MAY I ASK?
MAY I ASK?
Our critics have often assured us that the dollar sign is the symbol of
America. I am coming to the conclusion that our more characteristic one
is the question mark. I have just typed them side by side on my Corona
and have been looking at them. $ and ?. We may read the dollar sign as
two parallel lines with a swirl trying to bring them together. One of
these lines, as I see it, is expense and the other income. Parallel
lines never meet in a Euclidean world. The S imposed on them represents
the frantic effort of the individual to refute this geometrical
finance. In this respect my present wanderings over a post-war world
show me that there is nothing typically American about this symbol.
The striving, the manifold tragedy, the wrung soul of an era concealed
in this new swastika is universal. In England, France, Italy, Austria,
Czecho-Slovakia, Holland, Belgium,—I find it wherever I have lately
been, even when the expense line does not, as at home, insist upon
describing a hopeless tangential curve away from its parallel. Once,
however, one has finally escaped from the smoking room of the liner,
landed at Southampton or Havre, Hamburg or Genoa and lost one’s self
among the “foreigners,” one does escape from the question mark in its
typical American repetitive usage.
One does not, it is true, escape entirely. The mails still function,
and a good part of this long sunny afternoon which should have been
devoted to work on my book, a stroll in the sunshine, or letters to
old friends has been spent in my study typing answers to letters from
strangers asking questions which any local librarian or even a little
intelligent thought and work on the part of the questioners should
have been able to answer for them. “Where can I find such-and-such a
quotation?” “Ought I to encourage my son to become a teacher?” “What
would be a good list of books to read?” “How can I make my boy take
an interest in history?” As I respond as courteously as I can to this
constant questioning from my native land, a usual part of my week’s
chores, I wonder what sort of minds ask all these and innumerable other
questions. (One thing I know, and that is, I shall never be thanked,
for it is a sad statistical fact that in ten years of answering
questions from American strangers I have never but twice had even the
courtesy of an acknowledgement of my reply. But that is beside the
present point.)
That I am not alone in my pondering over this American question mark
is indicated by another letter, lately received, from a man with a
very different type of mind from the correspondents just noted. “A six
weeks’ lecture tour,” he writes, “including Texas, California, and
Colorado, brings me back to New York with the major impression that
all America is asking questions. Healthy mental curiosity is not a
thing to be condemned in children, but it is a healthier sign in adults
when they occasionally take the trouble to think out the answers for
themselves. My limited experience in France has convinced me that the
average Frenchman is ashamed to ask a question without volunteering at
least part of the answer. In England questions are apt to be either
rhetorical or veiled in the form of statements open to correction. I am
told the problem is the decay of conversation in America but I doubt
whether we ever had any conversations to decay. Sophisticated New York
is no exception.”
Questions and converse are closely linked but it is easier in our
social history to trace the continuance of the former than of the
latter. We have, indeed, an occasional comment, such as that of John
Adams who noted in his Diary when passing through New York in 1774 on
his way to the Continental Congress that in spite “of all the opulence
and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be
found” and “no conversation that is agreeable; there is no modesty,
no attention to one another. They talk very loud, very fast, and all
together.” Alexander Hamilton, not the celebrated statesman but a
Baltimore doctor, is the only man I know who tried to report colonial
conversations verbatim, as may be found in his little-known but
immensely entertaining _Itinerarium_. With almost complete unanimity,
however, all travelers for a couple of centuries comment on the, to
them, curious American habit of asking questions in every part of the
country. It begins as early as 1710, perhaps earlier, and becomes
marked as the travel literature rapidly increases after the French
and Indian War. It is a habit, therefore, which obviously has a long
history behind it and for which the first explanation sought must be an
historical one.
The frontier, that omnipresent though often unrecognized influence in
so many departments of American life, is probably at the bottom of it.
In a sparsely settled section there are two good reasons for putting
a stranger through his catechism,—danger and paucity of intellectual
interest. Even today, in the remoter parts of the Carolina mountains,
to quote a bit of personal experience, the opening of conversation is
still stereotyped when a mountaineer meets a stranger on the road.
“Howdy.” Then, with no show of diffidence, “what mought your name be?”,
and when this has been satisfactorily answered, comes inevitably next,
“whar mought you be goin’?”.
Thus far the opening of the conversational game is evidently a
cautious play for safety, so well understood that it is assumed no
offence could possibly be taken. What, however, so many of the early
American tourists complained of in New England and elsewhere, was the
merciless catechising that followed,—questions as to one’s age, married
state, one’s relatives, every imaginable detail of a personal sort by
which the stranger’s mind, history, circumstances and opinions were
ruthlessly explored so long as he continued to submit. The American
jaw possesses an idiosyncratic restlessness, which has been the
foundation and prime cause of the rise of the Beeman, Adams, Wrigley
and other gum fortunes, but I am inclined to trace the source of the
second type of American questioning less to the extreme irritability
of the maxillary muscles than to a psychological vacuity. The trick of
questioning, instead of conversing, which developed among the dwellers
in the towns, villages and frontier fringes of colonial America and
which so disturbed the horde of French tourists who came to look us
over following the Seven Years’ and Revolutionary Wars, and the English
who came from 1820 to 1850, was merely the rude effort of a primitive,
predatory and half-starved brain to grab at food. The spider simply
sucked the blood out of any insect that got caught in his web.
The community mental life of any village or provincial town for
most folk in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was hardly
stimulating but, as compared with those in Europe, that of the American
towns, villages and lonely clearings became a good deal like what
the landscape must have looked like after the last great thaw of the
Ice Age revealed it under the melted glacier. As I have pointed out
elsewhere, a struggle for life under primitive, even savage conditions
does not preclude the growth of an artistic and intellectual life,
as the arts and mythologies of any primitive people from the African
negroes to the Pacific Islanders testify. What saps the white man
and empties his mind of all cultural elements when he struggles to
subdue a wilderness is the effort to maintain a civilized standard,
as far as possible, of material comfort under wilderness opposition.
Something has to be jettisoned from his cargo or he sinks. He always
naturally elects to throw culture overboard until such time as, the
storm weathered, he thinks he may salvage it again. Hard as the life
has been in the old lands from which our first immigrants came, English
in New England, German in Pennsylvania, there had been many means of
self-expression and leisure, and a social consciousness that made such
self-expression natural. For example, among other things they brought
with them their arts and crafts. They carved the end beams of their
houses, painted designs on the overhang, designed, carved and painted
their furniture. Little by little all this was dropped. The struggle
proved too hard. A negro who lived in a grass hut in the jungle had
time to carve wooden sculpture, play music, weave legends, but the
white man who wanted in a few years to make a European homestead
out of a patch of the American primeval forest had no leisure or
surplus energy for anything else. On the other hand, the struggle
against new conditions sharpened his wits just at the time that he
was throwing overboard everything that they could work on. They began
to be ingrowing. In these new communities there was practically no
diversification of labor or interest. Everyone was doing everything for
himself, and almost all were doing just the same thing. On the voyages
across from the old countries in the eighteenth century, the food
supply frequently ran out and in some cases the immigrants actually ate
each other. In the new communities to which they came, the mental food
supply also ran out. There was often no food for conversation. It is
not strange that they ate the strangers, mentally.
We thus have developed a working hypothesis as to where the question
mark originated in American life. We will now consider its persistence.
Why _does_ it persist, and why, in the rich and diversified America of
today, does not conversation takes its place?
For one thing, there is the inheritance from the past. The man who
lived in a clearing or even a small village with no public library,
newspapers, magazines or scarcely neighbors in the eighteenth century
had some excuse for not giving his mind good food, and letting it get
so starved that it would chew on anything that came its way. There can
be literally scarcely an American today who has any such excuse for
mental under-nourishment; but habits were formed. The American mind
is full of the quaintest and most curious anomalies. In business, for
example, it is the most radical and innovating mind (within the limits
of the capitalistic system) in existence. Politically it is eighteenth
century if not earlier. In the same way, the average American youth of
either sex, though self-reliant socially to a marked and even startling
degree, intellectually lacks, almost as markedly, all initiative.
He, or she, studies his lessons and recites them, even in college,
like good little grade boys and girls. The habit of wide-ranging
intellectual curiosity and of self-reliance in satisfying it has been
lost. The habit of asking questions has persisted. Everyone wants to be
told what to read (mark the success of the book-clubs), what he should
think, what is good and what is bad. Perhaps the most encouraging part
of the Prohibition muddle is that it shows that at least he will kick
and balk when told what he must drink. The first factor, then, is
that the American mind has behind it no long habit of indulgence in
intellectual curiosity, understood in the best sense. Through a long
period it got out of the way of being interested in things other than
those of the daily environment of work and play, or of the rag-tag and
bob-tail of disconnected facts that might turn up with any stranger.
There could be no more coherency among these than among the stray items
one picks up by glancing through a popular magazine and a village
newspaper. They kept the mind from eating into its own fibres, perhaps,
but did nothing to train it as an instrument of thought.
Moreover, to a great extent, America is still provincial and frontier.
I am not speaking solely of the international aspect of this. For the
most part, it is, of course, utterly ignorant of the rest of the world.
I am speaking generally and not of select groups. It is one of the
quaint anomalies of which I spoke above, that the nation whose public
mind is the least international of any of the great nations, should
publish the best journal dealing solely with international affairs.
That, however, has nothing to do with the case. The magazine is not
self-supporting and has a limited circulation. The editor of several
magazines of extremely wide circulation told me that they could publish
nothing that did not directly deal with America, that their readers
were interested in nothing else. The editor of another magazine,
one of the best in the country, told me that, although for his own
intellectual satisfaction he did occasionally publish an article on a
foreign country, there was no reaction to it among his readers and as
far as circulation went the pages might as well have been left blank.
It is not, however, in this sense only that I mean we are still
provincial and frontier. In this sense, America is still in the
frontier stage and it is becoming questionable if it will ever be
anything else. The difference between the Indian and the Englishman was
that the Englishman wanted all the physical comforts of old England
set up in the wilderness in his own generation as fast as they could
be. He measured his own minimum standard of living by that to which
he had been accustomed or which he had seen. The attainment of this
absorbing all his energy, he let the rest go. Could the first settlers
of Boston in 1630 have seen the comfortable town of 1800, they would
have believed that a settled, orderly and comely cultural life must
surely by then have been attained. The trouble is that America never
has attained. This, I well know, is by many considered as a virtue and
I am discussing it here only from the standpoint of the main topic of
this chapter.
The seaboard was soon comfortably settled, but the frontier kept
extending and extending and absorbing the interest and energies of the
people. In 1890 even the physical frontier was officially declared
closed and ended by the government, but it made no difference, for
the people were as busy and worn out as ever settling themselves in
a wholly new country, the country of “the high standard of living.”
The settlers who two centuries ago had to jettison their cultural
heritage and interests in order to cut down trees and snipe at Indians
skulking behind those that had not yet been cut, have been replaced
by the settlers in the Country of the High Standard who have to
jettison their cultural tastes (the heritage has gone) in order to
pay rent, get a cook, have two or three bathrooms and a motor car or
two in this new frontier country of the Standard. They are just as
pressed, hard-working and weary as their forefathers, and from the
same reason,—trying to attain a standard of physical well-being to
which they think they ought to attain in their own generation in an
environment in which the old physical difficulties have merely been
replaced by economic ones.
I have not, as yet, had a chance to read Mr. and Mrs. Lynd’s
_Middletown_, but it is, I understand, a very careful and not
exaggerated study of a town of forty thousand people in the Middle
West, yet a review says that it shows that “literature and art have
virtually disappeared as male interests.” It is what always happens
in any frontier life, and America has replaced the old geographical
frontier by the Living-standard one. In the old days, we used to tell
critical foreigners that we had been so busy settling and subduing a
continent that we had had no time for culture. Well, we have jolly well
settled and subdued it. We have roped it, and thrown it, and eaten a
good part of it up. But before we had time to get our breath we have
gone off on a gold rush to this new land of the High Standard. Because
it is on no map, there is no telling how big it is or how long it
will take to settle and subdue it. Meanwhile the total energies of a
good many of us are absorbed in “sawing wood” like our ancestors and
protecting ourselves from the savages under the changed conditions
imposed by settling this new country that can be found in no atlas.
When the old frontier ended at the Pacific Ocean we had at least some
limit set to the physical and mental energy necessary to make it
habitable for civilized men, but one wonders to-day, as one swings
one’s economic axe and turns one’s back on the shelf of books one would
like to have time to read, where in heck is the Pacific Coast of this
new country we have started to subdue.
This new country is a rushing, busy, hustling restless one. Not long
ago I dined in America with an old friend I had not seen in some years.
After dinner we walked into the library to have our coffee before the
open fire. After we had sipped it and had a puff or two of our cigars,
my host said, with the inevitability of after dinner New Yorkers,
“Where do you want to go now?” I suggested that as I had not seen him
for a long time I would much prefer to sit just where I was before the
fire and talk to him. His reply was, “Thank Heaven. I haven’t had a
good talk with anybody in ages.” Last year when home, a New York boy of
about seventeen, a thoughtful lad, complained of his inability to find
any men to talk with. “They always want to go somewhere or turn on the
radio,” he commented. “How is a boy to learn if he can never talk to a
man?” At least for ordinary conversation, there used to be the home,
the piazza in the evenings or the tramp through the country. The motor
car, the small apartment and the rest of the factors in the new high
standard have largely done away with such opportunities. But I think
that, as far as good conversation, and not mere talk, is concerned,
these are surface symptoms, secondary influences.
Many elements are necessary for good conversation. For one thing
there must be a sense of leisure. The talk may last only an hour, but
an absence of any sense of hurry is essential. We may get through a
business interview in five minutes, like rushing a bucket to a fire,
but good talk should be like a stream on which we can float leisurely
without knowing what may appear beyond the next bend. In order that
there should be bends, however, each mind must have many interests. It
is by no means necessary that the major interest of each of the talkers
should be the same or even similar. As a rule, indeed, for the best of
talk, it is just as well that they should not be. If they are, the talk
is too apt to become and stay mere “shop.” The talkers, however, must
have backgrounds that afford ample points of contact. One must be able
to range over fields of fact and thought without having forever to be
adding interpretative footnotes.
It is the lack of this background that accounts in good part for the
lack of conversation in America in the European sense, even among the
professional and university classes. Too often in America as long
as one keeps to a man’s “subject” one may get a good deal that is
interesting, even if it is imparted too much like a lecture, but once
get off that and one is lost. It is like getting off a road in the
dark. In contrast, I well recall an evening spent with a Frenchman,
whose “subject” happens to be American history. As we had both written
books known to the other on the topic, we started on that, and I
very soon found that he was better founded in it than many American
professors. There was not a source to which I referred with which he
was not well acquainted and which he did not quickly and accurately
appraise. Soon the talk wandered to other matters. In a very amateurish
way I had been interested in the Minoan civilization of Crete and had
been to the Ashmolean Museum to hunt up some pottery. In a casual
way he took up the question and discussed the various stages of the
civilization and the changes in pottery design; and as we drifted
from that to Greece and philosophy and literature, the talk flowed on
and on, without effort or pedantry until we found it was one in the
morning. He was, of course, a far abler and better educated man than
myself, but outside of American history, perhaps, we were both amateurs
in all we discussed. What I enjoyed was the breadth of the discussion,
the wealth of background he had, the ability to illustrate some point
by another in a wholly different field. It is just this that is
lacking for the most part in American talk, which is apt to be narrow,
professional, and all too often pedantic.
The European mind at its best is both fuller and more flexible than
ours, though in many practical ways the American is perhaps the more
flexible. It is not simply the number of facts absorbed but the play
of mind and the fields covered. We have had our own examples of the
scholar in politics, for example—the man of fairly wide interests, such
as Wilson, Lodge, Roosevelt, to name three very different types; but
they have been, so to speak, practical minds, working in history, law
or natural science. We note the intrinsic difference when we run over
the English list, Morley, Balfour, Haldane, Smuts and others. In all
of them, Morley least, philosophy has been a major interest, and it
is in the philosophical outlook that we find another essential factor
in good conversation. It cannot be sustained long on mere facts. The
philosophy need not—indeed, should not—be technical, but there must be
a philosophical attitude, an ability and willingness to see all round a
subject and to trace its implications.
Talk, in fact, should never be exclusively technical, any more than
it should deal solely in facts. Talk is to facts much like wine to
grapes. They should be there as a foundation, but the aroma and full
flavor of a rich Burgundy are far from the individual grapes that were
crushed in order that the wine might flow and slowly mature. There is
one factor that has played a large part in the de-specializing of talk
in Europe, and that is responsible for good talk everywhere, which has
been curiously lacking in America—woman. Talk is possibly best between
socialized, civilized men, but the process of socializing, civilizing
and de-specializing them has been largely the task of woman, a task in
which she has signally failed in America.
This topic is complex enough to call for a paper wholly devoted to it,
but I think it cannot be denied that woman in America has failed in
her age-long duty of civilizing her man. She has merely appropriated
leisure and culture to herself. Woman has never made anything of
culture without man. As a result of the complete social dichotomy
in America, the women have developed an anæmic, uncreative cultural
atmosphere, and the social life of both sexes has become uncivilized
in a very real sense. A broadly humane culture has suffered in the
hands of the women until it has come to be regarded as effeminate
dilettantism, and the man, engrossed in his office, shop, study or
laboratory, leading his social life by talking shop, whether business,
art or profession, to his fellow male workers, has narrowed also into
specialism and one-track interests. Yet, on the whole, I think today,
in spite of all the Women’s Clubs with their papers, the Browning
Societies and the rest of the feminine cultural flub-dub, there is
more chance for the growth of a genuine cultivated life among the men
than among the women of America. Woman having failed to socialize and
humanize her man, it may yet be his job to civilize _her_.
I am very far from meaning that good talk must deal with Shakespeare
and the musical glasses. What I mean is that good conversation is
something quite different from obtaining verbal instruction. We may
get an amazing amount of interesting information from a specialist
discoursing on his subject, but so can we from the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. Good talk affords, perhaps, the best instruction in the
world, but it is not the instruction of a text book. A scientist who
knew all there was to know about the common house-fly might give us an
extremely interesting evening, but if it were solely limited to the
objective aspects of this one subject it obviously would not be good
conversation in any civilized sense. For that, as we have said, a wide
background of knowledge and experience, and a completely de-specialized
attitude of mind are required.
There is, perhaps, one other point about American talk that may be
noted. There seems to be rather a widespread fear that to indulge in
intelligent conversation is to make one’s self suspect in a nation
of go-getters and he-men. The dominance of business interests and
the business type undoubtedly has much to do with this; but tracing
it back, I think we meet the influences of both the frontier and of
the American woman again. He-men, of course, are at a premium on the
frontier. Moreover, the experience to be derived in a frontier life,
if intensive, is extremely narrow. Like a small farm, it may be a
good place to start from but it is intellectually killing to remain
on it. Not only does the frontier stunt the intellectual life but
it makes it suspect. A frontier is essentially democratic, and in
all democracies, it is damning to be highbrow. In this respect the
influence of the frontier has been deeply felt in American life since
the days of Andrew Jackson. But if for this reason good conversation
is more or less taboo, so it is for another. By failing to civilize
her man and make him a part of any real social life, woman has, as
we have said, feminized American culture and conversation to such an
extent as to make anything beyond shop-talk appear as effeminate. For
this double reason a certain atmosphere has been created in America
that is inimical to good talk. There are, of course, many men who can
talk well under the right conditions, but the social atmosphere in
America all too often does not provide them. Thus Henry Adams, when
teaching at Harvard, in spite, as he said, of the “presence of some of
the liveliest and most agreeable of men who would have made the joy of
London or Paris,” found that Cambridge offered only “a social desert
that would have starved a polar bear.” Even Russell Lowell, William
James, the Agassiz’s, John Fiske and Francis Child could not make it
blossom.
Conversation is distinctly a social art, and it can flourish only
where society itself has come to be something of a practised art.
It cannot succeed, any more than an orchestra can, with one or two
competent players amid a lot of others with no ear for music. One
has got to be able to count upon all the members of the group having
a certain background and attitude, even when the major interests and
occupations of every member of the group are different. For various
reasons, the old type of society, in which, from a social point of
view, such counting upon could be made with certainty, is breaking
down everywhere, but in America the social mixture has always been
more heterogeneous than in Europe. I am not speaking in a snobbish
sense, any more than it would be snobbish to object to a saxophone and
a bass drum taking part in a piece prepared solely for strings. The
mental backgrounds, even when there are any that deserve the name, of
any ordinarily gathered group of men in America are so different that
within their circumscribed spheres they offer but narrow range for talk
to wander in. It is continually being brought up against this wall and
that. When the right group gets together in America there can be as
good talk as anywhere; but it rarely happens, and for the most part
even those capable of it have learned to hold their tongues and play
safe.
Coming back to what seems to me to be the main point the question mark
is likely to continue to be the symbol of the United States so long as
its men remain frontiersmen, so long as they continue to devote all
their time and strength to subduing a wilderness instead of living in
it, whether the wilderness is one of woods and Red Indians or of the
stony fields of ever increasing economic wants. If the new land of the
High Standard proves to be illimitable, with a frontier retreating
further and further ahead of each succeeding generation, the question
mark, sign of hungry and empty frontier minds, is not soon to be
replaced by civilized conversation. The discussion of an endless
succession of things, motors, radios, aeroplanes, or of facts, is not
conversation. A full mind, a philosophic outlook, a disinterested
interest so to speak, a broad and varied background, are not frontier
products. Here and there in America a settler has decided that he will
move no further, that he will content himself with the patch he has
already cleared, and begin really to live instead of always getting
ready to. He has ceased to be a frontiersman and begun to build the
next stage of civilization. His talk is apt to be good. Conversation
will begin when we cease to expand and begin to concentrate. I read
today in a European newspaper that “what Denmark thinks today, Europe
thinks tomorrow.” Look for little Denmark on the map, and think that
over. But, you say, “May I ask...?” Go to!