of religion up to a point, and to draw a parallel between his afterthe-fact description-analysis of the numinous moment as a fundamentally religious experience and the heightened but calming, “overabounding” state of mind expressed in American lonesomeness.

Otto’s

project

and

his

vocabulary

throw

illuminating light on the phenomenon of lonesomeness in its 98

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The Numinous and the Transcendent experience of something qualitatively more than mere loneliness. He offers an intriguing language in which to grasp the experiential dimension of this alternative North American way of being “religious” in lonesome, self-communing wonder and in rapt, transcended melancholy.

IV If we subtract from Otto’s phenomenology of the numinous the assertion that, for those who know it, the numinous in its most penetrating moment offers us cognitive knowledge of the presence of the Divine—as I believe we must in order to embrace what remains cogent in Otto’s proposal for a more “objective” phenomenological support for a philosophy of religion adequate to our later age—with what are we left? To answer this, we take guidance from a number of more recent, Anglo-American philosophers

of

religion,

latter-day

inheritors

of

Kantian

“transcendental” inquiry who focus on the a priori conditions under which empirical inquiry is possible. We draw upon those philosophers in particular who in recent generations have wanted,

where

“evidence”

of

the

limitations

upon

and

possibilities of our human reality is concerned, to free themselves from positivist confinement to evidence provided solely by sense experience in the belief that the inward experience of evolving, interacting, self-conscious human beings provides a much richer source of evidence for what it means to be human. Lonesomeness as “numinous” experience encounters a receptive climate in the philosophical-anthropological writings of John Macquarrie, Eugene Long, Alastair Kee, Ian Ramsey, and Roger Hazelton, among others, all trained in the post-Kantian, rationalempiricist “analytical” tradition but not limited by it. We do not 99

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LONESO M E intend here to review the work of each of these writers respectively, of course. Nor can we even begin to trace the influence of writers like Karl Jaspers or Martin Heidegger upon the reflections contributed by philosophers of religion such as these. But they each in different ways have weighed intriguingly, in one way or another, evidences for “finding the locus of transcendence in the human existent rather than in God,” as Macquarrie puts it.13 And we enlist them in collective support of our intent to specify a religious dimension of lonesomeness—in virtue of their accounts re-establishing “transcendence” in ways that suggest fundamentally religious impulse and experience. This religious dimension, we believe, can be established upon evidence that lonesomeness, as a salient example of meaningful transcendence

“relocated”

within

human

life,

is

indeed

experienced as fulfillment from “beyond” the self of potentialities of consciousness normally experienced as inhibited. Otto refers to “numinous self-feeling.” Our more recent philosopher explorers of transcendence as a human quality (Kee) or attribute (Macquarrie) have effectively proposed, at least in our reading of them, that Otto’s “wholly other” should more responsibly (less theologically) be understood to refer to the dilated, transformed sense of the self integrated fully into its surround. One by one, they find evidences of “relocated” human transcendence as in Roger Hazelton: “a multifaceted phenomenon that can be seen from many angles, so that any account can hardly avoid being partial.”14 Thus transcendence can be evidenced, for instance, in moral commitment to others, in our agency with respect to shaping and re-shaping the self over time (experiencing ourselves in freedom as “possibility”), in feelings of “cosmic gratefulness” for human life (George Naknikian), or in our sense of “parti-cipation in a wider range of being” and the “sense of finiteness and mystery inherent in our experience of ourselves” (Long).15 100

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The Numinous and the Transcendent The literature on this reading of the ontological character of transcendence as a fundamental component of human life is rich and especially fascinating for religionists unacquainted with it who would more readily think of transcendence as descriptive, rather, as it were, than of the transcending transcendent, namely, of the Divine, the creating deity posited in traditional faiths. The concept of a transcending transcendent is certainly crucial to the religious

belief

and

practice

of

traditional

Western

faith

communities. Without this ingredient, leaving fideism aside, little separates these faiths from agnosticism or atheism. But we observe that personal transcendence experienced in the mindexpanding-and-relaxing sense of transformation into a wholly integrated, wholly other larger self—human transcendence— qualifies as religious experience, despite as in our case of lonesomeness the absence of a sense of a transcending transcendent religious “object.” Lonesomeness functions like a hierophany, but of a kind in which something uncannily human, perhaps an enlivened sense of participation in Long’s “wider range of being,” or perhaps an access of Macquarrie’s “qualitative more, a deepening, enhancing, and enriching of life,”16 is momentarily revealed, as it were transfiguring consciousness in the process. Taking seriously the “historicity” of human experience, as we do or should, we find in this probing of the modes of human transcendence the implicit question: does this reading of human experience compel description of human transcendence as inherently religious? For some, it may stretch the concept of religion to describe it as such, but we are arguing that certain privileged moments of numinous consciousness of the “wholly other” qualify as “religious” enough to be included in the “general sphere of religious life.” Any contemporary definition of “religion” must be broad and generous lest it fall into the trap of 101

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LONESO M E elevating a particular religion, in all or simply in its most crucial details, as the standard to be met by all others. Perhaps transcendence

glimpsed

in

the

freedom

of

self-shaping

individuals created not simply to be but also to become themselves over time, or in moral commitment to others, or in reflective moments of gratitude for finitude and mystery felt as benign— perhaps this is not traditionally speaking “religious.” Perhaps it will not satisfy the confident zealot. But in moments when Otto’s numinous sense of the unspecifiable “wholly other” strikes or floods or ravishes us, in such moments of overabounding dilation of consciousness as in the fleeting lonesome state of mind, then we are justified, we propose, in regarding such experiences as religious, and not least because the experience so closely conforms in kind, as Otto repeatedly reminds us, with that of the traditional mystics. Not always in our usage but enough to warrant note, lonesomeness meets this religious test, as we have seen in the previous two chapters and as we shall see in the two following devoted to American painters and to country music artists respectively. When Eugene Long writes, as in the passage quoted at the head of the chapter, that “our descriptions seem to suggest that we participate in a wider range of being, in reality that transcends all particulars or combinations of particulars,” he is effectively

pointing

toward

the

“religious”

character

of

lonesomeness experienced in its overabounding register. His “otherness within our experience as transcendent beings” may be more modestly conceived, certainly less theological, and probably more accurate a description than Otto’s of the “wholly other” encountered in or through the numinous, but it would seem, from our broad perspective, equally and helpfully to mark a fundamentally religious experience.

102

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The Numinous and the Transcendent V To adduce still further precedent support for our claim that American lonesomeness has a religious character, we turn to the writings of a celebrated scholar in the discipline of sociology. We enlist the testimony of the sociologist of religion who, in the 1960s and subsequently, more than any other scholar in the field, has instilled the interpretive concept of “civil religion” in America— Robert Bellah. The lonesomeness we are addressing, for which we have drawn for support upon Gunn in Chapter One and then Otto and Macquarrie and fellow analytical philosophers here, is not a “civil” religious phenomenon in the sense that Bellah and Sydney Mead17 and others harking back to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s political theorizing have meant that term. Nor does it come within the purview of scholars in Britain and elsewhere who discern “implicit” religion or religiousness in specific routinized non-formally-religious behaviors of individuals and communities prompted by powerful needs, interests, or urgings of a strength like those expressed by the deeply committed, institutionalized religious faithful.18 To reiterate, lonesomeness is effectively the umbrella expression for a hardly describable if not actually inchoate momentary sense of contact with an “otherness,” if not actually some “Other” quite beyond but also within the individual self. We might call it a fleeting sense of being filled with a calming,

unbidden,

supervening

“presence”

restorative

of

harmony and completeness. It is not a belief but a perception comprised of feeling perhaps and pre-verbalized, pre-verbalizable (cf. Otto), wondering consciousness of self integrated with the surrounding manifold beyond the self. Here we turn, then, to Bellah’s reflections, subsequent to his better-known work on social and political contexts for religious belief and behavior in America, on the inner religious experience of the individual. 103

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LONESO M E With that later Bellah who proposes that in our reflections upon “religious” experience we must avoid an “objectivist fallacy,” namely, as he puts it, the “confusion of belief and religion,” our lonesomeness as defined above can indeed be regarded nicely as fundamentally “religious.” Such an overly rational, Enlightenment-driven “fallacy,” seductive as it is among Western communities of traditional faith wedded to a literalistic hermeneutic, he observes, is to be found “only in the religions deeply influenced by Greek thought” and hardly at all in nonWestern religions. His argument, that of a sociologist addressing the function rather than the content of claimed experiences or symbolizations

of

transcendence,

though

intellectually

challenging, is for that very reason fundamentally supportive of our exploration. For Bellah, religious experience, regarded as one of “the most fundamental cultural forms,” is “neither objective nor subjective, but the very way in which the two are related.” Hence his proposal that a structural analysis provides “a more phenomenologically accurate understanding of ordinary religious experience than the assumption that it is primarily a matter of cognitive belief.” The “deficit condition” of loneliness—loneliness is the term he employs—is “structural” in the human condition itself, one that can and does give way, in privileged moments, to the structural experience of transcendence as immanence, the potential of which, so he argues, is “deeply embedded in man’s existential situation and a part of the very structure of his experience.” Such privileged moments are to be likened, functionally, to those described by the traditional mystics in the Western tradition. As he puts it, “The crux of the issue, as it has always been in mystical religion, is the relation of this self, myself, and other selves, the universe itself.”19 While, in a post-Kantian, secular age, in his view traditional arguments for transcendence must be abandoned, we nonetheless 104

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The Numinous and the Transcendent “appreciate that there is a reality independent of ourselves, our societies, or our cultures.” In the Beyond Belief chapter, “Transcendence in Contemporary Piety,”20 like Gunn invoked in Chapter One, Bellah cites the poet Wallace Stevens as an exemplary prophet for our age. He rates Stevens as “the greatest American ‘theological poet’ of the twentieth century,” as much for his prose reflections in Opus Posthumous (1957) as for his poetic utterance itself. Here he cites the effective way in which that poet conveys, in the poet’s own words, an “insistence on a reality that forces itself upon our consciousness and refuses to be managed and mastered.”21 For Bellah, querying transcendence, Stevens is most persuasive where, as Bellah paraphrases him, the poet credits “the wonder and mystery of art, as indeed of religion in the last resort,” with “the revelation of something ‘wholly other’ by which the inexpressible loneliness of thinking is broken and enriched.” In agreement with Stevens, Bellah argues that the “overwhelming reality” of the “inner life” responding to such a greater reality—an experience not to be captured by any “simple use of the word ‘subjective’”—is to be acknowledged as a structural element alongside that of the experience of the “unsatisfied desires and longings that overwhelm all men at certain times.” Needs such as these are to be “taken as one indication of the structure of reality” in the fullest sense. Likewise the inner experience of fulfillment of such needs has always served as the chief “inner” dimension of transcendent reality, an experience “as much immanent as transcendent.” Putting aside the described substance of any particular experience of transcendence, so he argues, we must affirm the dynamic character of the experience, while at the same time expecting to find it, if differently conceived or named, in other intellectual and cultural traditions if not all. But Bellah is most relevant when he quotes Stevens on “the revelation of something ‘wholly other’ by which the inexpressible 105

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LONESO M E loneliness

of

thinking

is

broken

and

enriched.”

Where

lonesomeness is concerned, that “something” likewise comes initially

and

often

exclusively

without

further

specified

particularity or name, in contrast, of course, to the figures and actions which, in articulated systems of institutionalized religion, invite devoted objectivist “belief.” An individual’s particular lonesomeness, in this way, may be approached as Bellah approaches the general notion of the “fulfillment” that he understands as “the chief ‘inner’ dimension of transcendent reality”. In contrast to loneliness, considered a “deficit need,” lonesomeness would constitute an experience of the sort of privileged fulfillment that “tends to overcome all opposition” and, paradoxically, “to be as much immanent as transcendent.” Thus lonesomeness might be considered descriptive of a preliminary stage of such elevated consciousness, which, were it to be succeeded by a subsequent moment of concrete definition, might then more easily be reckoned revelatory, in the sense of “revelation” encountered in the claims of traditional mysticism. An echo of Otto is clear in Bellah’s dynamics, where the experience itself, say, of a fulfilling lonesomeness, would be distinguished from a subsequent “objectivist” appropriation of that raw experience which might follow. In our skeptical, secular modernity, where appeal to traditional, transcendent sources of authority and worship are questioned and, by many, discredited, the need for a serviceable symbolism for what Bellah calls “higher values” persists. Individuals and societies, we would add, do need symbols, implicit if not always explicit, to help express need to mark occasional experience of grasping a greater reality in its “otherness,” as suspect in the realm of materialist skepticism as this may be. Many, that is, need a symbolic language which, while it does not reach so far as to name transcendence as such, 106

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The Numinous and the Transcendent still manages to express what Bellah calls the overcoming of the dichotomies of ordinary conceptualization, for example the “subjective” vs. the “objective,” and that “brings together the coherence of the whole of experience,” even if only, we would add, for that privileged moment. One more feature of Bellah’s argument is relevant to our cause. In his analysis, drawing as it does upon admiration of the poet

Stevens,

he

concludes

that

adequate

symbols

for

transcendence must, in our time, and upon reflection, be embraced as “not final but only provisional.” Here Bellah borrows the sort of conclusion to which Stevens drove in Opus Posthumous, where he urged sympathetic readers to achieve this particular poise: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”22 His appeal to Stevens, perhaps unusual for a sociologist, is integral to an argument that results in conclusions that would teach us to appreciate the tentative and the inconclusive, even and especially in “religious” symbols for the transcendent that truly can function as such under the conditions of secularism. Bellah’s essay could be extended—we extend it—to an exploration of lonesomeness that considers its function as an especially American “tentatively” religious symbol—so tentative, so apparently uncommitted, that many have not recognized it as such.

107

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5 E DWA R D HOPPER’S LUMINIST L O N ES O M E ... the effect is this: the arousal of more emotion than can be explained or contained by its evident cause. It is a lonely sensation, a congestion of feeling incapable of articulation, like being tongue-tied with love. Peter Schjeldahl, “Hopperesque”1

... these people might be seeds, tensely waiting the resistless pull of light toward their own unfolding. And why not? Haven’t we all seen miracles? Diane Bonds, “The Life of the Body”2 (re. Hopper’s “People in the Sun”)

That the extraordinary can be something less Than is provided by the clutter of incident.

109

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LONESO M E That it can dwell in the traces of meaningfulness, Those trapezoids, signs of the light by which we see The light we see—”in lumine tuo videbimus Lumine”—(as we might say to the fathering sun what we had once Sung to the fostering mother of wisdom, “In thy radiance we see light”). John Hollander, “Sun in an Empty Room”3

When Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy comes to a treatment of “Means by which the Numinous is expressed in Art,”4 this influential phenomenologist of religion makes observations helpful to the enterprise of descrying spiritual dimensions in works of the modern tradition of Western pictorial art whose subject matter is ostensibly not all religious in the formal sense. His approach makes a convenient point of entry into a discussion of the American lonesome as it appears in the work of Edward Hopper. Critics professionally trained to analyze and to comment insightfully on the formal features of works of art in the Western tradition are absolutely essential both to our initial and to our fullest grasp of particular works and artists. But a meaningful criticism of art will not limit itself to description of a painter’s technique—to his or her manner and means of deploying color, his or her draughtsmanship in constructing the illusion of space through manipulation of planes and perspective, and of drawing upon the iconographic language of the contextualizing tradition. The great painters are those whose skilled treatment of a subject matter we care about, whether or not we are able adequately to verbalize what it is exactly we care about, speaks to some prepossessing issue in our experience of the common human condition everywhere shaped by culture. The formal criticism of 110

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Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome art is of course enriched by appropriate contributions of insight from other disciplines into the subject matter of individual works, especially when these contributions evidence respect for the intimate connection between form and content, between means and matter. Great art is great because it invites and rewards scholarly critique offered from as many disciplined humanistic points of view as may claim interest. Religion is as universal as art. Religionist critics take a natural interest in art as an expression of the human spirit generally, and in individual works as “texts” to be interpreted for their personal testimony. We have characterized the American lonesome as the experience of a feeling-state akin to what Otto describes as that of the “numinous.” The way in which he describes attempts in the arts to suggest if not actually to represent the numinous—by Otto’s definition

it

cannot

be

represented

without

fundamental

distortion—provides a basis for characterizing the lonesomeness in American art and in the immensely influential and popular Hopper in particular. A brief sketch of Otto’s approach to visual art will help before we come to a body of work in which the native imagination of lonesomeness is expressed in memorable visual images to complement the verbal images we have treated in Chapters Two and Three. Otto posits a capacity inherent in the feeling of the “sublime” to stir the additional feeling-perception of the numinous. This can occur in rapt beholders of the monumental and the gothic sublime, he observes, by what he calls the principle of the association of feelings. But expressions of the numinous through the sublime and the gothic are but indirect. They are equally a matter of subjective response on the part of the beholder and of expression on the part of the artist. This is not carefully worked as theory, but Otto is on firmer ground when he comes to specific direct means of expressing the numinous. He lists three such 111

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LONESO M E means: darkness, silence, and emptiness or empty distance. The first, darkness, would not seem helpful when it comes to the American tradition in which light is so often painted for effect— the legacy of nineteenth-century “Luminism” which Hopper arguably extends and enriches. As for silence, Otto reminds us of the long religious tradition of employing cessation of sound, of words in particular, in the ritual context in order to refrain, out of fear or reverence, from use of the wrong words—words of “ill omen” or “ill augury.” He cites from the Old Testament Book of Habbakkuk (2:20): “Yahweh is in His holy Temple, let all the earth keep silent before Him.” And secondly, he cites employment of a more positive “religious” silence—from music he draws his one illustration—as in the “Incarnatus” movement of Bach’s Mass in B minor, where silence constitutes, as “a spontaneous reaction to the feeling of the actual ‘numen praesens’,” the felt presence of the overwhelming “wholly Other.” Strategic manipulation of silence for a spiritual if not actually a formal religious purpose is no less effective for utilizing the traditional negative way (the via negativa) of expressing the inexpressible, the wholly other character of the transconceptual transcendent. This strategy is perhaps to be found also in Emily Dickinson’s image of the landscape “listening.” The image of course recurs in Hopper’s medium of painting when, as we shall see, he returns again and again to the figure of the solitary individual watching and listening in stillness. The third “direct” means in Otto’s schema, by which an artist evokes emptiness or, as he puts it, “empty distance, remote vacancy, ... as it were, the sublime in the horizontal,” he associates

primarily

with

oriental

art,

especially

Chinese

landscapes. But he grants that this effect is to be found in art produced by “us Westerners,” too—that is, by images of the 112

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Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome “silent amplitude of enclosed spaces, courtyards, and vestibules.” The Chinese, he observes, have developed “a special art to paint empty space, to make it palpable,” and, of course, this art has contemplation for its aim. Its purpose is “to impress the observer with the feeling that the void itself is depicted as a subject, is indeed the main subject of the picture.” And this is to be grasped by comparison, as he demonstrates in an earlier chapter, with the function of terms such as “nothingness” and the “void” in the rhetoric of the mystics of the Western tradition. The “void” in the writings of the contemplatives, he observes, is “a negation that does away with every ‘this’ and ‘here,’ in order that the ‘wholly Other’ may become actual.” The notion may be one which will remain

obscurantist

if

not

unintelligible

to

the

literalist

imagination—that is, to the viewer unprepared, unsympathetic to either the project of the mystics or that of certain painters enlisting their limited means to evoke the presence of an unnamed, trans-conceptual Otherness. A critique such as this of Otto’s, possessed by a singular thesis circling round and round the idea of the “numinous,” may not immediately appear relevant to the work of Hopper. One might be all the more dismissive of such an approach were one asked to apply it to the early Hopper, where melancholy, depressive loneliness, darkness, and the oppressive burden of solitude would seem more powerful thematically than any countering, more positive feeling. But we should distinguish the later from the early Hopper, the more conveniently to address the late-maturing vision expressed in the increasing number of works, beginning in the late 1940s, in which he paints figures whose attention is drawn in a flood of low-angled sunlight to its source beyond the frame of the painting. This is to suggest that Hopper’s inner subject matter evolved as he grew older. The impetus of his project, his aim as an artist shifted noticeably as 113

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LONESO M E his view of life and his personal needs evolved. The shift can be described in several ways, from several points of view, surely raising disagreements in the process—he is a great artist after all. As Robert Coles has observed, “Hopper’s paintings lend themselves especially well to the viewer’s inclinations—in the tradition of Rorschach cards.”5 But the feeling in the paintings from, say, 1949 through 1963, is a feeling that invites a critique such as Otto’s, limited and inflexibly theory-driven though it may be. The mysterious complex of feeling in these later paintings invites interpretation which probes for evidences of the numinous in the painter’s now classic images of the American lonesome, as we have characterized it in in the preceding chapters. Hopper scarcely needs introduction. His images and their influence are everywhere, on book jackets, in tributes paid by poets, in posters and reproductions, in the look of American settings constructed by cinematographers, as well as in museum galleries thoughout the world. Hopper’s version of American urban ennui and alienation, its haunted spaciousness and penchant for nostalgia, the experience of marginality in an often cruelly competitive society, and, most of all, its brooding loneliness, is so distinct and so well-traveled that he has become, more than an icon, a patron saint of the American century. Hopper is the melancholy “shadow” in the interiority of the dynamic American ego. Response to the body of his work has given us a new word, “Hopperesque,” by which, when he coined it, Peter Schjeldahl meant “not a style but a particular face of reality—which we would feel even if Hopper had never lived, though more obscurely,” like the term “Kafkaesque.”6 The Hopperesque describes no childlike face of reality. In Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis reminds us that the accumulated experience of life, as a manifold of suffering and triumph, of frustration, defeat, and occasional victories, alone slowly builds 114

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Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome character and depth into the innocent tabula rasa face with which we were born—we wear the traces of our experience in our faces. The Hopperesque captures a layered complex of immediately recognizable (or projected) mature states of feeling, of mind, and of what we mean by the “soul.” The most difficult component of these states to write about, as one would expect, is that which derives from Hopper’s (and America’s) inheritance of latent Emersonian idealism, and especially its insistence upon an affirmative, transcendental underwriting of the American experience, whatever the local setting, rural or urban. Gail Levin, Hopper’s biographer, assures us that Hopper “read Emerson assiduously and sought to express the Emersonian vision.”7 However, mixed with other elements and influences, this wistfully affirmative “religious” component of the Hopperesque in large part helps to explain the seductive, communicative power of his work, the quality in it which invites viewers to read themselves into his ideographs of common life in the twentieth century. Those who write on Hopper understandably find it difficult to put into words their perception of this affirmative spiritual ingredient to be “felt” in his images of loneliness transfigured or nearing transfiguration in lonesomeness. But their occasional efforts to account for this element provide valuable corroboration. These help us begin reaching for a needed fuller grasp of the maturing vision in the later Hopper, realized as that vision is in a visual language, in a medium distinctly apart from the medium of verbal discourse. Schjeldahl’s review of the exhibition, “Edward Hopper: Light Years,” at the Hirschl & Adler Gallery in the fall of 1988, is perhaps the most celebrated, if, also at the same time, one of the most free-wheeling, impressionistic assessments of the artist to date. It is also one of the best. In this sparkling review, entitled “Hopperesque,” Schjeldahl classifies the artist as “more a 115

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LONESO M E naturalist than a realist, and a symbolist above all.” Noting Hopper’s love of the movies and of movie theaters, crediting him with an understanding of “the metaphysic of film like no other artist until, perhaps, Andy Warhol,” Schjeldahl compares the painter’s procedure as a draftsman—characteristically he began his preliminary sketches by drawing a simple rectangle—with his own response to “a blank movie screen when I’m in the mood for a movie.” In both that enabling rectangle of Hopper’s and Schjeldahl’s blank screen the critic projects a “terrain teeming with memory and anticipation, rife with spiritual possibility.” He reads the sense of isolation throughout the paintings as “always defiantly upbeat,” citing as an instance the mood conveyed in “Gloucester Street,” in which he feels heat and energy in the image of a deserted, ordinary-looking house. And he insists that the feeling conveyed in Hopper’s typically isolated figures cannot adequately be described, as so often it has, as one of yearning— the mood captured is always compounded of more elements than merely those of “disconsolateness and desire.” For Schjeldahl, it is the “visionary intensity” in the artist that will always confound a reductive, glib analysis. The “tough-minded” Hopper presents his images with marked “candor about the artificial, theatrical nature of images,” but he is equally capable of giving us, as in “Early Sunday Morning” (1930), a row of inner-city storefronts “light-transfigured.” And what the critic writes about the fleeting moment of excruciating, elevated vision in Hopper is worth remembering: The Hopperesque pertains to a glimpse that burns into memory like a branding iron. Anyone who has done much living knows situations in which mood and moment produce a spark, and some utterly neutral thing is permanently changed. 116

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Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome Schjeldahl illustrates this contention with a personal experience of a moment the character of which he recalls as in some sense “sacred”—a moment unanticipated, bringing instant relief to the emotional distress he was suffering at the time. He observes: To lose one’s soul to a vision is no more communicable than any other neurological glitch: it might make a needle jump on some brain-monitoring device. To reel one’s soul back in with the vision attached, preserving both in a formal order, is genius. Schjeldahl credits Hopper with having succeeded as a painter in accomplishing what Yeats wanted poetry to accomplish in making its “raid on the inarticulate.”8 This moment in the common American experience—the moment of transfiguring lonesomeness captured so well in the late Hopper—is also noted by the strong-minded critic Robert Hughes, who, in turn, employs a slightly different language in describing it. “The boredom and solitude that afflicted” the painter, he observes (touched occasionally by appreciation of the sexualized female figure found in the master), ... sometimes transcends itself when it is projected through the human image. It can even lead to a sense of epiphany, as when the blond woman in the open blue robe, her fine breasts taking the morning light like the touch of another hand above her own, appears in the dark doorway of “High Noon” (1949), like some secular Madonna drawn from sleep by a distant angelic voice.9 For Hughes, the “Hopper effect” has “become part of the very grain and texture of American experience.” Furthermore, the 117

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LONESO M E painter’s “quintessential realism” consists in something other than any “persuasive content,” such as political ideology, patriotism, or class conflict. Hughes does not say exactly in what this “realism” consists. But he intimates it in the direction he takes, for instance, when he describes the matter presented in “Early Sunday Morning,” whose effect is not portentous, as the “metaphysical” cityscapes of Giorgio De Chirico intentionally were. You are in the real world, but it’s a stranger world than you imagined. The screwdriver slips under the lid of reality and lifts it a crack, no more. What’s inside? As early Auden: The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cups opens A lane to the land of the dead.10 His predecessors in the nineteenth century had painted the landscapes and mythicized figures of the frontier, writes Hughes. But Hopper sees “that the old frontier had moved inward and now [lies] within the self, so that the man of action, extroverted and self-naming, [is] replaced by the solitary watcher.”11 Now in Hopper the American loneliness visited by lonesomeness reappears under the approach of twentieth-century introspective “existentialisms.” Tantalizingly, other writers testify to the transfiguring lonesome expressed here and there in the painter’s work. Ivo Kranzfelder, in Edward H. Hopper: Visions of Reality (1998), notes the “quasi-religious tendency in many of his pictures,” and suggests that “Empty Room by the Sea” (1957) conveys the very “oceanic” feeling that the friend of Freud’s had proposed as a source for universal religious feeling, a proposal which Freud 118

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Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome notes only to dismiss as unscientific in Civilisation and its Discontents (1930).12 In a Foreword to Edward Hopper and the American Imagination (1995), David A. Ross cites “isolation and transcendence” as the themes which “continue to evoke a powerful American mythology.”13 Deborah Lyons, in the Introduction to this interesting, hybrid volume, observes that the Hopper who assures us “that we may yet find redemption in the sunlight” is a “master of portraying our ultimate loneliness.” And further, she proposes that, seeming to “seek consolation in the light,” as they do, his figures are subsumed into a vision in which the mundane “suddenly becomes cause for epiphany.”14 The same volume includes a poem, “Sun in an Empty Room” (titled in response to Hopper’s painting of 1963), contributed by John Hollander. Hollander, an urban poet of great sophistication, has absorbed into his own imagination and occasionally wanted to defend the neglected complexity of the statements projected in Hopper’s images of urban solitudes against crudely reductive interpretations. In a passage in this poem echoing Wallace Stevens’ meditative “Sunday Morning,” Hollander touches urbanely upon the religious, or perhaps substitute religious, dimension of Hopper’s lonesome—such a room, stripped of all furniture, sunlit, might provoke us to reflect That the extraordinary can be something less Than is provided by the cluster of incident. That it can dwell in the traces of meaningfulness, Those trapezoids, signs of the light by which we see The light we see—”in lumine tuo videbemus Lumen”—(as we might say to the fathering sun what we had once Sung to the fostering mother of wisdom, “In thy radiance we see light”). 119

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LONESO M E The original quotation is drawn from Psalm 36:9 in the Latin Bible, of course—there the notion is that believers are given the light in creation by or through which they are enabled to “see” the greater light which is God—but the point here is that it carries indisputable religious overtones. In a review of Lloyd Goodrich’s Edward Hopper (1970), Hollander in 1972 advocated reassessment of a painter not yet fully understood as “a new American visionary” in the tradition of Emerson.15 This element in the painter has still not received it due. In a poem, “Sunday A.M. Not in Manhattan,” responding to the brick store-front painting from 1930, Hollander again addresses the dimension of the something extra in Hopper’s vision. In the medium of own poetic language, the poet here reads the image couched in symbolic visual language as an expression of that state of mind that Otto describes as infused by a sense experiencing the “wholly Other:” Lying longest, most still, Along the unsigned blank Of sidewalk, the narrowed Finger of shade left by Something, thicker than trees, Taller than these streetlamps, Somewhere off to the right Perhaps, and unlike an Intrusion of ourselves, Unseen, long, is claiming It all, the scene, the whole.16 What is this “Something, thicker than trees/Taller than these steeetlamps” off to the right, out of the frame of the painting, that casts the long shadow on the sidewalk, between the fire hydrant 120

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Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome and the storefronts, all the way to the edge of the painting on the left and beyond, Hollander asks rhetorically. This unseen “vertical” is not of determinable human dimension, it signals no “Intrusion of ourselves.” The poet does not speculate as to what may account for the mysterious shadow. Simply, he sees it as the single element in the design that most encapsulates the mystery of the “something more” with which Hopper has infused the painting as a whole. There is no accounting for whatever casts this shadow. Its presence would certainly seem to confirm Schjeldahl’s contention that Hopper, in the final analysis, is a “symbolist.” This line of shadow symbolizes the “wholly Otherness” of Otto, echoing the shadows cast into Plato’s cave by the light of Eternity. It marks the transitory personal experience of the numinous that dilates a depressive lonely state into the cherished moment of the fulsome American lonesome. The taciturn Hopper apparently confided to friends and interviewers very little of his intentions with respect to the matter of his paintings. He committed even less to the written record: here and there a word in a letter to a friend, rarely even a brief, formal piece of writing by way of explanation of his work. But one such “introduction,” fewer than three pages in length and gnomic in style, prefaces the American Artists Group Monograph No. 8 devoted to his work in 1945. It reveals little of a man who was notoriously reticent in the company of others, and who, as he wrote to a friend, believed that “so much of every art is an expression of the subconscious.” (Most of the important qualities an artist puts into a work of art, he had observed, are put there “unconsciously,” while “little of importance” is contributed by the “conscious intellect.”17) However this is to be interpreted, six years later Hopper was to write that his aim “has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature.” The emphasis should fall on the word 121

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LONESO M E “impression,” for he goes on to speak of the routine work of presenting

his

“sensations,”

and

then

of

two

particular

constraints under which the work goes forward, that of “the technical difficulties of painting,” and that of “the limitations of personality.” He aligns his own purpose with those of “the great painters,” whose aim was “to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.” He firmly rejects mere “decoration” and the mere “truthful representation” of extreme realists in favor of painting of a “more human meaning and a wider scope,” produced in “renewed wonder and humility.” Interestingly, when Hopper cites an example of the old masters whose universality (“fundamental truth”) ensures that their work is “as modern as Cezanne,” the old master he cites is Giotto. For Giotto is one of the first great painters in whom the expression of emotion on human faces becomes convincing and whose paintings, at the same time, express profound conviction of the world as sacred.18 American art historians are well aware of the linkage Barbara Novak has posited between Hopper as a “quietist,” conceptual painter and the nineteenth-century heritage of Luminism. The case for the lonesome in Hopper, as we have defined it in preceding chapters, is strengthened by Novak’s argument for the influence upon the artist by these precedent painters of light and calm who, as she claims, established a distinct tradition for subsequent American artists to appropriate. Her view of Hopper as “heir to the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with light,” when amplified, enables us to read Hopper, in addition, as heir to the nineteenth-century landscape painters’ absorption of Emerson’s view of nature as revelatory of transcendence as well. Her critique points to a way of grasping the Hopperesque as a particular “face of reality” in which we are invited to discern a stilled, purposeful watching and listening for the ecstatic.19 122

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Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome Over thirty years ago Novak boldly held up the heritage of Luminism for inspection as “one of the most truly indigenous styles in the history of American art, a way of seeing so intimately related to the artist’s idea of the world and his relation to it that it can be identified not only in landscape painting but also in still life, genre, and portraiture.” Luminism is to be found especially in the works of Fitzhugh Lane, Martin Heade Johnson, and John Kensett, she argued, but it also “touched upon and flavored the works of countless painters who worked ostensibly in other forms”.20 It was a way of painting in which the artist strove to leave on his finished canvas no visible brush strokes to draw attention to his artifice, but rather strove to become anonymous— that is, to “disappear” as though absorbed into the matter of the scene represented. It was a way of painting the “thing” itself to suggest that the thing be viewed as transparent to the Divine.21 Again and again Novak appealed to the influence of Emerson upon these painters, beginning with those of the Hudson River School—the Emerson of the essay “Nature” who recommends looking upon nature “with a supernatural eye” to discern “spirit in the fact.” This is the Emerson implicit as an influence, for instance, upon Thomas Cole, upon both his landscape paintings and his “Essay on American Scenery” of 1836. This is the Emerson who, as he tells it famously in “Nature,” while crossing a bare common alone at twilight, thinking nothing in particular, suddenly experienced a piercing epiphany, “enjoyed a perfect exhilaration” and was “glad to the brink of fear.” In the Luminist mode, wrote Novak, the anonymity of the painter’s role is like the transparency of the eyeball into which, for rhetorical effect, Emerson tells us he was “changed” during the instant of that exhilaration. Novak ranges widely in her examination of contributing sources for the Luminist mode in American painting, from the introduction of photography and the adoption of geometrical 123

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LONESO M E abstraction, to mid-nineteenth-century interest in spiritualism, mathematics, and the “recourse to the mechanical as a tool for measure.” Not only what she calls “Emersonian reason,” but the sort of “faith” as was expressed in spiritualism, Novak observed, seem as “pertinent to the spiritual and mystical properties of Luminism as does measure to its concrete properties.” But apparently too few art historians have shared her interest in the cultural contextualizing of this “alternative tradition” of Luminism to have answered her appeal for further research.22 Neglect of the “religious” sources, for individual painters and in twentieth- as well as in nineteenth-century American culture, and for this distinct quietist strain in the tradition, seems especially regrettable. Against a backdrop of secularized cultural resistance to the formally religious, perhaps we could contribute to the filling of this gap by addressing the neglected spiritual and mystical dimension of the Luminist mode in terms of the transfigured lonesome. As Helen Vendler, speaking rhetorically, has identified a trust in an inner, “Quaker light” in the poetry of A.R. Ammons,23 so it might help to liken the spiritual element in the Luminists (as it passes into the stillness of Hopper) to a reverent, expectant “Quaker silence,” without pressing the echoed particular purposes of the “silence” invoked in that faith tradition. Writing on Luminism, Novak observed that nineteenthcentury modes persisted in the twentieth century “not so much as conventions of form as conventions of attitude.” The “precise and conceptual” quietist mode as practiced by “many Hudson River men, as well as by such Luminosity as Lane and Heade,” she observed, is to be found in painters of this century “though disguised under new styles and associated with different ambitions and intentions.” She applied this specifically to Hopper, who emphasized overtones of Luminist mystery still further in dealing with the almost depopulated city. Into the 124

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Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome silent world of Luminism, now transposed to grim urban architecture [his landscapes, she adds, are “painted with the same neutrality and indeterminacy as the city”; his landscapes are “urbanized”]—he introduced the weighted geometries of Homer and the unsettling spatial shifts from classic parallelism found throughout the nineteenth century. He also shared Luminism’s concern with unbroken light ... and with the atmosphere of early morning and evening, when few people stir. These are Hopper’s American qualities, not to be confused with the “American Scene” context that still is occasionally attached to his work.... [He exchanges] the isolation of man in nature—a recurring theme in Luminist modes—for the more pathetic isolation in a man-made environment.24 To re-fit Hopper into this alternative tradition over thirty years after Novak published her not undisputed views, fraught with ambiguities though the initiative must be, enables deeper penetration into the matter of his art. This is not to say that other elements, other moods and feelings, and other interests conscious and unconscious, do not figure in the matter of his art. It was Novak, after all, who has invited scholars in disciplines other than the American Art History to contribute to our understanding of the work, and she is right. It is simply to say that the inchoate “religious” dimension in the work invites and rewards careful, balanced exploration. Non-art-historian, religionist critics, remaining sympathetic to Hopper as a technical craftsman, can enrich the mix of views needed in the final analysis by offering interpretation of his subject matter viewed as the personal testimony of a modest visionary profoundly in touch with a particular re-assertive depth in the American psyche. The lonesome in Hopper is expressed in his handling of light and his arrangement of human figures. Ten paintings in 125

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LONESO M E particular form the core canon of his contribution to the American lonesome. They are, in chronological order: “Early Sunday Morning” (1930), “High Noon” (1949), “Cape Cod Morning” (1950), “Rooms by the Sea” (1951), “Morning Sun” (1952),

“Sunlight

on

Brownstones”

(1956),

“Second

Story

Sunlight” (1960), “People in the Sun” (1960), “Woman in the Sun” (1961), and “Sun in an Empty Room” (1963). Ten is a completely arbitrary number. Other works could be added to this list, or subtracted from it, as taste and judgement vary from individual to individual. We offer it only as strategic means of focusing the issue. Most of these works are from later in the artist’s career. None of them achieve their effects through use of the darker tones he borrowed from film noir. Most of them include visual comment on the relation of nature to the architecture of an urban world or, at least, of the man-made environment, in which individuals by themselves or with others gaze introspectively at nothing in particular in arrested moments of calm. In all of them the sun from beyond the frame and from varying angles and heights casts into the frame a quality of light that poets and critics alike have been at pains to describe. What Novak discerned in nineteenth-century Luminist light, that it “largely derives its special quality from its containment within clearly defined geometries and sometimes, too, from the opposition of its brilliance to the ultra-clarification of the foreground detail,” is of course also to be found in Hopper. And though one would be hard pressed to posit Emerson as a direct source for the “meaning” of Hopper’s matter, it is not inappropriate to invoke the cultural inheritance of Emersonian idealism, attenuated and blended with newer currents as it would have been for Hopper’s generation. As Novak reminded us, among the many Emersons that have been invoked to authorize this or that view of the American experience, some of 126

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Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome these “Emersons” manifestly conflicting with others, is the Emerson for whom the visible creation is “the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world,” and for whom matter is an extension of mind. For this Emerson, Novak observed, “light was the first of painters,” and “a jet of pure light” is “the reappearance of the original soul.”25 We do Hopper a disservice not to explore his symbolism of light in these works, in some part, as an implicit proposal of the possibility of immediate experience of an unnamed, unnameable transcendent reality. And when we take this approach, the human figures arranged in the formal designs of these works begin to assume roles in a kind of theater of the numinous, or at least of waiting for the numinous, bringing us back to Rudolf Otto. Hopper’s people, watching, listening, whether together, as in “Sunlight on Brownstones” or “People in the Sun,” or apart, as in “Morning Sun” or “Woman in the Sun,” give themselves to the light, in whose otherworldly quality—the sun is always out of the frame—they seem ready to encounter, if not already encountering the “wholly Other.” In their inner privacy, behind the masks they wear—Hopper’s much noted “voyeurism” does not extend to the inner condition of their souls—these figures may indeed be experiencing the numinous moment. In their common passivity, any one of them may indeed be passing into or

out

of

what

Abraham

“naturalistically” as a “peak

Maslow moment.”26

wants

to

describe

Like Kierkegaard’s

Knight of Faith, they may indeed be making the “movements of Faith,” or of something like faith, without showing any visible evidence of it. These are not individuated people in their own right; they are extensions of the artist. Most of them are cast in his mold: WASP, old-line Northeast seaboard. These people will not wear their lonesome epiphanies on their sleeves. Susan Platt, a feminist critic skeptic, certainly has it right, if only partly 127

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LONESO M E right—her refusal of generosity marks a critical blind spot— when she observes: His paintings depict a white Anglo-Saxon upper middle class world of repressed masculinity, rather than the superhero pioneer, politician or worker. His male figures are glum introverts in static poses.27 Platt sees part of what is there on the canvasses, but she does not see, nor does not tell us she sees, all of it. Hopper speaks not only about but through his female figures absorbed in the light (such as “Cape Cod Morning,” “Morning Sun,” “Woman in the Sun”), as well as through his male figures. He would not have the effect on us that he has did he not address especially in these “core” lonesome works a subject matter that speaks knowingly to the ambiguity of individual spiritual experience, whether men’s or women’s, latent or realized in consciousness, in a secularized, materialistic cultural context. These works project Schjeldahl’s mirror-like “terrain teeming with memory and anticipation, rife with spiritual possibilities.” Schjeldahl and Hollander have applied the term “visionary” to the artist, and of course it is apt. It is safe to mean by “visionary” a seeing inwardly and a seeing of what others of less creative imaginative power do not “see” nor are able to see with the naked eye. In these ten Hoppers especially, the artist seems to be seeing as a visionary might, as William Blake would put it, not with but through the eye. To this kind of vision, prompted by spiritual if not formally religious need or concern in Hopper, Hollander pays tribute, as we have seen, pointing to “Sunday Morning” and “Sun in an Empty Room” for illustration. Both works are worthy of further comment, as is “High Noon” (1949), the work Hughes singles out as illustrative of the epiphanic moment in Hopper. 128

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Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome And it is certainly worth pointing out the implicit traditional religious echo in the otherwise straightforward title and treatment of the subject of “Woman in the Sun.” The allusion, whether or not consciously intended, is to a subject visited countless times in earlier centuries of Western art, in numerous interpretative illustrations of the woman “clothed with the sun,” threatened by the dragon, often imaged as the Virgin either pregnant or handing her child to an angel for safe-keeping, in Revelation 12. But we will look briefly at two other works, “Morning Sun” and “People in the Sun,” by way of establishing the visionary lonesome as a postLuminist component of the Hopperesque. Unlike the woman in “Cape Cod Morning”—both are modeled on his wife, Josephine Nivinson—this figure in solitude is seated, at rest, muscles relaxed, in a pose she could easily hold without tiring for the length of time it might take for the quiet mood upon her to pass or for her private thoughts to run their course. She sits up, clasping her knees, upon a bed as though rising from sleep in the earliest morning sunlight breaking over the city rooftops beyond the open window. The bed does not appear to be a double, marriage bed, but a single bed, her own. As her sleep has been entirely her own, so also is her waked consciousness drawn to attention. And this consciousness is the focal matter of the painting, captured in her steady, interested but expressionless gaze into, one imagines, a “beyond” within. She is seeing what she looks at, the sunlight over the rooftops, but she seems to be simultaneously seeing into and through it. We assume she is seeing inwardly, and that her gaze only halfregisters the cityscape in its detail beyond the window. Her material vision has become a grid, a screen upon which she is projecting the inwardness implied so insistently by the painter. The light is not quite realistic, of course, nor is the construction of space inside the room. Hopper the draftsman has 129

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LONESO M E placed the light and the shadow where he wishes to achieve the visual effects desired. (Enamoured of the sexual female body, as he was, he could not resist throwing light, unrealistically it would seem, on the woman’s glowing upper thigh.) But the angles, planes, and the cast of shadows are realistic enough to meet the demands of verisimilitude. The face is intentionally reduced to a mask from the more detailed, personalized face of his wife clearly identifiable in at least one of the preparatory sketches (included in Platt’s review of Levin’s Biography). This is a face signaling a person “lost in thought,” a person represented as a site of something more than a naturalistic, merely “psychological” inner experience. The viewer is invited by the enchanted serenity of the moment to read into the mystery of her consciousness the experience of some form of higher consciousness, however mixed it may be with other, naturalistic elements. And, to be sure, Hopper draws implicitly upon the age-old symbolism of the sun as representative of divinity, in a visual echo, as it were, of the day-dreaming meditation of the woman on the terrace in Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” (imagining, at one point, a ritual “devotion to the sun,/Not as a god but as a god might be,/Naked among them, like a savage source”). The absence of other furniture and wall-hangings in this stripped bedroom heightens and focuses the “metaphysical” quality of the image, linking it by mood also to the heroic, spiritually lonesome poems of Emily Dickinson discussed in Chapter Two. The five figures in “People in the Sun,” fully clothed in a public place, three men and two women, one of whose faces is obscured, sit in equally relaxed repose facing the same sun out of the frame to the right. The sun-flooded terrace upon which they sit is shaped, in the design, to point in the direction of the sun, too. Although the man in the rear to the left reads, bent forward at the waist, eyes lowered to his book (the arrangement of his 130

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Edward Hopper’s Luminist Lonesome body helping to unify the lines in the design), the other two men and the woman in the hat look in the direction of the sun but, again, seemingly at nothing in particular. They gaze off into a landscape of the vast open space of Western prairie and distant mountain range purpled in what one guesses to be late afternoon light. The purpose of their passive presence, without conversation, without evidence of diversion by eating, drinking, or smoking, eyes open, formally dressed, is inexplicable on the evidence presented in the painting. Hopper invites us to speculate on the “something more”—Hollander calls it the “sense of something beyond”28—suggested by these combined elements. The matter exceeds our limited means of explaining what these people might be doing together and experiencing individually. It remains a mystery. But the image tantalizes. We read it as we can. These figures are watching and listening as though waiting for something to happen, and as though “lost in thought” like the figure in “Morning Sun.” The space in the painting separates each one of them from the other as it separates the vertical wall on the left and the floating terrace itself from the natural world stretching to the horizon. “Individuals in the Sun” would serve equally well as a title. They are at rest from the roles each ordinarily assumes in the complex business of modern urban life, as signaled by the clothes they wear. Perhaps they are joined, by the common space they occupy, in recovering from that quotidian business to which they will return following the duration of this static repose. Whatever we speculate, the “something more” in the image remains. The solitude of isolation even in a crowd remains, perhaps even loneliness, too. But the latent transfiguring moment of

lonesomeness

readies—it

could

fall

upon

one

or

all

unexpected—and it may fill them, one by one, as it may touch the engrossed viewer as well. As Diane Bonds speculates aptly in 131

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LONESO M E “The Life of the Body,” the poem, excerpted at the head of the chapter, in which she responds imaginatively to the painting: ... these people might be seeds, tensely waiting the resistless pull of light toward their own unfolding. And why not? Haven’t we all seen miracles? Both these paintings stand in the American visionary tradition, and both inherit essential elements of Luminism. But it is Hopper’s personal stamp on them that invites a revisionist, clarifying description of their matter as that of the American lonesome welling up in transfigured loneliness. The feeling of approach to the numinous in these works justifies the neutral religious language used in this chapter. There is more in Hopper and in the Hopperesque than the visionary lonesome, but this religious-like lonesomeness is what we now need to feel, to see and to affirm in the artist. But we now turn to related fieldwork in the mass-entertainment medium of country music, in which verbal appeal to the lonesome is a stock in trade, if not to say a lucrative franchise.

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6 C O UN T RY L O N ES O M E

If country “owns” one American theme above all others, then that theme is surely ground-level loneliness. Cecelia Tichi, High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (1994)1

The silence of a falling star Lights up a purple sky, And as I wonder where you are, I’m so lonesome I could cry. Hank Williams, 19492

Like a stray dog on the highway, Like a hobo in the rain, Like the long, mournful whistle

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LONESO M E Of a faraway train, I have known that lonesome feeling That comes right before the dawn. Hillary Kantner and Even Stevens, 19893

As we suggested in the Introduction, the American meaning of “lonesomeness” is a process of definition through evolving language

use.

Dictionary

definitions

or,

rather,

published

attempts at such, however, are hardly sufficient evidence for this state of affairs, in which, for example, the word seems to mean now this and now that in differing discursive contexts for differing

users

of

the

language.

We

have

shown

how

lonesomeness in its distinctively American, arguably religious sense has appeared in passages of American poetry and prose. And we have argued that it appears in the corroborating pictorial language evolved in the Luminist tradition of American painting and, in particular, in the work of the great twentieth-century inheritor of that tradition, Edward Hopper. It remains to address the

linguistic-poetic

uses

of

lonesomeness

in

the

one

contemporary, popular cultural form in which, more than any other, the continuing recourse to the word on the part of song writers begs notice and sympathetic interpretation. We turn to the medium of country music. By “country” we mean here the rich song tradition in which vocalization

is

most

often

accompanied

by

instruments

traditionally found among musicians isolated from high-brow symphony orchestras and big bands in urban centers: guitar, banjo, mandolin, harmonica—add the violin but call it a fiddle and, occasionally (considering “gospel” and Tin Pan Alley roots), the honky-tonk piano. The styles and tastes of the diverse, evolved forms of country are informed variously by a rich, 134

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Country Lonesome motley heritage, as befits a populist, people’s music. We do not proceed here as specialists in music, however. Our immediate interest lies primarily in country lyrics as distinct from the sounds of country made by the instrumental and vocalizing techniques of country artists in performance, although of course the one is virtually inseparable from the other. Untrained as musicologists, we are limited to observing that the lonesome in country, and in the folk and gospel traditions it inherits, tends to fall into the minor as distinct from the major key. And in order to make the lonesome sound on his banjo or fiddle, a performer of Appalachian mountain music will tune it differently in order to achieve the tonal mode of the melancholy. Beyond making such a general observation, or another like it, for instance, that the bluegrass giant of a previous generation, Bill Monroe, is legendary for the “high lonesome” effect of his falsetto somewhat akin to yodeling, we are not competent to elaborate. To our kind of untrained, unspecialized ear—doubtless there are many country fans like us—we must note simply that where the lonesome sound of country is concerned, we think we know it when we hear it. Although my probing of American lonesomeness began before the publication of Cecelia Tichi’s sustained critical (and adoring) study of country music, High Lonesome (1994), her work has certainly stimulated our own, narrower, differently focused exploration. She, too, pays tribute to classic literary expressions in Whitman, Mark Twain, and Hopper, if briefly, while concentrating upon an extensive catalog of country artists writing and singing of savoury, melancholy states of mind and heart: lost, alone, bereft. But Tichi is primarily occupied by drawing thematic parallels between emotional utterances across a spectrum in the country medium and similar expressions in classic, canonized American literature. Her aim is to win for the sprawling body of 135

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LONESO M E country lyrics something like the kind of critical acclaim habitually bestowed upon highbrow literary art. Her book is encyclopedic and provocative especially in its many suggestive asides. We will return in the concluding chapter to further reflection on the implications, from the point of view of the present study, of observations of Tichi’s such as this: Emotional life in America, according to our artists and analysts, is much less a storybook conclusion to ‘the pursuit of happiness’ than it is, all too often, a face-toface encounter with loneliness. The artists of country music have confronted this issue directly and in a wide range of styles over decades, ...4 Gospel, hillbilly, western, folk, ballad imported by the early Scottish and English settlers, popular Tin Pan Alley songs—these are the scattered roots of country, or, rather, the strands of precedent traditions twisted into the braid of country as we know it now. But there is another influence, that of African-American music, and before we turn to illustrating examples of the country lonesome, we must address again the question of the relation of the lonesome to the blues. Black and white cultures, co-existing side by side and inter-mingled, especially in the South for more than three centuries, have unquestionably influenced each other mutually, dynamically, in some ways easy to trace and in some not so easy to trace. (Historians of religion in the American South, for instance, have still not shown us as sufficiently as they would like the many ways in which the respective styles of black and white hybrid and folk Christianities in the region have dramatically inter-penetrated each other over the generations, producing the present-day forms of worship, belief, and practice

136

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Country Lonesome we observe today.) The rhythms of African-American music, from the “spirituals” to latter-day “blues,” of course have here and there shaped forms of country. The ensuing question to be raised again—we broached it in Chapter One—pertinent to the argument of this monograph, is whether when we address American lonesomeness in “country” we should not also include its cousin, the feeling-state so powerfully expressed in the blues as performed by African-American artists. The answer to this question—that is, the answer appropriate to our purpose here—is simple. Socially and politically, the blues are generated from and speak to an American culture separate and markedly different from that of the European-American immigrants and their descendants. Not only, by contrast with the blues, does country lonesome emphasize a story where the blues, remembering the African folk lyric, emphasize thematic variation upon an image—as Tichi notes5—not only, that is, is country marked fundamentally by narrative ballad form while the blues are not—but the culture of country and, in particular, of country lonesome, though related to the blues, is shaped by a significantly different politics. The music derives from and speaks to a different racial experience and to a differently disenchanted poor working class. And so the immediate feeling content expressed is differently framed. Country lonesome is but one strand in a weave of music that does indeed complain of political injustice and of relegation to repressive, demeaning social status in a land of plenty. But it does so within a social-political milieu different from that which has given birth to the “blues” associated with the African-American experience. The achievement of authentic blues in performance, of course, is to express not only a determined resistance to degradation and loss, but, in addition, a celebration of the resilient self and of a community

137

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LONESO M E equipped by spiritual resources rooted in both imported African and acquired European religious traditions to carry on against steep odds. This achievement perhaps somewhat echoes the unbidden experience of the triumphantly redeeming lonesome. But the cultural matrix in which the blues function, for our purposes, is different from that of the dominant, more privileged European-Americans inhibited perhaps by class and similarly by meager

opportunity,

but

not

by

legal,

political,

social

discrimination based upon race. The blues may bear a family resemblance to lonesome songs in a wide sense. But inevitably the meanings, the significations of country lonesome are different, for our purposes—categorically different. The approach to the transcendent differs qualitatively. Although these two forms have “spiritual” (“transcending”) elements in common, although both are thoroughly North American, and though what makes them different deserves more thorough exploration than we can offer here, in sum, the one is white and the other black, and we are here concerned with the former. The trove of country lonesome songs in itself speaks volumes. There are so many! What reader will not immediately think of examples? Perhaps the most famous of all—the poetry in which so many country songwriters have been trying to emulate in the fifty-some years since it was recorded in 1949—is the Hank Williams song we know by its resonant last line, “I’m so lonesome I could cry.” The entire exhibition room in the Country Music Hall of Fame Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, devoted to the story of and memorabilia from Williams’ career as a country icon, is testimony to the secure place he holds as a giant of the business. His signature lonesome song is an example par excellence of a first-among-equals in the sub-genre of country, in which a delicate balance is struck between the unrelievably, unbearably lonely and the implicit assertion of a resilience “in 138

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Country Lonesome spite of” which, through the aesthetic pleasure taken in the lyrical voicing (and the hearing) of the words, lifts the clearly stated, depressive lonely into an expression of the redemptive lonesome. Fans of country music and of lonesome songs in particular may resist an interpretation which perceives in this sub-genre something like what Rudolf Otto describes as experience of the “numinous.” To apply Otto’s phenomenology of the holy to this expressive material and to Hank Williams’ classic song in the first instance might to some seem inappropriate. But the song is so beautifully and so sparely worded, and the images are so bell-like in their clarity and so luminous, that it lends itself to comparison with what Otto likens to an ideogram “covering” an original feeling-perception too deep at first for words—a feeling-perception not of transcendence as such (hardly, it would seem, although we cannot know this), but of what one can imagine was an overwhelming flood of feeling lost in and vulnerable to the “mysterium tremendum” in the human awareness of bottomless self-consciousness. The song, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s term,6 offers a haunting “objective correlative” for an emotion combining generous affective response to the world’s natural beauty, childlike fear of the unknown in the dark of night in the absence of human touch, and a strengthening solace in the hopeful prospect of sharing it with some other. “I’m so lonesome I could cry” is a country elegy in which beauty rescues the writer, the singer, and the hearer from a passing depressive loss “of the will to live.” The song is a miniature nocturne sharing family resemblance with more sustained, highbrow works of Chopin, Whistler, and Keats. The “lonesome whippoorwill,” the “midnight train whining low,” the personification in the projection that a robin might “weep,” the turning of autumn leaves in their natural cycle toward death, the “silence of a falling star,” the “purple sky,” and the charged word “wonder” in “as I wonder where you are,” all collaborate to 139

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LONESO M E express the transfigured loneliness of the native lonesome. The affecting extremity of Williams’ lonesome speaks the extremity of emotion itself, as complex as it is quiet. And it finds redemptive release in the telling. Unlike the whippoorwill, Williams is not “too blue,” too depressed to “cry” (to write and to sing). He is so lonesome he could cry the tears prompted by a fulsome oceanic feeling-perception resembling what Abraham Maslow, whom I will discuss in the concluding chapter, persuasively describes as those regenerative “peak moments” which occasionally interrupt the routine flow of our quotidien life experience. Other examples of the country lonesome abound. Another song in the treasury of the native folk tradition deserves special mention as a progenitor, another classic source for subsequent variations in this sub-genre: “Lonesome Valley.” No one knows with certainty its provenance in the nineteenth century. Its writer unknown, it is more likely the product of many hands. It comes to us in the oral tradition, and we do not know whether it originated in African or in European-American cultures—both have taken it to heart. It asserts the obligatory cultural individualism both of white Americans moving into the daunting spaciousness of the frontier as it also reflects the adapted rites of passage of Christianized blacks following instruction to “come through ‘ligion’” in solitary quest of authenticating personal conversion experience:7 You got to walk that lonesome valley, You got to go there by yourself, Ain’t nobody here can go there for you, You got to go there by yourself. The gospel song movement accompanying the emergence in the nineteenth century of popular evangelical revivals utilizing an 140

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Country Lonesome array of techniques to elicit response took to “Lonesome Valley” as a vehicle for the stock challenge to the individual in need of conversion or re-affirmation of faith. The “valley” is a metaphor for the site or, more strictly, the moment in which the inner man or woman is called to “repent,” to “believe,” and to come forth “reborn.” It is the narrow pass to be negotiated in fear and trembling (echoing the category of the Individual itself through which the dialectician Soren Kierkegaard, a world apart in Europe, was insisting the nineteenth century collectively must negotiate in order to save its soul8). And this site, within the innermost self, is lonesome not lonely because there one is to achieve one’s redemptive transcending of the depressed and “convicted,” lonely self. The “valley” is empty of other souls and voices, but charged with the presence of the impending Divine. Though the song, consisting of nothing but chorus, is for group singing, the chorus varies each time to dramatize the challenge to each member of the individual’s family, one by one, and finally to anyone whose relation to the singer beyond the family circle has not been named: “Your mother’s got to walk...” “Your father’s got to walk...” “Your brother’s got to walk...”—the list can be extended ad infinitum—”All sinner’s got to walk...,” and, finally, “Everybody’s got to walk that lonesome valley.” And, of course, the biblical account of Jesus going into the wilderness to encounter and to defeat temptation, to find himself, is implicitly suggested as the original model of the recommended experience: “Jesus had to walk that lonesome valley.” Like the serious practicing poet who writes with the assimilated tradition informing his or her treatment of subject and choice of words and images, the country songwriter carries all the old songs in his or her head as funded wealth. The lonesome-songwriter is effectively a listener-connoisseur of those voices and performances. George Morgan’s “Lonesome Road” in 141

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LONESO M E 1955 illustrates this in the repeated chorus joining as it dramatizes the activities of listening and writing (and singing): Oh, play you lonesome record, play, You’re trying to break my heart. Oh, play you lonesome record, play, And let the teardrops start. The tears here can just as well be tears of gratitude, even of joy, as they can be tears of grief. Country lonesome feeds greedily upon itself to meet a large market demand for these savory, solacing “tear-drops,” a demand that cannot be explained merely by invoking the adage that misery loves company. This lonesome heals, renews, and attracts, whereas the lonely remains miserable and flat, sorry for itself and flat sorry. So when one encounters Jim Rushing and Larry Cordel’s tribute, “Lonesome Standard Time,” written in the early 1990s, and though, by my last count, over 260 different lonesome songs are listed in a standard Phonolog discography, one cannot help but hear a distant echo not only of the Hank Williams classic, but of the personal religious meaning “Lonesome Valley” and songs like it have held for generations of Americans. Rushing and Cordel include no explicitly religious images whatever. There is no need for them to; these meanings will always be there by association, by accumulating cultural heritage and alongside latter-day meanings less church-religion-related, but equally “religious” in the broader sense. The well-funded feeling state their song celebrates inherits an implicitly and informal religious dimension. The song grants the listener freedom to hear this dimension, the listener’s own personal assimilation of it, as it fits: Do you feel a kindred spirit, to the sound of pouring rain? 142

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Country Lonesome Does your heart start to yearnin’ when you hear a distant train, they write, and proceed to touch on the stock situation of missing a lost loved one and a lost opportunity for happiness. The refrain returns: “You don’t need the wind to tell you,” and again, “You don’t need a watch to tell you/You’re on lonesome standard time.” They play, as do Rushing and Cordle, on the selfconsciousness of the tradition: When you hear them old sad songs, do you hang on every word? Do you swear a cryin’ fiddle has the sweetest sound on earth? If you shudder at the music of a hoot owl in the pines, You’re on lonesome standard time. “There’s a bigger clock a-tickin’,” they write, “it crosses every zone,” It don’t ever need a-windin’, ‘cause if it works like mine, Ain’t no doubt about it, you’re on lonesome standard time. The song exploits for commercial purposes the ubiquitous country theme of the lonely/lonesome, of the paradoxical pleasure taken and given in voicing the melancholy regret of the spurned or spurning lover. The poetry is undistinguished. But the cleverness of the play upon the functional notion of differing time zones, of which traveling, notoriously rootless Americans are well 143

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LONESO M E aware, is striking. The projection of an emotional “zone” cutting across these formal divisions, to be accessed anywhere and everywhere the American lonesomeness strikes an individual, touches a chord in the American imagination of redemptive bestself recovery in the experience of the feeling state. In lonesomeness we “zone out” away from the troubles of which we complain—temporarily. The folk history of “America,” understood as Emerson’s “a dream in our eyes,” is a history of colonizing immigrants moving westward from points of entry on the eastern edge of the continent. The immigrants displaced Native American civilizations, destroying them where resistance provoked fear or challenged greed, pushing them ahead as they moved west to claim more and more territory, granting them “reserved” lands where decency compelled it or proved strategic. This folk history featured repeated engagement with the “Indian.” But it also featured, in larger measure, repeated response to a seemingly unpeopled, picturesque, seemingly unhistoricized landscape—a landscape, that is, unimbued with the meanings that the historical imagination confers over time. The histories imported by the European immigrants—that is, the respective historical imaginations of these newcomer immigrants—encountered an alien North American landscape undomesticated by historical narrative. The loneliness they experienced as “wayfaring strangers”9 was prompted not only by “relational deprivation,” but also by loss of a meaningfully coded environment. Historically, the great American lonesomeness emerged in part as a response made by immigrants and their descendants moving west to colonize more and more land, generation after generation: an imaginative construct elicited to meet emotional and spiritual need when confronted with the daunting tabula rasa of the open spaces they found. A folk culture substratum of coping lonesomeness was born, in defiance of 144

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Country Lonesome the ever-present hazard of depressive loneliness, creating in its stead a strengthening, stabilizing emotional-spiritual resource supportive of movement onto the frontier. We are reminded that in evolving usage, of course, the two words have often indeed been confused for lack of clear demarcation between them: “lonely” has most often signaled depressive relational deprivation. But also, as clearly in Dickinson’s “another loneliness,” it has occasionally signaled the transfiguring state of “lonesome” that we are exploring in this essay. The tradition of folk song and then “popular” song lonesomeness,

extended

and

accentuated

by

the

country

lonesome, expresses the power and function of this well-funded resource perhaps better than any other traditional cultural form. Of all the 260 lonesome songs listed in the most recent Phonolog discography consulted, the listed song most recorded is “Lonesome Road.” Illustrating its broad cultural iconic significance, both black and white performing artists have wanted to put their individual signatures on it. For it inherits earlier country and hillbilly singers’ fondness for the blues heard on southern street corners, in fields, and in traveling shows, as reflected in Henry Whitter’s “Lonesome Road Blues” recorded in 1923. Yes, the lonesome road must have been the choice of many escaping responsibility, in the process damaging by breaking the family “circle” left behind. But equally, the evoking of that road, regarded as a recourse for expression of our highly valued individualism, expresses something fine and good in the American spirit, most certainly in lyrical, reflective moments of re-committed hope. The short list reads like a who’s who of recent popular entertainers: Joan Baez, Fats Waller, Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Paul Robeson, Doc Severinson, Duane Eddy, Franki Valli, James Taylor, and Stevie Wonder. These are but the bigger names of the recent 145

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LONESO M E past—”Lonesome Road” is a staple of the American experience. Its original lyrics are attributed to Gene Austin in 1928: Look down, look down that lonesome road Before you travel on— But improvisation has varied it over decades of performances by individual artists. In the original the familiar complaint of a spurned lover figures prominently: True love, true love, what have I done That you should treat me so? But a spiritual if not a religious note complicates and enriches the utterance: Look up, look up and seek yo’ maker ‘Fore Gabriel blows his horn, Weary totin’ such a load, Trudging down that lonesome road. The

lonesome

traveler

theme

is

ubiquitous

in

country.

Occasionally, as in Sarah Carter’s “Lonesome Pine Special” in 1932 (originally performed with the famous Carter Family), the road or highway or train tracks lead homeward: I wonder if someone still wants me, Wonder why I had to roam, Looking down that lonesome highway, I’m on my way back home. But, more often, the traveler voices expectation of rootless voyaging toward as yet unknown experiences, as in the savored 146

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Country Lonesome melancholy of Ted Daffin’s “Lonesome Highway” in 1947: Looking down that lonesome highway, Wond’ring where my journey ends, Don’t know where my feet are going ... But then out of the turbulent 1960s came the defiant assertion of pop-cultural

renegade

star,

Jimi

Hendrix,

in

“Lonesome

Highway” of 1969: Going down that long lonesome highway, Bound for the mountains and the plains, Sure ain’t nothing gonna tie me, which concludes in defiant, signature self-assertion, “Gonna live life my way.” Hendrix echoes the refrain in one of the first commercially

recorded

country

songs,

millworker-turned-

musician Henry Whitter’s “Lonesome Road Blues”: “I ain’t gonna be treated thisaway!” But this Hendrix twist on the country lonesome is an exception. Far more often one encounters the image of crying, occasionally whining, over love remembered and lost. And, in general, a collector of these lyrics and a connoisseur of the recorded versions of them might want to differ with my sanguine reading of them. Another interpreter might prefer to hear throughout this body of popular song a prevailing note of depressive loneliness, the negative feeling-state upon which it would be incorrect to project the redemptive lonesome as we are characterizing it. But the possibilities, the potentialities of the particular melancholy signaled by the country and crossover lonesome cannot be so limited. The lyricism, the cherishing appeal to haunted memory (as, for another example, in Carter Stanley’s 147

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LONESO M E “Lonesome and Blue” in 1955), the assertion of the integrity of one’s personal story, the therapeutic and proactive gathering of the isolated self threatened by fragmentation, are positive elements in these songs. These elements together express a redeeming courage to face and to face down the day, the night, and the uncertain future—in solitary recollection, in recovered self-possession. In performance these lonesome songs are cathartic. The songwriter chooses not the lonely but the lonesome for an image to capture a performative act of courageous self-reintegration. The old favorite penned in 1927 by Roy Turk and Lou Handman illustrates what conjuring power this savory lonesomeness does possess: Are you lonesome tonight? Do you miss me tonight? Are you sorry we drifted apart? Does your memory stray To the bright summer day When I kissed you and called you sweetheart? Do the chairs in your parlor seem empty and blue? Do you gaze at your doorstep And picture me there? Is your heart filled with pain? Shall I come back again? Tell me dear Are you lonesome tonight? If the song touches on personal tragedy or at least painful reminiscence, it also helps repair emotional damage. In paying tribute to a bittersweet recollection, in reclaiming the beauty of that personal moment fixed in time, in its calming wistfulness, implicitly the song expresses a capacity to rebuild and to 148

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Country Lonesome strengthen the self. The song is about more than feeling sorry for oneself, despite the self-dramatizing portrayal in the final verse of the singer on a stage as the curtain drops down to end his tragic tale of loss. (In an earlier version, the Carter Family avoided this theatrical self-dramatization by Turk and Handman.) The interpretation and reception of the song in performance makes this abundantly clear. One has only to listen to the recording of Elvis Presley laughing his way through the song in a jarring performance at the Las Vegas International Hotel, on 26 August 1969, to note perhaps the elasticity of lonesome but more crucially, of course, the importance of performance itself.10 To be merely lonely in country music is to be all alone without a significant other. To be lonesome, by contrast, is to yearn (and to savor the yearning) for the missing particular other, as in “Lonesomefied” by Bobby Gregory in 1961 (“Oh I never felt so lonesomefied before ... I’m tellin’ ya, gal”). The song “Lonesome—That’s all,” by Ben Bradley and Lee Roberts, goes all the way back to 1918. The words distinguish between the two states, if subtlely, in a way characteristic of the country tradition. The world is empty for the singer since his girl went away: And I woke from each dream of your loveliness To sink again into loneliness. And I’d give all the world for just one caress, I’m lonesome I guess—that’s all. The final two lines underscore the richer content of the lonesome: And my heart is crying the whole day through, “I’m lonesome for you,” that’s all. If contrary examples of country lonesome can be cited (e.g., Roger Miller in 1965, “My heart is as lonely as a heart can be 149

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LONESO M E lonely,/The last word in lonesome is me;” or Don Gibson in 1961, “Ev’ryone I’ve wanted has wanted someone new./Heartaches hang around and always come./I surely must be lonesome number one”), the preponderance of country crying songs imagine emotional connection with someone in particular. Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me” in 1958 is an example. A hallmark of this tradition is the repeated acknowledgement of the quality of intimacy through which one discovers a fuller, happier self. A happier self! A good example of the unabashedly sentimental strain in country lonesome was contributed by the long-time master of ceremonies on the weekly country music radio show broadcast for decades from the old Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the Grand Old Opry. Predating Bob Dylan’s “I Am a Lonesome Hobo” in the 1960s, Roy Acuff’s “Lonesome Joe” in 1953 entertained the large audience for that long-running Saturday-night radio program in the years before television reached rural homes. Acuff’s Lonesome Joe is a “poor hobo,” a rider of freight-train box cars, cadging meals where he can, living on hand-outs, an uncomplaining gentleman from the school of hard knocks, forever on the go. But the gist of his tale is that he has found his niche in a solitary “lonesome life.” And the tale concludes with this tombstone epitaph-like summation: He saw all the world but never made no dough, And died a happy man. His name was Lonesome Joe. America is a fabled land of riches, of competition and initiative rewarded. But the “poor hobo” takes an alternative path in the pursuit of happiness, making do with little or nothing, taking pride in his independence and in living by his wits, achieving the separate dignity to which all aspire. Where there are winners in the competition for riches and prestige, there must be losers. 150

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Country Lonesome Acuff’s Hobo Joe achieves an inverse heroism, an archetypal sociological significance as effectively a comfort to listeners whose lives are a struggle, who have tasted defeat, and who survive on little else than integrity, pride, and the capacity to persist. Appropriately his name is Lonesome, and he dies happy. But “happiness” is not the best word. Tex Sample, in White Soul: Country Music, the Church and Working Americans (1996), offers shrewd guidance in evaluating lonesome songs collectively. In general, he reports, “The music deals with coping and survival, with trust and hope, with faith and holding on. It does not do analysis but rather ‘shows,’ displays, and puts on view the coping, the survival, the trust, and the hope.” What he concludes of country in general applies acutely to lonesome songs: Smack-dab crowded with faith it almost always “says more than it says,” and no matter how hard the day or how long the night, some hint of hope or some clue of a protest claims, if not a certain future, a signal of something more—that somehow, someday, somewhere will keep the circle from being broken. In blind desperation folks still see the light.11 The list of these songs is long, and this chapter must come to an end. But at least a few other titles can be mentioned by way of suggesting how continuous and colorful is the thread of the lonesome through the country tradition and beyond it in “crossover” renditions. Consider, for illustration, these titles associated with and, in some cases, written by these well-known performers respectively: Doc and Merle Watson’s “Lonesome Moan” and “Smokey Lonesome;” Tanya Tucker’s (and Rick Nelson’s) “Lonesome Town;” Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Lonesome Fiddle Man;” Elvis Presley’s “Lonesome Cowboy;” Pete Seeger’s 151

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LONESO M E “Lonesome Traveller;” Waylon Jennings’ “Lonesome, On’ry, and Mean;” Charlie Daniels’ “Lonesome Boy from Dixie;” and Hank Williams’ (and Jimmie Davis’) “I Heard That Lonesome Whistle.” Then add: Ricky Scaggs’ “Lonesome For You;” Bob Wills’ “Lonesome Hearted Blues;” Kenny Rogers’ “Lonesome Cowboy Blues;” Randy Travis’ “High Lonesome;” Emmy Lou Harris’ “Another

Lonesome

Morning;”

and

Jimmie

Rogers’

“I’m

Lonesome Too.” And add Ernest Tubb’s “Lonesome 7–7203;” Woody Guthrie’s “Lonesome Day;” Bill Monroe’s “Lonesome Midnight Waltz;” several interpreters (including Flatt and Scruggs) of “Lonesome Road Blues;” George Jones’ “Talk to Me, Lonesome Heart;” and the Gatlin Brothers’ “What Are We Doin’ Lonesome.” “Blue and Lonesome,” by an unknown song writer, includes the line, “The lonesome sound of a train going by makes me want to sit and cry.” Casting the net wider to encompass other, related styles of popular music, one notes Frank Sinatra’s “Lonesome Cities;” Bobby Darin’s “Lonesome Polecat;” Eric Clapton’s “Lonesome and a Long Way From Home;” a host of interpreters of “Are You Lonesome Tonight;” Frank Zappa’s “Lonesome Electric Turkey;” and The Kingston Trio’s (and The Weavers’) “Lonesome Traveller.” Such a list only scratches the surface, and of course I omit the names of many singers who have covered these titles in recorded and unrecorded performances. Individual performers give their own unique coloring to lonesome songs. The textures of the country (and pop) lonesome are many and rich. One more example, a personal favorite, deserves mention. I join many in the audience for country music who return again and again to the work of Johnny Cash. We respond to the mixture of gravelly roughness, sometimes darkness, and familiar evangelical religious imagery in his poetry. One pungent instance is his “Cold Lonesome Morning” from 1980, a 152

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Country Lonesome song worthy of Hank Williams, who surely must have influenced him. The singer’s girl gives him pain but he cannot stop loving her. The pattern is long established, and he has “gone past doing any good to cry.” When, as he predicts, he will wake one morning to find her gone, he imagines he will die of heartbreak: One of these cold, lonesome mornings, Dark and early Before a wild bird sings, I’m gonna fly, While it’s dark and I’m still reaching for you, I’ll wake up and I can’t cry. “Just before the dawning’s first glimmer,” he pleads, “I’m gonna go.” The Cash touch is in that “I’m gonna fly,” evoking the flight of the soul (as in “I’ll Fly Away”), echoing the image of flight “home” upon death and redemption in the intertwined black spiritual and white gospel traditions of American evangelical Protestantism. The feeling of that line if not the explicit notion suggested expresses the ubiquitous transfiguring moment in the native American lonesome. Country music is a distinct cultural inheritance for all Americans. Regarded as it may be as a low-brow art form, the country tradition nevertheless can be explored as the high-brow cultural traditions are explored—Cecelia Tichi has demonstrated this persuasively—as a repository of reflection upon perennial basic concerns growing out of the common American experience. If country music speaks in a simpler, suggestive form more accessible to an unlettered, populist America (and perhaps to the “lettered” as well) than the great texts of the academic canon, it certainly has addressed more consistently the heartache of the lonely and the fulsomeness, approaching the numinous, of the lonely transcended in the lonesome. Dwelling so consistently 153

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LONESO M E as it has on this particular theme in our personal, social and cultural life, country songs would seem to have drawn us to its exploration at least as effectively as have the other arts. In the following chapter we attempt a summary reflection upon this “exploration” in a wider context. But one final example, to give country poetry itself here the last word. The Hillary Kantner and Evan Stevens song, “Lonesome (As the Night is Long)” from 1989, nicely echoes the savored moment in Theodore Roethke’s poem from which we lifted a passage to place at the head of the chapter on poetic imagination: Like a stray dog on the highway, Like a hobo in the rain, Like the long, mournful whistle Of a faraway train, I have known that lonesome feeling That comes right before the dawn. Ever since you left me Memories of you have kept me Lonesome as the night is long.

154

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7 E PI L O GU E: T H ER A P EUTIC L O N ES O M ENESS Country, then, is arguably a grieving music for a lonesomeness bred in the American bone. If so, it may also be part of a long-term pattern of therapeutics. Cecelia Tichi, High Lonesome: The American Culture Of Country Music (1994)1

An American is not a Caliban, untamed, rough, and spontaneous, as European Romantics have wanted to imagine, so much as a Hamlet, introspective and reflective. And yet, in this dynamic, can-do, restless—cynics might say superficial as well as materialistic—culture, the pervasive introspective strain is too often regarded as a symptom of weakness in personality. It is too often regarded as a warning sign of reluctance or inability to come forward as an actor with a role to play on the stage, or as a competitor primed for struggle in the arena of American life. For an individual life in America is not given, it is to be taken or invented. Introspection and reflection, accordingly, are devalued 155

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this

consumer

LONESO M E commodities

in

culture.

Loneliness

is

an

embarrassment. Unproductive solitude in which the mind may wander without intention or agenda is a liability. But still the Hamlet strain remains within us, throttled, devalued, repressed. (R.W.B. Lewis overstressed this condition when he suggested almost half a century ago that an American could now be fathomed through the iconic image of Laocoon, referring to the famous classical statuary grouping of the father terminally entangled and tormented by progeny and serpents.2) It is to encourage this Hamlet strain, this thoughtful, moody selfconsciousness into which redemptive illumination can and does break in privileged moments, that we have wanted to gather our evidence. It is to counter-act the prevailing cultural option for, if not Caliban, then the campaigning politician, the salesman/ ”drummer,” the litigator, the performer of greater athletic feats through pharmaceuticals, the mask with no man or woman behind it, that we wish to recommend the American lonesome. Early in the nineteenth century in the novel The Prairie, James Fenimore Cooper gave us a memorable prophetic image of the multi-form American lonesomeness destined for re-discovery and development in solitude down through ensuing generations. In retrospect, it would appear that a tentative experience of this native, elevated feeling-state is projected in the stagey first appearance of the white colonist gone bush to become Cooper’s natural man. It is embodied in the theatrical presentation of the iconic figure of the Trapper, Leatherstocking himself, Natty Bumppo, who of course has often been read as a Romantic construction to flatter the taste of followers of Rousseau. But in this first appearance in The Prairie he bodies forth a human possibility whose dimensions are distinctly elusive—Cooper presents him as, in part, a mystery that may or may not ever be fully 156

revealed.

Cooper,

I

believe,

was

prescient

in

this

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Epilogue: Therapeutic Lonesomeness introduction of Natty Bumppo to the settlers in his novel as not fully contoured or defined but nevertheless larger than life, his identity and meaning as a symbol not yet to be fully descried. The settlers venturing into the heartland of the new continent as pioneers are to be seen equally as newcomers to the idea of America. We read their voyage of discovery into the interior (onto the prairies) as simultaneously an exploration of the new possibilities of this idea as they discover the effects of the pioneer experience upon themselves. Cooper introduces to these pioneers a “colossal figure” outlined against a luminous western sky at sunset, his appearance “musing and melancholy” and his “just proportions or true character ... impossible to distinguish.” Thus do we meet, early in American literature, a glimpse through metaphor of a particular kind of thematized experience in our spiritual destiny as a newcomer people. Natty Bumppo embodies an implicit prophecy of the native feeling state of musing, melancholy

lonesomeness

to

be

savored

by

subsequent

3

generations.

The psychologist Robert Weiss, cited in the opening chapter, restricts his focus, as noted, to the experience of loneliness as a clinically conceptualized feeling state which, if it persists, can induce depression, and, accordingly, is to be understood and treated by trained clinicians as pathological. Weiss is adamant in his refusal to offer, as it were for relief, the possible solution of “cherishing” such a problematic state. In the terminology of clinical psychology, such a solution would encourage destructive masochism, the largely involuntary impulse to inflict damage upon oneself, of an emotional if not also of a physical kind. Of course, within the framework of his critique he is right. But to leave it at that would be to accept the limitations of his approach as a clinical psychologist. Our aim in this monograph is obviously to suggest the limitations of that approach when we consider the 157

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LONESO M E phenomena of loneliness transformed into lonesomeness. Here we are pursuing a different sort of understanding of the emotional life, one which is intentionally sympathetic to the integrity of “peak” or “oceanic” experiences conducive to psychological and spiritual experience of well-being, of richer self-possession and effective

self-healing.

Our

point

is

that

a

cherishing

of

lonesomeness in the many instances I have reviewed, and of the multitude of varieties knowable in their similar content and effects only by individuals in the theater of solitary consciousness, can be therapeutic. As Cecelia Tichi puts it, and as I read the corroborating evidence in support, lonesomeness, to speak figuratively, is indeed “bred in the American bone.” And likewise, as she suggests in an especially perceptive moment (in a proposal floated but not substantially addressed in High Lonesome), the exploration of this lonesomeness—Tichi of course means the frequent uses of it in country music in particular—”may also be part of a long-term pattern of therapeutics.” How so? In what sense do we recommend an emotional, imaginative, spiritual embrace of lonesomeness as an initiative belonging to the activity of “therapeutics?” In preceding chapters we have attempted to lift up for inspection the never completely paraphraseable content of this too little explored North American culture-specific feeling-state, all the while acknowledging in its content that which inevitably resists reduction or distortion by paraphrase. To enlist the testimony of classic and popular works of the creative imagination is not to suggest that the religious-like content of this feeling-state is confined solely to artists. Rather, we have assumed that artists of great feeling and integrity speak for the rest of us, for all North Americans, primarily but not exclusively those of ethnic European origin—that is, for the stilldominant evolving patchwork of the white American cultural tradition into which one is born or in varying degrees assimilated. 158

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Epilogue: Therapeutic Lonesomeness We have assumed, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that these workings of art effectively “mirror” the American reality. We are proposing that the appeal of the positive, spiritual dimension in loneliness transcended has become functionally intuitive in a culture whose artists in several mediums have wanted to evoke, to plumb, to explore its possible meanings, while at the same time to ensure its evanescent quality. Our classic artists do tell us who we are, and we ignore them at our peril. In this concluding chapter we will reflect briefly, by way of summary, on the usefulness of the feeling-state as such that we have explored. We suggest its relevance to the personal experience of those many Americans who are increasingly obliged to negotiate a privatized, individualistic way of “being religious,” in great part as though by cultural mandate in the chaotic free-for-all of a non-traditional, increasingly secularized society. Religion in America has a rich and complicated history. No simple narrative can compass it adequately. The alarmist concern that increasing secularization threatens not only to trivialize religion, but also to overcome it entirely, is probably not warranted. Religion remains a compelling force—the pattern of decline and then resurgence in both older and newer forms would appear well established. The fear that even religiousness itself will disappear from what we have known as a great mixing bowl of traditions extended and re-invented by Americans is unrealistic. And yet, where traditional religious authority has been

irreparably

damaged—or

so

it

might

seem—where

manifestly this authority has been undercut and, for many, removed, new paths for claiming religious belief and feeling have been and will be cut through the wilderness. This theme of course permeates the history of religion in America. The continuing, enterprising bricolage of homo religiosus Americanus deserves respect, both moral and intellectual. It well deserves the 159

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LONESO M E closer attention of a thoroughgoing, sympathetic Americanist scholarship. The bricoleur finds his religious vision where he is able. One adapts or discovers religion wherever and however one’s experience permits, piecing together a world view that, as Wallace Stevens put it, “will suffice” from a crazy-quilt mix of available beliefs and values, and selective personal experiences. The purpose of this essay is not only to explore but also to recommend

the

historical-cultural

experience

of

numinous

lonesomeness as one such source for the enterprise of religion, personal and private. For we have been arguing that lonesomeness offers to those given it a non-traditional, informal encounter with an unnamed “otherness,” always inviting, always receding. If only we could peer deeply enough into it that we could “see” through the feeling of it the “otherness” plain! All that we have observed in preceding pages would, to the student of American culture, raise the question of how the earlier, path-breaking work of William James a century ago, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), especially might shed light on our subject. We now ask that question. We have cited him in passing as a sympathetic source. How might his proposals be employed, perhaps to point the issue of usefulness, here in our concluding chapter? James’ efforts to present the early academic enterprise of psychology as disciplined and scientific in its procedures, while useful to the study of religion, casts a long shadow over the generations which followed him in the twentieth century. And in Chapter Four we invoked his wise and practical focus upon the “general sphere of religious life” as distinct from the particular spheres defined by traditional theological commentary. American studies generally, as well as religious studies, rightfully respect his home-bred scholarly creativity, from which many have subsequently taken inspiration. 160

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Epilogue: Therapeutic Lonesomeness One

salient,

critical

response

to

our

evolved

native

individualistic American way of being religious was made by James in the epochal Varieties. Over a century ago, James dramatically pointed the study of religion away from its historical external forms to the mental states associated with it, widening the study empirically and pragmatically to include testimonies to non-traditional as well as traditional expressions of subjective religious experience. As an optimist and as an advocate, famously, for “healthy-mindedness,” James wanted to define religious faith most generally (and aptly) as, so Reinhold Niebuhr quotes him in his Introduction, “the sense of life by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but lives on. It is the force by which he lives.”4 And the personal “experience” of the individual as distinct from the “philosophy” or metaphysics of the community and of the tradition provides, for James, “the real backbone of the world’s religious life.”5 We note that he stands firmly for “scientific” research in the American tradition of valuing

the

practical

over

the

theoretical.

For

our

sort

of explorative investigation, drawing where it can upon a variety of scholarly discourses, we might initially suppose James to be a useful consultant. And so he is. He has indeed influenced many kinds of research into the “varieties of religious experience,” some similar to ours, that have emerged to address the American scene. As a product of the American experience himself and as a ground-breaking

investigator,

empirical

and

pragmatic,

he

provides a most useful path-breaker in method. At first glance he would seem, especially in his concern for “healthy mindedness,” an obviously potential friend of lonesomeness in its religious dimension. But for our purposes, his wide-ranging intellect and the fruits of his research seem to belong irrevocably to an earlier, more optimistic intellectual (and theological) climate, a climate that 161

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LONESO M E was to be altered during the course of the twentieth century by successive challenges to that optimism and by the many ways in which those challenges were to be met by scholars of diverse training. If only a thoroughgoing “psychology” of religious experience, focused programmatically for James upon “the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and initiated conduct,” could help the intentionally religious among us realize the “healthy-minded” religious imagination James proposed! If only his contemporaries or ours could find personal means of aligning themselves with the subjective experiences of the initiating prophetic prototypes, such as Jesus, Buddha, or Muhhamad! For James, religion’s “existential condition” is a matter ideally of constructive alignment, personal as this would be, with the examples of great forbears in the religious traditions. At the risk of slighting his immensely influential perspective carefully articulated, we note that he is less interested in the religious integrity of imaginations largely left to themselves, responding catch-as-catch-can to the manifold of experience, impacted if at all only somewhat by the influence of formal, “institutionalized” religion. In putting aside, for example, the special experiences of traditional “mystics,” as he does—their traditionalism makes them less relevant by James’ latter-day standards—he effectively marginalizes the apparently unprogrammed in the “general sphere of religious life:” the fecundity of day-dream, or, as it were, the moment of privileged if inarticulate illumination accessed by feeling, the moment which strikes one dumb, in which we feel lost as well as “found.” And for James, religious states of mind are always “made up of a feeling plus a specific sort of object”—the same sort of reflex assumption of “objects” of religious feeling-perception that we noted in Rudolf Otto. And in his general approach he rigorously places a premium on the scientific and the rational as he 162

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Epilogue: Therapeutic Lonesomeness addresses the mystery of the totality of human experience, only a portion of which, as he admits, proves amenable to rational description and analysis. What we have described as the sort of open-endedness of such a feeling state as lonesomeness interested him very little. He preferred to address subjective states shaped more directly by the influence of traditional thought and recorded experience. James would disagree, we conclude, that such a mental state as lonesomeness merits consideration for its “religious” dimension, despite elsewhere generously invoking for our sympathetic consideration the wider “general sphere of religious life.” Because James does acknowledge that religion functions as a certain kind of “total reaction” to life, perhaps we might conclude that, in his view, any such total reaction qualifies as religious. He observes that to “get at” such a total reaction “you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree everyone possesses.” But then, for his purposes, he observes that such a goal and such an approach has no practical utility—”so broad a use of the word ‘religion’,” he concludes, “would be inconvenient.”6 So to pursue the higher, more capacious dimensions of “lonesomeness,” as we are urging, and though we risk doing him an injustice, we need but glance at James briefly. More useful to us than James, imposing a figure as he remains, are two other writers who came after him. To widen the exploration of the religious-like dimension in the experience of lonesomeness, to complement Otto’s phenomenologist’s approach and that of the more recent analytical philosophers, we turn to two writers on psychology broadly conceived from subsequent generations in the twentieth century. One, from earlier in the century, is the 163

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LONESO M E Frenchman Romain Rolland, who in a famous letter to Freud in 1927 objected to the master’s pathologizing of religious mysticism. The other is the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, whose popular concept of the “peak experience” draws in some measure upon Otto’s “numinous” for corroborating support. In his letter to Freud of 5 December 1927, Rolland argues for the legitimacy of the kind of mystical experience that he likens to a sui generis “oceanic” feeling, a term we have used previously without crediting him. This feeling, he claims, using his own life experience as evidence, should be regarded as a “spontaneous religious sentiment” irreducible to any other. And he describes it: What I mean is: [this sentiment is] totally independent of all dogma, all Credo, all Church organization, all Sacred Books, all hope in a personal Survival, etc., the simple and direct fact of the feeling of the “eternal” (which can very well not be eternal, but simply without limits, and like oceanic, as it were).7 In

protest

of

Freud’s

systematic

reducing

of

“religious”

experience to expressions of sub-conscious forces in conflict or at play within the individual, Rolland insists that he himself has had this “oceanic” experience at moments throughout his life. He observes that, as a rational man, making only a modest claim, “In this way, without discomfort or contradiction, I can lead a “religious” life (in the sense of that prolonged experience) and a life of critical reason (which is without illusion),” as it were, without self-contradiction. For as he puts it, this feeling is “the true subterranean source of religious energy.” And he makes a final stab at naming it as “a free vital upsurge”—distinctly free, that is, by implication, of the subconscious motivations proposed by Freud. 164

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Epilogue: Therapeutic Lonesomeness Rolland’s “feeling of the ‘eternal’ (which can very well not be eternal, but simply without limits, ...)” comes as close as anything we have read to expressing what we want to urge North Americans to “know” as the spiritual component in the feeling of loneliness transcended in lonesomeness. In a secular, selfconscious, skeptical age bereft of a once “common” sense of the sacred canopy under which we conduct our lives, the word “eternal”

is

advisedly

written

with

surrounding

inverted

commas, signaling that the concept has fallen into question. But the word cannot be discarded, its symbolic power retains its grip, subject as it has become to Rolland’s qualification, “which can very well not be eternal [in a literal sense] but simply without limits”—in tribute to the secular skepticism of modernity. The experience of self-transcending, self-enlarging lonesomeness provides a North American access to the “oceanic” (as it does to Rudolf Otto’s qualified “numinous”). One may feel it often or hardly ever throughout one’s life. One may not consciously link the feeling-perception with the term “lonesome.” But the feelingperception of the oceanic is certainly kin to lonesomeness understood as the feeling that the ordinary limits of consciousness have suddenly, momentarily receded or dropped away. A famous example in American literature of an attempt to record this is that of Emerson, cited earlier, who produced the daring, though perhaps for some, comical image of himself transformed for a privileged moment into a transparent eyeball as he crossed the Boston Common. One may not wish to label the feeling “religious” at all. But Rolland is right, we think, to insist that this is “the true subterranean source of religious energy.” Rolland’s oceanic feeling may very well always have been experienced as something like what historically the religious have meant by the intimation of “eternity.” I take this to be a fleeting but intuitive, supra-rational apprehension of a higher or at least another order 165

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LONESO M E of reality incapable of being apprehended otherwise than through such a feeling-perception of consciousness without limits. Linguistically speaking, the “oceanic” lonesomeness of North Americans constructed by our variant English language dialect has long evolved into a vehicle for the expression of dilated, illuminated consciousness. The fundamental experience itself is not culture specific. The emotional “way” into it is indeed a cultural construction. What an American may embrace under the rubric of lonesomeness, a European or an Israeli like the novelist Amos Oz may experience through a different signifier. But let Oz tell it, in an interview in the weekly Ha’aretz magazine, titled “The Mysticism Within,” where he describes a recently published novel: But there is something mystical about this book, If you called it a mystical book, I wouldn’t make a fuss. And it is cosmophilic—bearing a love for the universe. At some stage or another, everyone in the book experiences a cosmophilic moment. A moment in which he loves the universe. A moment in which the cosmos slightly opens up to him, like a sudden expansion of the quiet.8 This “opening up,” this dilation and elevation of consciousness, is similar to the forms in which American lonesomeness has been experienced, as expressed in the instances reviewed in the previous chapters—and to the experience of the “oceanic” in Rolland. It also invites comparison with the popular psychologist Abraham Maslow’s proposal of the category of the “peak experience,” under which individual experiences of lonesomeness, we suggest, are to be subsumed. In the 1970 Preface to Religions, 166

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Epilogue: Therapeutic Lonesomeness Values, and Peak-Experiences (1964), Maslow sets forth the basis and intent of his argument: Most people lose or forget the subjectively religious experience, and redefine Religion as a set of habits, behaviors, dogmas, forms, which at the extreme becomes entirely legalistic and bureaucratic, conventional, empty, and in the truest meaning of the word, anti-religious. The mystical experience, the illumination, the great awakening, along with the charismatic seer who started the whole thing, are forgotten, lost, or transformed into their opposites. Organized Religion, the churches, finally may become enemies of the religious experience. This is the main thesis of my book.9 Unlike Maslow, our aim is not to retrieve the subjective illuminative experience from burial within formal religious cultic practice, from objectification in trammeling dogma and ritual. The forms of the particular subjective experience adduced in our argument are fugitive and numerous, and in no danger of being collected and betrayed by transformation into the foundation for an organized Church of the Lonesome. We merely wish to show the subjectively religious character of loneliness transcended in lonesomeness as one salient feature of the larger American scene reflected in representations expressed in the arts. What we have found and reported accords with Maslow’s conclusions, namely, that “spiritual values ... are not the exclusive possession of organized churches, that they do not need supernatural concepts to validate them.” Maslow’s secular bias prompts him to argue for the “naturalistic meaning” of these values and experiences, and to observe that both science and religion have heretofore 167

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LONESO M E been too narrowly conceived. By contrast, our qualified bias for religion generally and religiousness as an irreducible component of human make-up leads us to observe that the subjective “cosmophilic” or oceanic moment “without limits” in lonesomeness, while certainly naturalistic (in its imminence), by virtue of occurring in the human animal, at the same time, in mystery, opens up a “transcendent” perceptual field for help in the grasping of which the historical faith traditions have bequeathed us conceptualizing symbols. Heretofore we have approached this unknowable through the contents of historically constructed faith systems. These systems have now been critically weakened for many and all but removed for many. To claim more about the “truth” of the responses these venerable conceptualizing systems have made (within and for the individual) to the experience of the “oceanic” would invite the psychologists’ label: “projection.” To claim less is to betray what individuals do experience subjectively. To suggest that lonesomeness qualifies as a savory instance of peak experience, it will help to enlist the corroborating testimony in Maslow’s appendix, “Religious Aspects of Peak-Experiences,”10 where

he

enumerates

the

features

that

characterize

the

phenomenon. He observes: “...it is quite characteristic in peak experiences that the whole universe is perceived as an integrated and unified whole.” He finds, in addition, that in these experiences “there is a tremendous concentration of a kind that does not normally occur,” that is, a more focused “kind of visual perceiving or listening or feeling.” Affective instances of this, of course, are to be found in Hank Williams’ song, as in Dickinson’s poetry and Hopper’s art, not to mention the passages I have exhibited in Mark Twain, Anderson, and Agee. Maslow continues, describing these experiences as moments in which “external objects, the world, and individual people [are 168

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Epilogue: Therapeutic Lonesomeness perceived] as more detached from human concerns.” The natural world is seen (and felt) as “an end in itself rather than as something to be afraid of or something to wish for or to be reacted to in some other, personal, human, self-centered way.” Thus

perception

becomes

“ego-transcending,

self-forgetful,

egoless, unselfish,” desireless and detached. It is felt as “a selfvalidating, self-justifying moment, which carries its own intrinsic value,” as it were, reminding the individual that life is indeed “worthwhile.” Here Maslow observes that, from the point of view of a more negative concern, peak experiences accordingly “help to prevent suicide.” And one is reminded by the material engaged in our previous chapters that, while the deficit condition of clinical loneliness understood as relational deprivation can lead to depression and thoughts of suicide, the qualitatively different, much richer feeling state of American lonesomeness can prove subjectively transformative, emotionally and spiritually. Stability of selfhood and James’ “healthy mindedness” may indeed follow. In Maslow’s peak experience the subject tends to drift away from “consciousness of time and space.” He calls this the acquisition of an “operational sense” of existing under the aspect of eternity as temporarily one loses “consciousness of being located in a particular place.” As I have been arguing, in the dilation of lonesome consciousness, one ascends into serenity, a serenity, as Maslow puts it, in which “the world is accepted” and one becomes “reconciled to evil.” In the particular case of lonesomeness, we submit, one becomes temporarily, and perhaps for a longer term as well, reconciled to loneliness, whether suffered in the company of or in proximity to others or, more as one would expect, in solitude. In peak experiences, Maslow argues, the emotions of “awe, reverence, humility, surrender, and even worship” connect to “what people through the ages have called 169

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LONESO M E eternal verities, or spiritual values, or the highest values, or the religious values.” This, too, would seem to characterize American lonesomeness. In the peak experience, as consciousness wends its way “toward a perception of unity and integration,” feelings of “fear, anxiety, inhibition, of defense and control” tend to fall away. Readiness to listen and to hear increases as “perplexity, confusion, conflict” diminish. In the specific context I have been addressing, to repeat, negative loneliness is overcome by positive lonesomeness. The individual fortunate to undergo such an experience, observes Maslow, “characteristically feels lucky, fortunate, graced.” The gift of such an experience can bestow numerous sorts of enriching personal qualities as after-effects, leaving one more resilient, less self-centered, less needy— strengthened for daily life. These after-effects, Maslow observes, can “be so profound and so great as to remind us of the profound religious conversions which forever after changed the person.” No evidence suggests that the feeling of lonesomeness as such has had or could have an effect to compare with a life-altering, watershed

moment

of

a

dramatic

religious

conversion.

Lonesomeness, granted, lacks high theater. But, as Maslow adds, “Lesser effects could be called therapeutic.” Surely this would be the case with the experience and after-effects of the savory lonesome feeling expressions of which I have canvassed in previous chapters. These illustrative instances form a chain of testimony to the existence of a persisting minor chord in the variegated music of personal life in America—a note of numinous, expansive wonder, of therapeutic awe, reverence, and humility, the potentiality of which is “bred in the bone.” This distinct but hidden and unrecognized form of nontraditional spirituality in America cries out for discovery and practical application as a vehicle for what Cecelia Tichi refers to 170

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Epilogue: Therapeutic Lonesomeness as “therapy.” Here criticism of the arts may find ways to collaborate with the enterprise of health care services and pastoral counseling ministries of all description. The experience of the American lonesome may be fleeting—like the privileged states of consciousness sought by the traditional mystics, it usually is. But, unlike the formally disciplined “paths” established by the tradition-specific mysticisms of yore, lonesomeness provides an open-ended, home-grown source of spiritual nurture and empowerment (from steadying self-repossession) available to the untrained, the un-”disciplined,” the unadept. Lonesomeness, as I have been interpreting its expression in great American artists, has long been offered, as it were, through its portrayals as an accessible state of mind (perhaps a “habit of the heart”), familiar but now in need of discursive “defamiliarization”—for the enrichment of our native solitude, for the healing of our loneliness. Lonesomeness

welcomed

and

explored

in

solitude

strengthens the “inner-direction” whose weakening in Americans David Riesman regretted half a century ago in The Lonely Crowd. More than ever, as the speed of the communications age increases our tendency to “other-direction,” a temporary retreat into “one’s own” enabled in gifted moments of lonesomeness is increasingly needed for ballast in the psyche of Americans. Nebulous as the individual experience may be, especially when attempting to describe it to others—perhaps its resistance to anatomizing and consumer packaging makes it all the more appealing—the common experience of lonesomeness must no longer be ignored as an experiential resource to help individuals battling loneliness and depression. The more mindful we become of loneliness transformed in special moments of this fulsome (“bred in the bone”) lonesomeness, the better equipped we may be for selfhealing, or at least for coping with the anxious solitudes which 171

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LONESO M E bedevil the increasing proportion of the adult population living alone (or “alone”), as the demographic statistics indicate. Individualism in America as in the West generally has proven an ambiguous cultural value. It is deeply ingrained in us and habitually reinforced by socialization.11 We cannot do away with it even if we wanted to. Its downside is expressed in our susceptibility to the anxiety of loneliness and, in the extreme, to clinical depression, the state in which an individual can no longer respond productively to external stimuli. In extreme, pathological states of depression, the individual cannot be expected to find remedy in the “soft” feeling-state of numinous lonesomeness. In such cases, prolonged treatment by trained pathologists of course may be required. But, short of these extreme clinical cases, and especially for individuals sympathetically open to the spiritual dimension, a reminder of the dimensions of lonesomeness as a peak experience is or should be regarded as a tool of counseling by the various helping professions. As Todd Gitlin, a sociologist, has written of teaching The Lonely Crowd to freshmen and sophomores at Berkeley in the 1980s, his students had trouble grasping Riesman’s distinction between inner- and outer-direction. He writes, “They had lived their entire lives as other-directed, with radars. The notion of life with a psychic gyroscope was unimaginable.”12 Perhaps Riesman in the 1950s was prophetic in his analysis of a great tide turning in the psyche of a culture steadily adjusting and re-adjusting to the social and technological developments of the twentieth century and now the twenty-first. Gitlin’s discovery about his students underscores, for our purposes, the usefulness now of rediscovering one particular but neglected personal and cultural resource at hand for addressing this diminished cultivation of the inner-directed potentiality in American individualism. The individual experience of the oceanic and of the peak moment 172

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Epilogue: Therapeutic Lonesomeness under whatever description, including lonesomeness, needs to be rescued from our individual and cultural relegation of it to the margins of over-stressed consciousness. Not only the spiritual/ religious life of Americans, churched and unchurched alike, but also our psychological well-being in a predominantly secular age makes it imperative. Perhaps the coming of Riesman’s other-directed individual helps to account for Gallup poll findings that the growth of “religiousness” of the American population, measured by claims of adherence to specific traditions, is deceptive, and that participation in institutionalized religion is generally a shallow affair.13 The struggle to deepen healthful “spirituality,” if not also traditional and untraditional “religiousness” in America, may be a difficult one. Those who undertake it swim against a strong current. But the struggle is nonetheless imperative, if the seductive consumer culture of material success and of addictive gadget technology is not to overwhelm what the influential Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, calls the foundational “depth dimension” in the individual, as skeptical prophets might warn.14 If a more meaningful religiousness is to survive, Whitehead’s adage, “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness,” seems all the more applicable in an age when participation in and loyalty to all but the flamboyant, theatrical denominational traditions, and formal religion generally, is notoriously on the wane. Indeed, the sociologist Thomas Luckmann’s findings in The Invisible Religion (1967) present corroborating testimony to this observation that religion not only begins but must sustain itself in subjectivity, often, or so it is implied, in despite of external forces. As we noted in Chapter Four, Luckmann draws our attention to the privatization of religion in a secularized culture, wherein the self-authorizing individual will perform his or her own spiritual 173

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LONESO M E bricolage in order to construct a personalized “faith.” One’s private, self-tailored “faith” will be assembled from a mix of eclectic elements: disparate historical creed selectively assimilated, a variety of humanisms of convenience, astrology, New Age offerings across a chaotic spectrum, and magic. Privatization presupposes a certain isolation, whether sought intentionally or, more likely, imposed. In another of Alfred North Whitehead’s adages, “The world is a scene of solitariness in community,”15 we would emphasize “solitariness,” as does the historical Protestant tradition when it insists that no formal human agency be allowed to interpose itself between the believer and the transcendent. The individual is never without need for community. But only those who have become truly individual, who have taken strength from their obligatory solitariness, can form and contribute productively to a community worth anything as a community. Whether one looks within or looks without—a distinction without a difference?—one will come upon Huck Finn’s “solid lonesomeness,” one will travel through “lonesome standard time,” one may wax “so lonesome” one could cry tears for the beauty of Being itself revealed through lonely solitude. Charles Burchfield, fifty years ago, characterized Edward Hopper’s as a “career of silent poetry” whose images of America and Americans are consistently marked by what Burchfield called a certain “listening quality.”16 A similar note is struck in Emily Dickinson when, as she puts it, in a “certain slant of light” of a New England winter afternoon, “the landscape listens” while shadows “hold their breath.” American lonesomeness, for all its prompting by visual and reflective experience, is at its heart a “listening” into the depths of the self and of the surrounding world. And as our lonesomeness “listens,” to recall Rudolf Otto and of course Maslow and Rolland, it invites fruitful comparison with the putative experience of the “numinous” as well as of Robert 174

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Epilogue: Therapeutic Lonesomeness Bellah’s “fulfillment,” in which the needy subject may indeed feel acted upon momentarily by a transcending, awe-inspiring, nothastily-to-be-named “Other.” The lonesome among us listen in the oceanic vein to hear more than recordable sounds—that is, to hear beyond the limitation to only the inaudible. Perhaps we are Whitmans more than Hamlets (and not Calibans), each of us walking the beach, rapt by the mockingbird’s carol of “lonesome love”: O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you, voraciously hungering for spirit: O if I am to have so much, let me have more!

175

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N O T ES

Preface 1

Johnson, Thomas H., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960), p. 502. Henceforward, as in Chapter Two, I will cite in the text, as above, the respective numbers assigned in the authoritative Johnson edition to individual Dickinson poems when referring to those poems.

2

Tichi, Cecelia, High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

3

In Democracy in America, 1835, Tocqueville observed, “... even the religion of most of the citizens is republican, since it submits the truths of the other world to private judgment, as in politics the care of their temporal interests is abandoned to the good sense of the people. Thus every man is allowed freely to take the road which he thinks will lead him to heaven, just as the law permits every citizen to have the right of choosing his own government” (de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in 177

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LONESO M E America, Vol. I [Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co./Anchor Books, 1954], p. 311).

Chapter One 1

Cordle, Larry, and Jim Rushing, “Lonesome Standard Time,” the first track on an audio CD of the same title, released 1 January 1 1992, by Sugar Hill Records, Nashville, TN.

2

Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950).

3

Slater, Philip, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).

4

Bellah, Robert, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a PostTraditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 198f.

5

Weiss, Robert S., Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973). See especially his introductory chapter, “The Study of Loneliness,” pp. 9–29.

6

Fromm-Reichman,

Frieda,

“Loneliness,”

Psychiatry

22:1

(January 1959); Moustakas, Clark, Loneliness (New York: Prentice Hall, 1961). 7

Weiss: Loneliness, pp. 227, 231, 232.

8

Weiss: Loneliness, p. 230.

9

Storr, Anthony, Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York: Free Press, 1988).

10

Watson, George, “The Bliss of Solitude,” Sewanee Review 32:3 (Summer 1993), pp. 340–51.

11

Rouner, Leroy S., ed., Loneliness (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). Vol. 19 in Boston University Studies in Philosophy and Religion).

178

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Notes 12

Ricks, Christopher, “Loneliness in Poetry,” Loneliness, ed. Rouner, pp. 173–94.

13

Ricks: “Loneliness”, p. 179.

14

Eliot, T.S., The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber, 1933), p. 132.

15

Ricks: “Loneliness”, p. 189.

16

Hartmann, Geoffrey, ”Literary Criticism and Its Discontents,” Critical Inquiry III, (Winter 1976), p. 219.

17

Lewis, R.W.B., Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), p. vii.

18

Eliot, T.S., “Religion and Literature,” Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1975), pp. 97–106.

19

Among Gunn’s especially relevant works are: F.O. Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1975), The Interpretation of Otherness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), Thinking Across the American Grain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and the edited collection, New World Metaphysics: Readings on the Religious Meaning of the American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

20

Lewis: The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Phoenix Books, 1964).

21

Tanner, Tony, The Reign of Wonder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

22

Gunn: Otherness, pp. 5, 6f.

23

Gunn: Otherness, pp. 190f.

24

Gunn: Otherness, pp. 181, 190f, 201. The quotation of R.P. Blackmur is from “Religious Poetry in the United States,” in Religious Perspectives in American Culture, ed. James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universtiy 179

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LONESO M E Press, 1961), p. 286. The quotation of Wallace Stevens is from Opus Posthumous (London: Faber, 1957), p. 237. 25

Gunn: “Introduction,” Thinking, p. 8.

26

Gunn: Thinking, pp. 9, 10.

Chapter Two 1

Johnson, Thomas H., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960).

2

Whitman, Walt, “A Song of Joys,” Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. Sculley Bradley (New York: Rinehart, 1949), p. 153.

3

Roethke, Theodore, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), “The Rose”, p. 204.

4

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational, trans. John W. Harvey. Fifth impression revised with additions (London: Oxford University Press, 1928).

5

Whitman: “Song of Myself,” section 33, p. 54.

6

Whitman: “Far From Dakota’s Canons,” p. 395.

7

Whitman: “Recorders Ages hence,” p. 104.

8

Whitman: “Proud Music of the Storm,” pp. 333f.

9

Whitman: “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” pp. 210–12.

10

Ricks: “Loneliness,” p. 178.

11

Frost, Robert, Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1949), p. 386.

12

Stevens, Wallace, “Sunday Morning” [1915], Poems: Wallace Stevens, selected, and with an Introduction by Samuel French Morse (New York: Random/Vintage, 1959), pp. 7–10.

180

13

Stevens: Poems: “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” pp. 23f.

14

Stevens: Poems: “Final Soliloquy,” pp. 157f.

15

Roethke: Collected Poems: “The Geranium,” p. 228.

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Notes 16

Roethke: Collected Poems: “The Tree, The Bird,” p. 248.

17

Roethke: Collected Poems: “The Exulting,” p. 155.

18

Roethke: Collected Poems: “She,” p. 129.

19

Ammons, A.R., “Easter Morning,” A Coast of Trees (New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 19–22.

20

Wright, James, “A Blessing,” Collected Poems (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), p. 143.

Chapter Three 1

Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Bantam Classic, 1981), pp. 117f.

2

Anderson,

Sherwood,

“Sophistication,”

Winesburg,

Ohio,

Introduction by Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1964), pp. 240f. 3

Kerouac, Jack, The Dharma Bums (New York: Penguin, 1976), pp. 61f. Originally published by Viking in 1958.

4

Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), p. 14.

5

Hemingway, Ernest, The Green Hills of Africa (New York: Scribners, 1935), p. 22.

6

See Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), Lopez’s Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Scribner, 1986), and Erlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984).

7

Thoreau, Henry David, Walden (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1854).

8

See Tony Tanner’s The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). Although Tanner in this now neglected essay stresses the 181

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LONESO M E childlike “naivety” of the common “wonder” he discerns as an identifying feature of the nineteenth-century “feeling for some valuable

unencumbered

simplicity

of

response”

to

the

American experience, his thesis does have relevance to our exploration here. In his use of the term “visionary” to suggest a religious-like character to an experience common to the disaffected as to the self-identifying traditional religious alike, Tanner’s “wonder” would appear to bear a resemblance to our “lonesomeness.” 9

Wilder, Laura Ingalls, Little House on the Prairie (New York, Harper, 1935), pp. 165f.

10

Anderson: Winesburg: “Hands,” p. 34.

11

Anderson: Winesburg: “An Awakening,” p.185.

12

Anderson: Winesburg: “Sophistication,” pp. 240f.

13

Wolfe, Thomas, Look Homeward, Angel (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1929), p. 295.

14

Agee, James, A Death in the Family (New York: Bantam, 1969), pp. 84–94, 11–15.

15

Hemingway: “Big Two-Hearted River,” In Our Time (New York: Scribners, 1972), pp. 178, 184, 185.

16

Cheever, John, The Stories of John Cheever (New York: Vintage International, 2000): “A Vision of the World,” p. 517, “The Ocean,” p. 593, and “A Country Husband,” pp. 328f.

17

Kerouac: Dharma Bums, pp. 61f.

18

Kerouac: Dharma Bums, pp. 88f.

19

Kerouac: On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 172f. Originally published by Viking in 1957.

20

182

Pynchon, Thomas, Lot 49, pp. 10, 14.

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Notes Chapter Four 1

Otto, Rudolf, Idea of the Holy, p. 7.

2

Long, Eugene, “Quest for Transcendence,” The Review of Metaphysics 52 (September 1998), pp. 12f.

3

Bellah, Robert, “Transcendence in Contemporary Piety,” Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 199.

4

See Macquarrie, John, In Search of Humanity (London: SCM, 1982; revised by XPRESS Reprints [SCM], 1993), and Kee, Alastair, The Way of Transcendence (New York: Penguin, 1971).

5

Turner, Frederick Jackson, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Chapter One in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921). First delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

6

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Nature,” Nature and Selected Essays (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), pp. 35–82.

7

Whitehead, Alfred North, Religion in the Making (New York: New American Library, 1996). Originally published in 1926 by Macmillan.

8

One notable exception to the recent neglect of religion and religiousness by the enterprise of American Studies is the collection of essays contributed by a range of Americanists employing interdisciplinary strategies of various description to investigate material, visible expressions of contemporary religiousness: Religion and Cultural Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), edited by Susan L. Mizruchi. In her Introduction to the volume, Mizruchi makes it clear that she and her contributors understand religion primarily “as an historically particular phenomenon only 183

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LONESO M E apprehended through language.” And because, as she puts it, “no religion is pure and unique unto itself” but depends for its

survival

on

a

“capacity

for

transformation

and

incorporation” (strategically assimilating exterior elements as demanded by evolving coherence and relevance), the most suitable methods for tracing and conceptualizing the dynamic of historical religion “are multidisciplinary as well as interdisciplinary”

(pp.

ixf).

Understandably

she

credits

skeptical poststructuralism in literary studies, as well as a cultural tendency to identify religion with the forces of reactionary

conservatism

with

effectively

de-legitimizing

religion as an academic focus. Mizruchi wanted her volume to join what she identified as a new “intellectual ferment” consisting of a long-resisted turn toward religion-and-culture studies as a “major, re-legitimized site of intellectual action and interaction” (p. x). The contributors to Mizruchi’s collection are careful to address specific instances of religious behaviors which they situate firmly in particular historical contexts. But they do avoid, or so it would seem, panoramic, speculative vision and sustained discussion of the sort of “larger” issues which may have been encouraged when American Studies was young, but now apparently are too fraught with risk. 9

Otto: Idea of the Holy, p. 11n.

10

Otto: Idea of the Holy, p. 117.

11

Otto: The Idea of the Holy, p. 37.

12

Otto: The Idea of the Holy, p. 208.

13

Macquarrie, In Search of Humanity, p. 25. In addition to Long and Kee already cited—see Long’s earlier “Experience and Natural Theology,” Prospects for Natural Theology (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1992)—see Ramsey, Ian, ed., Prospect for Metaphysics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961).

184

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Notes See Hazelton, Roger, “Relocating Transcendence,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review XXX (1975), p. 25. 14

Hazelton, “Relocating Transcendence,” p. 25.

15

Naknikian, George, “On the Cognitive Import of Certain Conscious States,” Religious Experience and Truth, ed. Sidney Hook (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1962), p. 159; Long: “Quest”, p. 13.

16

Mcquarrie: In Search of Humanity, p. 26.

17

See Bellah, Robert, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96:1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1–21; Herberg, Will, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: an essay in American religious sociology (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1960); and Mead, Sidney E., “The Post-Protestant Concept and America’s Two Religions,” in Issues in American Protestantism, ed. Robert L. Ferm (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 369 ff.

18

Cf. Bailey, Edward I., Implicit Religion in Contemporary Society (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), and Implicit Religion: An Introduction (London: Middlesex University Press, 1998). Bailey also edits Implicit Religion: Journal of the Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion and Contemporary Spirituality.

19

Bellah: “Religion and Belief,” Beyond Belief (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 220–4.

20

Bellah: “Transcendence in Contemporary Piety,” Beyond Belief, pp. 196–208. All quotations in this and the following three paragraphs,

except

where

noted

(drawn

from

Wallace

Stevens, whom Bellah quotes), are drawn from this essay of Bellah’s. 21

Stevens: Opus Posthumous (New York: Knopf, 1957), p. 238.

22

Stevens: Opus Posthumous, p. 163; Bellah, Beyond Belief, p. 203.

185

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LONESO M E

Chapter Five 1

Schjeldahl, Peter, “Hopperesque,” The Hydrogogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978–1990, ed. MaLin Wilson, Introduction by Robert Storr (New York: University of California Press, 1993), p. 297.

2

Bonds, Diane, “The Life of the Body,” The Poetry of Solitude: a tribute to Edward Hopper/poems collected and introduced by Gail Levin (New York: Universe Publishing, p. 71.

3

Hollander, John, “Sun in an Empty Room,” Figurehead & Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 61.

4

Otto, Rudolf, Idea of the Holy, pp. 68–72. All quotations of Otto in the following five paragraphs are drawn from these pages.

5

Coles, Robert, “On Edward Hopper, Loneliness, and Children,” New York Times, 3 March 1991, p. 35.

6

Schjeldahl: Hydrogen: “Hopperesque,” p. 296.

7

Levin, Gail, “Edward Hopper: His Legacy for Artists,” Edward Hopper and the American Imagination, ed. Deborah Lyons and Adam D. Weinberg, with Juilie Grau (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Norton, 1995), pp. 109–15.

8

Schjeldahl: Hydrogen: “Hopperesque,” pp. 293–9.

9

Hughes, Robert, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Knopf, 1997), p. 428.

10

Hughes: American Visions, p. 424.

11

Hughes: American Visions, p. 422.

12

Kranzfelder, Ivo, Edward Hopper, 1882–1967: Visions of Reality (Koln: Taschen, 1998), pp. 84, 192. See discussion of the “oceanic” in Chapter Seven.

13

Ross, David, Foreword to Edward Hopper and the American Imagination, ed. Lyons and Weinberg, p. viii.

186

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Page 187

Notes 14

Lyons, Deborah, Introduction, Edward Hopper and the American Imagination, pp. xii, xiiif.

15

Hollander, John, “An American Painter,” Commentary (January 1972), pp. 94–9.

16

Hollander: “Sunday A.M. Not in Manhattan,” The Night Mirror (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 70.

17

Letter to Charles H. Sawyer, 29 October 1939, quoted by Lloyd Goodrich in Edward Hopper (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970), p. 164.

18

Hopper, Edward, “Introduction,” American Artists Group Monograph No. 8 (1945).

19

Novak, Barbara, “Epilogue: The Twentieth Century,” American Painting in the Nineteenth Century: Realism. Idealism and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969), pp. 262–88.

20

Novak: American Painting in the Nineteenth Century, p. 95.

21

Novak: American Painting in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 95–7, 262.

22

Novak: American Painting in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 92, 97, 109.

23

Vendler, Helen, “Veracity Unshaken” (a review of Ammons’ Sumerian Vistas, 1988), The New Yorker, 15 February 1987, p. 104.

24

Novak: American Painting in the Nineteenth Century, p. 278.

25

Novak: American Painting in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 111, 120, 122f.

26

Maslow, Abraham H., Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences (New York: Viking, 1964). See discussion of Maslow in Chapter Seven.

27

Platt, Susan, “Rethinking Mr. Hopper” (review of Levin’s biography), The Art Book VI, 1 (January 1999), p. 15.

28

Hollander: “Hopper and the Figure of Room,” Art Journal 41 (Summer 1981), p. 159. He also draws analogies between 187

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LONESO M E Hopper and the poetic theory and practice of Wallace Stevens, suggesting that Hopper’s oeuvre might well be titled “The World as Meditation” (p. 160).

Chapter Six 1

Tichi, Cecelia, High Lonesome, p. 82.

2

Williams, Hank, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” 45 rpm release (flip side, “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It”), Mercury Records/MGM, Nashville, TN, 1949.

3

Kanter, Hillary, and Even Stevens, “Lonesome (As The Night Is Long),” 1989.

4

Tichi: High Lonesome, p. 5.

5

Tichi: High Lonesome, p. 7. For this observation she credits William Ferris in Blues from the Delta (1978).

6

Eliot, T.S., “Hamlet and His Problems,” The Sacred Wood (London, Methune, 1921), p. 100.

7

See Johnson, Alonzo, “Pray’s House spirit: the institutional structure and spiritual core of the African American folk tradition,” in Ain’t Gonna Lay My ‘Ligion Down: African American Religion in the South, ed. Alonzo Johnson and Paul Jersild (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 8–38.

8

See Kierkegaard’s long entry, “The Individual: A Hint,” dated 1947, in The Journals of Kierkegaard: 1834–1854, ed. and tr. Alexander Dru (London: Fontana Books/Collins, 1965), pp. 133–5.

9

The “white” spiritual/folk song, “The Wayfaring Stranger,” also known as “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” of unknown origin, became a signature song of Burl Ives (1909–95) and has been covered by numerous other singers.

188

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Notes 10

YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxGrzsPRVK&

feature=related (November 2008). 11

Sample, Tex, White Soul: Country Music, the Church and Working Americans (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996), p. 171.

Chapter Seven 1

Tichi, Cecelia, High Lonesome, p. 102.

2

Lewis, R.W.B., An American Adam, p. 195.

3

Cooper, James Fenimore, The Prairie, 1827 text (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985), pp. 14f.

4

Niebuhr, Reinhold, Introduction to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Collier, 1961), p. v.

5

James, William, Varieties: an excerpt from a letter of James to a friend, quoted on the back cover of the 1961 Collier edition.

6

James: Varieties: the quotations in this and the preceding two paragraphs are drawn from pages 24–46.

7

Rolland, Romain, quoted by William B. Parsons in The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling (New York: Oxford, 1999), pp. 36f.

8

Oz, Amos, “The Mysticism Within,” Ha’aretz, weekly edition of the International Herald Tribune insert (11 December 1999), p. 18.

9

Maslow,

Abraham,

Preface,

Religions,

Values,

and

Peak

Experiences (New York: Viking, 1970), p. vii. 10

The quotations in this and the following three paragraphs are drawn from the Appendix to “Religious Aspects of PeakExperiences,”

in

Religions,

Values,

and

Peak

Experiences:

pp. 59–68. 11

Weintraub, Karl, in The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago 189

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LONESO M E Press, 1978), provides forceful argument for the formative cultural value that Western civilization over the centuries has increasingly placed upon the unique and unrepeatable self as the potential identity all are challenged to realize in our respective lifetimes. 12

Gitlin, Todd, “Bookend: How Our Crowd Got Lonely,” New York Times Book Review (9 January 2000).

13

Lindsay, D. Michael, and George Gallup, Jr., Surveying the Religious Landscape: Trends in U.S. Beliefs (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1999).

14

Tillich, Paul, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).

15

Whitehead, Alfred North, Religion in the Making.

16

Burchfield, Charles, “Edward Hopper: Career of Silent Poetry,” Art News 49 (March 1950), p. 6.

190

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B IB L I O GR APHY

Agee, James, A Death in the Family (New York: Bantam, 1969) Ammons, A.R., “Easter Morning,” A Coast of Trees (New York: Norton, 1981) Anderson,

Sherwood,

“Sophistication,”

Winesburg,

Ohio,

Introduction by Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1964) Bailey, Edward I., Implicit Religion in Contemporary Society (Leuven: Peeters, 1997) ——, Implicit Religion: An Introduction (London: Middlesex University Press, 1998) ——, ed., Implicit Religion: Journal of the Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion and Contemporary Spirituality (London: Equinox Publishing Ltd) Bellah, Robert, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96:1 (Winter 1967) ——, “Transcendence in Contemporary Piety,” Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) ——, “Religion and Belief,” Beyond Belief (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) 191

09c_Lonesome_191-198

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Page 192

LONESO M E Blackmur, R.P., “Religious Poetry in the United States,” in Religious Perspectives in American Culture, ed. James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961) Bonds, Diane, “The Life of the Body,” The Poetry of Solitude: a tribute to Edward Hopper/ poems collected and introduced by Gail Levin (New York: Universe Publishing, 1995) Cheever, John, The Stories of John Cheever (New York: Vintage International, 2000) Coles, Robert, “On Edward Hopper, Loneliness, and Children,” New York Times, 3 March 1991 Cordle, Larry, and Jim Rushing, “Lonesome Standard Time,” the first track on an audio CD of the same title, released 1 January 1992, by Sugar Hill Records, Nashville, TN de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, Vol. I (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co./Anchor Books, 1954) Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974) Eliot, T.S., “Religion and Literature,” Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1975) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Nature,” Nature and Selected Essays (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003) Erlich, Gretel, The Solace of Open Spaces (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984) Ferris, William, Blues from the Delta (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Double Day, 1978) Fromm-Reichman, Frieda, “Loneliness,” Psychiatry 22:1 (January 1959) Frost, Robert, Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1949) Goodrich, Lloyd, Edward Hopper (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970) 192

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Bibliography Gunn, Giles B., F.O. Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1975) ——, The Interpretation of Otherness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) ——, New World Metaphysics: Readings on the Religious Meaning of the American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) ——, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) ——, “Introduction,” Thinking Across the American Grain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) ——, Thinking Across the American Grain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) Hartmann, Geoffrey, “Literary Criticism and Its Discontents,” Critical Inquiry III (Winter 1976) Hazelton, Roger, “Relocating Transcendence,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review XXX (1975) Hemingway, Ernest, The Green Hills of Africa (New York: Scribners, 1935) ——, “Big Two-Hearted River,” In Our Time (New York: Scribners, 1972) Herberg, Will, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: an essay in American religious sociology (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1960) Hollander, John, “Sunday A.M. Not in Manhattan,” The Night Mirror (New York: Atheneum, 1971) ——, “An American Painter,” Commentary (January 1972) ——, “Hopper and the Figure of Room,” Art Journal 41 (Summer 1981) ——, “Sun in an Empty Room,” Figurehead & Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 1999) Hopper,

Edward,

“Introduction,”

American

Artists

Group

Monograph No. 8 (1945) 193

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LONESO M E Hughes, Robert, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Knopf, 1997) Ives, Burl, “The Wayfaring Stranger,” The Wayfaring Stranger (Columbia Records, 1944) Johnson, Alonzo, “Pray’s House spirit: the institutional structure and spiritual core of the African American folk tradition,” in Ain’t Gonna Lay My ‘Ligion Down: African American Religion in the South, ed. Alonzo Johnson and Paul Jersild (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996) Johnson, Thomas H., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960) Kanter, Hillary, and Even Stevens, “Lonesome (As The Night Is Long)” (Hollywood, CA: Capitol Records, 1989) Kee, Alastair, The Way of Transcendence (New York: Penguin, 1971) Kerouac, Jack, The Dharma Bums (New York: Penguin, 1976) ——, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1976) Kierkegaard, Soren, The Journals of Kierkegaard: 1834–1854, ed. and tr. Alexander Dru (London: Fontana Books/Collins, 1965) Kranzfelder, Ivo, Edward Hopper, 1882–1967: Visions of Reality (Cologne: Taschen, 1998) Levin, Gail, “Edward Hopper: His Legacy for Artists,” Edward Hopper and the American Imagination, ed. Deborah Lyons and Adam D. Weinberg, with Juilie Grau (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Norton, 1995) Lewis, R.W.B., The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Phoenix Books, 1964) ——, Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1965) Long, Eugene, “Experience and Natural Theology,” Prospects for Natural Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992) ——, “Quest for Transcendence,” The Review of Metaphysics 52 (September 1998) 194

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Bibliography Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Scribner, 1986) Lyons, Deborah, Introduction, Edward Hopper and the American Imagination (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997) Macquarrie, John, In Search of Humanity (London: SCM, 1982; revised by XPRESS Reprints [SCM], 1993) Maslow, Abraham H., Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences (New York: Viking, 1970) Mead, Sidney E., “The Post-Protestant Concept and America’s Two Religions,” in Issues in American Protestantism, ed. Robert L. Ferm (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969) Mizruchi, Susan L., ed., Religion and Cultural Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) Moustakas, Clark, Loneliness (New York: Prentice Hall, 1961) Naknikian, George, “On the Cognitive Import of Certain Conscious States,” in Religious Experience and Truth, ed. Sidney Hook (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1962) Novak, Barbara, “Epilogue: The Twentieth Century,” American Painting in the Nineteenth Century: Realism. Idealism and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969) Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational, trans. John W. Harvey. Fifth impression revised with additions (London: Oxford University Press, 1928) Platt, Susan, “Rethinking Mr. Hopper” (review of Levin’s biography), The Art Book VI:1 (January 1999) Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006) Ramsey, Ian, Prospect for Metaphysics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961) Ricks, Christopher, “Loneliness in Poetry,” Loneliness XIX (Boston University Studies in Philosophy and Religion. Notre Dame, IN: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1998) 195

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LONESO M E Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950) Roethke, Theodore, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) Ross, David, Forward to Edward Hopper and the American Imagination, ed. Lyons and Weinberg (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997) Rouner, Leroy S., ed., Loneliness (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). Vol. 19 in Boston University Studies in Philosophy and Religion Sample, Tex, White Soul: Country Music, the Church and Working Americans (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996) Schjeldahl, Peter, “Hopperesque,” in The Hydrogogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978–1990, ed. MaLin Wilson, Introduction by Robert Storr (New York: University of California Press, 1993) Slater, Philip, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970) Stevens, Wallace, Opus Posthumous (London: Faber, 1957) ——, Poems: Wallace Stevens, selected, and with an Introduction by Samuel French Morse (New York: Random/Vintage, 1959) Storr, Anthony, Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York: Free Press, 1988) Tanner, Tony, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965) Thoreau, Henry David, Walden (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1854) Tichi, Cecelia, High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) Turner, Frederick Jackson, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921) 196

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Bibliography Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Bantam Classic, 1981) Vendler, Helen, “Veracity Unshaken,” The New Yorker, 15 February 1987 Watson, George, “The Bliss of Solitude,” Sewanee Review 32:3 (Summer 1993) Weiss, Robert S., Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973) Whitehead, Alfred North, Religion in the Making (New York: New American Library, 1996) Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. Sculley Bradley (New York: Rinehart, 1949) Wilder, Laura Ingalls, Little House on the Prairie (New York, Harper, 1935) Williams, Hank, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” 45 rpm release (flip side, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It”), Mercury Records/ MGM, Nashville, TN, 1949 Wolfe, Thomas, Look Homeward, Angel (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1929) Wright, James, Collected Poems (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971)

197

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10_Lonesome_199-202

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I N D EX

Acuff, Roy (“Lonesome Joe”), 150–1 African American blues tradition, xvi–xvii, 12, 136–8 Agee, James (A Death in the Family, 1957), 66–7 American Artists Group Monograph No. 8, 121 Ammons, A.R. (“Easter Morning”), 46–8 Anderson, Sherwood (Winesburg, Ohio, 1922), 51, 61–4 Anglo-American analytical philosophies of religion, 82, 92, 97, 99 Appalachian mountain music, 135 Auden, W.H., 118 Austin, Gene (“Lonesome Road,” 1928), 146 Bach, Johann Sebastian, Mass in B Minor, 112 Barnes, William, 13 Bellah, Robert (“Transcendence in Contemporary Piety”), 7, 8, 21, 80, 103–7, 175 Blackmur, R.P., 20, 21 Blake, William, 128 Bonds, Diane (“The Life of the Body”), 109, 131–2

Boston University Institute for Philosophy and Religion, 10 Bradley, Ben (and Lee Roberts, “Lonesome – That’s All,” 1918), 149 British lonesomeness, 4, 5, 13, 14 Burchfield, Charles, 174 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 4 Carter, Sarah (“Lonesome Pine Special,” 1932), 146 Carter family, 146, 149 Cash, Johnny (“Cold Lonesome Morning,” 1980), 152–3 Cheever, John (“A Vision of the World,” “The Ocean,” “The Country Husband”), 69–71 Chinese landscape painting, 112–13 Chopin, Frederic, 139 “civil religion” in America, 8, 103 Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), 119; see Freud, Sigmund clinical psychology, 8–9, 157 Cole, Thomas, 123 Coles, Robert, 114 Cooper, James Fenimore (The Prairie, 1827), 72, 156–7

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LONESO M E Cordle, Larry (and Jim Rushing, “Lonesome Standard Time”), 1, 2, 142–4, 174 Country Music Hall of Fame Museum, Nashville, 138 Daffin, Ted (“Lonesome Highway, 1947), 147 Das Heilige (1917, The Idea of the Holy, 1923), 79, 93–9, 110–14; see Otto, Rudolf “Declaration of Independence”, 86 Dickinson, Emily, xiii, 11, 17, 23, 32–41, 43, 55, 90, 112, 130, 145, 168, 174 Dillard, Annie, 56 Dreiser, Theodore, 61 ekstasis, 91 Eliot, T.S., 12–13, 17, 25, 139 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 20, 41, 56, 86–7, 115, 120, 123, 126, 144, 165 Erlich, Greta, 56 “existentialist” writers, 91 Fitzgerald, Scott (The Great Gatsby, 1925), 58–9, 72 folk music tradition, 135–7, 140, 144–7 Freud, Sigmund, 118–19, 164 frontier evangelical revivalism, 1, 35, 39, 85, 140–1 Frost, Robert (“Desert Places”), 40–2 Gale, Zona, 61 Garland, Hamlin, 61 Gibson, Don (“Oh Lonesome Me,” 1958, “Lonesome Number One,” 1961), 150 Giotto, 141 Gitlin, Todd, 172 gospel music, 89, 134, 136–7, 140–1, 153 Grand Old Opry, 150 “great experiment of the Republic,” xxi, 16, 17, 86 Gregory, Bobby (“Lonesomefied,” 1961), 149 Gunn, Giles B., xx, 18–22, 103, 105

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Hartmann, Geoffrey, 16 Hazelton, Roger, 99, 100 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 100 Hemingway, Ernest The Green Hills of Africa (1936), 52–3 “Big Two-Hearted River” (1972), 68–9 Hendrix, Jimi (“Lonesome Highway,” 1969), 147 High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music, (Cecelia Tichi, 1994), xviii–xix, 133, 135, 155, 180–1 Hollander, John “Sun in an Empty Room”, 109–10, 119–20, 128 “Sunday A.M. Not in Manhattan,” 120–1, 128, 131 homo religiosus Americanus, 19, 26, 84, 92–96, 159 Hopper, Edward, xviii, 17, 39, 109–32, 134, 135, 168, 174 “Cape Cod Morning” (1950), 126, 128, 129 “Early Sunday Morning” (1930), 116–18, 126 “Empty Room By the Sea” (1957), 118–9 “High Noon” (1949), 117, 126, 128 “Morning Sun” (1952), 126, 127, 128, 129, 131 “People in the Sun” (1960), 126, 127, 130 “Rooms by the Sea” (1951), 126 “Second Story Sunlight” (1960), 126 “Sun in an Empty Room” (1963), 119, 126, 128 “Sunlight on Brownstones” (1956), 126, 127 “Woman in the Sun” (1961), 126, 127, 128 “Hopperesque” (Peter Schjeldahl), 114–6, 122, 129, 132 Hudson River School, 123, 124 Hughes, Robert, 117–18, 128 Husserl, Edmund, 92, 95 institutionalized religion, xxi, 106, 173

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Index Interpretation of Otherness, The (1979), 19–22; see Gunn, Giles James, Henry, 58, 67 James, William (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902), 81, 82, 84, 160–2, 169 Japanese melancholy loneliness (sabishisa), xvi Jaspers, Karl, 100 Johnson, Martin Heade, 123–4 Kantner, Hillary (and Even Stevens; “Lonesome (As the Night is Long),” 1989), 133–4, 154 Keats, John, 139 Kee, Alastair, 99–100 Kensett, John, 123 Kerouac, Jack (On the Road, 1957; The Dharma Bums, 1958), 17, 51–2, 71–4 Kierkegaard, Soren, 93, 127, 141 Kranzfelder, Ivo (Edward H. Hopper: Visions of Reality, 1998), 137 Lane, Fitzhugh, 123–4 Lawrence, D.H., 5 Levin, Gail, 115, 130 Lewis, C.S. (Till We Have Faces, 1956), 114–15 Lewis, R.W.B. (The American Adam, 1964), 16, 18, 156 “lonesome” songs, miscellaneous, 151–2 Long, Eugene, 79, 99, 100–2 Lopez, Barry, 56 Luckmann, Thomas (The Invisible Religion, 1967), 173–4 Luminism, 112, 122–5, 132 Lyons, Deborah (Introduction, Edward Hopper and the American Imagination, 1997), 119 Macquarrie, John, 99–101, 103 Mansfield, Katherine, 5 Maslow, Abraham (Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences, 1970), 127, 140, 164, 166–70, 174 Masters, Edgar Lee, 61

Mead, Sydney, 103 Miller, Roger, 149 Mizruchi, Susan L. (ed., Religion and Cultural Studies, 2001), 183–4 Monroe, Bill, 135, 152 Morgan, George (“Lonesome Road,” 1955), 141–2 “mysterium tremendum,” 39, 94, 96, 139; see Otto, Rudolf myth of the West, 59, 85–6, 118 Naknikian, George, 100 “Nature” (1836), 86, 87, 123; see Emerson, Ralph Waldo new Adam (in the new Eden), the, 55, 86 Nivinson, Josephine, 129 “numinous,” the, 20, 37, 42, 44, 50, 56, 57, 60, 65, 68, 76, 95–102, 109–14, 121, 127, 132, 139, 153, 160, 164, 165, 170, 172, 174; see Otto, Rudolf Novak, Barbara, 122–27 O’Neill, Eugene, 17 “oceanic,” the, 26, 28, 43, 62, 92, 96, 118, 140, 158, 164–6, 172, 175 Opus Postumous (Wallace Stevens, 1957), 105, 107; see Stevens, Wallace “Other, the” (“Otherness”), xx–xxii, 19–22, 33, 37, 44, 65, 68, 76, 79, 82, 91, 94–5, 97, 100–6, 112–13, 120–1, 127, 160, 175 Otto, Rudolf, 25–6, 33, 37, 39, 60, 68, 77, 79, 81–2, 92–103, 109–14, 120–1, 127, 139, 163–5, 174 Oz, Amos, 166 phenomenology, xix, 80, 81–2, 92–5, 99, 139 Plato, 12, 121 Platt, Susan, 127–8, 130 post-Kantianism, xiv, 82, 92, 99, 104 Presley, Elvis, 149, 151 Psalm 36: 9, 119–20 psychology, xix, 8–10, 82, 157, 160–4 Puritans, the, 20 Pynchon, Thomas (The Crying of Lot 49, 1965), 52, 75–6

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LONESO M E Ramsey, Ian, 99 “relational deprivation,” xxi, 9, 22, 26, 144–5, 169 religious myth, 25, 33, 35, 37, 39, 42, 68, 95–6 Revelation 12, 129 Review of Metaphysics, The 52 (September 1998), 79; see Long, Eugene Ricks, Christopher (“Loneliness and Poetry”), 11–14, 31–2 Riesman, David (The Lonely Crowd, 1952), 6–7, 171–3 Roethke, Theodore (“The Tree, The Bird,” “The Rose,” “She”), 24, 26, 40, 44–6, 154 Rolland, Romain, 163–6, 175 Romantic period and influence, 4, 12, 27, 44, 55, 65, 155, 156 Rorscharch cards, 114: see Coles, Robert Ross, David A. (Edward Hopper and the American Imagination, 1995), 119 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 103 Rushing, Jim; see Cordle, Larry Ryman Auditorium, 150 Sample, Tex (White Soul: Country Music, the Church and Working Americans, 1996), 151 Schjeldahl, Peter, 109, 114–17, 121, 128 Slater, Philip (The Pursuit of Loneliness, 1970), 7 Snyder, Gary, 71 sociology, xix, 6–8, 9, 17, 32, 80, 81, 103–7, 173, 172–5 Stanley, Carter (“Lonesome Blue”, 1955), 147–8 Stevens, Even; see Kantner, Hillary Stevens, Wallace (“Sunday Morning,” “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”), 20, 21, 40, 42–4, 46, 119, 130, 160 Storr, Anthony (Solitude: A Return to the Self, 1988), 9–10

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“structural” loneliness, 8, 104–5; see Bellah, Robert Tanner, Tony (The Reign of Wonder, 1965), 18, 181–2 Thoreau, Henry David (Walden, 1854), 36–7, 41, 56–8, 69 Tichi, Cecelia (High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music, 1994), xviii–xix, 133, 135, 136, 153, 155, 158, 170–1 Tillich, Paul, 93, 173 Tin Pan Alley, 134, 136 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xx, 17, 85 Turk, Roy (and Lou Handman; “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” 1927), 148–9 Turner Thesis, 85 Twain, Mark (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884), 17, 51, 52–5, 67, 135, 168 Uberschwenglische, Das (“the overabounding”), 96; see Otto, Rudolf Vendler, Helen, 124 Warhol, Andy, 116 Watson, George, 10 Weiss, Robert (Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation, 1974), 8–9, 26, 157 Whistler, James Abbott McNeil, 139 Whitehead, Alfred North, 87, 173, 174 Whitman, Walt, 17, 23–4, 26–32, 40, 45, 55, 74, 135, 175 Whitter, Henry (“Lonesome Road Blues”), 145, 147 Wilder, Laura Igalls (Little House on the Prairie, 1935), 59–60, 67 Williams, Hank, 133, 138–40, 142, 152, 153, 168 Wolfe, Thomas, 64–5, 67 Wright, James, 40, 48–9 Yeats, William Butler, 117