Stalking the Hippogriff

Every so often over the years, when I’ve told someone I’m a writer, they ask either ingenuously or sarcastically (I’m never sure which), “Are you going to write the Great American Novel?”

It occurred to me long ago that the less literary a person is, the more likely he is to pose this question. But I never thought critically about the expression; it was merely a cliche and a part of our national vocabulary. Then, a few years ago, I suddenly wondered where this strange phrase, with its longed-for paragon, had come from.

The difficult search and odd enigma were soon upon me. I waded through a score of indexes and a number of anthologies. I confounded a good reference librarian and stumped a couple of university professors. Novelists couldn’t help me and even the most over-read friends didn’t know the answer. Reviewing Van Wyck Brooks and F. O. Matthiessen, Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Aaron and Granville Hicks--all the books I could think of as the principal texts on the literary history of the United States--I found no mention of the Great American Novel.

It was easy enough to know the figure of speech as the title of a novel by Phillip Roth. His book is a slapstick panorama of America, a very self-consciously literary work, and a parody of what it mockingly represents itself to be. Roth, however, was not the first to use the phrase as a title--not even the second. Earlier, in 1923, William Carlos Williams wrote a short prose work of the same name, though it is not a novel at all but rather digressions and impressions, full of banter and gibes at American society. As it deepens and mellows, it anticipates Williams’ work of a few years later, “In the American Grain.”

Clyde Brion Davis, a little-known novelist I came across, also wrote “The Great American Novel” (the quotation marks are a part of his title) in 1938. And he did a nice job of it too. His quietly comic story is about a journalist who hopes he will one day write the American epic, but is always not getting around to it.

And that’s as far as it went for a long time. That is as much as I could find out.

Then, suddenly, I got my answer. I got it when I least expected it and wasn’t looking for it. Reading Edmund Wilson’s “Patriotic Gore,” his book about the literature of the Civil War, I came across his remarks about John W. DeForest, a Union officer and postwar novelist. It was DeForest, Wilson notes, who first gave “currency to this still all too current phrase.” DeForest’s 1868 essay in the Nation was titled, “The Great American Novel.”

If DeForest gets the credit, I soon realized, it is an ironic tribute. Searching out the essay, I found that he wrote virtually in opposition to the sanguine idiom. DeForest says at the beginning of the piece that a friend has proposed to write such a book. Taking a dubious tone, he reviews what American literature has produced. James Fenimore Cooper is simply inferior, his characters “less natural than the wax figures of Barnum’s old museum.” Nathaniel Hawthorne “staggered under the load of the American novel,” and all his works truly “belong to the wide realm of art rather than to our nationality.”

A novel, DeForest insists, which might propose to be “a tableau of American society” comparable to those of Thackeray and Trollope in England or Balzac in France, would face “a nation of provinces” in which “each province claims to be the court.” It is this discontinuity that defies the creation of a national paradigm or overarching fictional work of art. “The nearest approach to the desired phenomenon,” DeForest says, “is ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ ” He goes on to laud that book as “a picture of American life, drawn with a few strong and passionate strokes, not filled in thoroughly, but still a portrait.” But this is limited praise; clearly he does not see the book as an apex but only as a solid rung on the ladder. What lies ahead offers dim prospects; the society is too fragmented and changing too rapidly. All this, DeForest reasons, will confound the creation of an ideal Great American Novel.

The thread of this argument ran well over 50 years and was bound up completely with the discussion of the creation of an American literature. In the heyday of the debate the issue was unavoidable and the varying arguments cut a wide swath through the literary magazines of the late 19th Century. Among serious writers, the notion of the representative novel was taken at least seriously enough to be disliked. And at least in this respect the Great American Novel became a key phrase and paradoxical springboard in arguments for the creation of a more native literature.

“Lay the story,” wrote T. S. Perry in the North American Review, “on the limitless prairie or in the limited Fifth Avenue, but let the story rise above geographical boundaries.”

“He must be broadminded and prophetic by instinct,” said William Chisholm in the Critic, “who shall take up the four corners of our national advance and present a homogenous and graphic likeness of the whole.”

The Forum, the Dial, the Atlantic Monthly and half a dozen other magazines all hummed with debate and speculation. The literary apothecaries brought forth prescription after recipe. The invocation of the national muse was trumpeted across the land in newsprint.

The apotheosis at hand, said a critic in the Century magazine, “must show us . . . those deeper and grander national forces,” while a writer in Lippincott’s reminded that it must be a novel in which “vice is punished and virtue rewarded.” It must reflect the Puritan heritage and it must have moral purpose.

Amid the tempest of humbug, a contributor to Lippincott’s wrote in 1886: “Suppose the comming (sic) novelist is of African origin. When one comes to consider the subject, there is no improbability in it . . . and why should not the comming novelist be a woman as well as an African?”

The Great American Novel, that happy epithet, within two decades had found a home in pompous rhetoric and cheap advertising. It was trivial cant and scalding polemics. And it still helped bring into focus some continuing themes in American society.

At least as far back as Emerson’s American Scholar essay of 1837 there was an insistence that the United States should declare its intellectual independence from Europe. This sentiment is specifically mentioned in the DeForest piece with reference to America as a spiritual colony.

Daniel Pierce Thompson wrote in 1881 that for the Great American Novel to be realized, the country must “cease to borrow English wings for American muses.” In 1917, Randolf Bourne was still shrieking at the “groveling humility” of America “before the civilization of Europe . . . the chief obstacle which prevents us from producing any true indigenous culture of our own.”

This sensibility pegged the notion of the Great American Novel to a dogma of Americanness. And by implication, this precluded the work of American writers with international settings for their fiction, such as Henry James. Julian Hawthorne protested, insisting that a book might be essentially American in spirit, like “The Marble Faun” by his father, though taking place abroad.

William Dean Howells, the major-domo of American letters in the final decades of the last century, mocked the term from a distance, but used the hubbub around it to further the cause of American realism. He envisioned no summum bonum of a book; no encapsulating work was possible or desirable. But a library of American novels, covering a range of experience and expressing varied regional temperament, was the practical and achievable goal. With this point of view, Mark Twain, Edgar Fawcett and Edward Eggleston concurred.

There were plenty who put Howells himself forward as the man for the job of writing the Great American Novel. An ardent admirer and realist writer, H. H. Boyesen, exhorted Howells to the task. A senator invited him to take up residence in Washington, there to write it; but Howells begged off from all such blandishments.

At the turn of the century, Frank Norris moaned, “Of all the overworked phrases of overworked book reviewers . . .” and went on to say that “the Great American Novel is not extinct like the Dodo, but mythical like the Hippogriff.”

In 1927, Edith Wharton published her essay “The Great American Novel” in the Yale Review. And if the great book hasn’t been produced (at least not so any two people agree on it), there must be some consensus that the Wharton piece is a great American essay.

For her, the entire debate was relentless parlance and disagreeable Americana. She jeers that the Great American Novel “continues to be announced every year; in good years there are generally several of them.” She notes the constrained formula that the book implies, saying the “range allotted is so narrow that the feat of producing the ‘greatest’ American novel, if ever accomplished, will rank the author with the music-hall artist who is locked and corded into a trunk, and then expected to get out of it in full view of the audience.”

The Wharton essay is virtually the last serious comment on the subject. It is a wonderful summing up, bringing together decades of objections, especially from the internationalist perspective. And it is clear that she disliked the realist and vox populi approach in American literature that had so completely swept the field in her time. Interestingly, she doesn’t discount the possibility of the appearance of the mythic book but notes that “it will probably turn out to be very different from what the critics counsel.”

I doubt if there is another single idea in American life that has been so continually castigated but so enduringly influential. And it was so from the beginning. If John W. DeForest first popularized the expression--and gave it a drubbing--he may have been the first to consciously attempt the book. His best novel, “Miss Ravenal’s Conversion,” is a realist--and anti-regionalist--portrait of the republic. And Frank Norris, for all his mockery of the idea, undoubtedly made a lunge at the Great American Novel in his work. In sweeping saga or thematic miniature, American novelists have always wanted to penetrate the historical mystery or lasso the big Hippogriff. They’re still trying.

And the expression itself--the weary shibboleth? Just when I think I’ll never hear it again, that it has finally passed out of the American language, up it pops. Someone uses it casually in conversation or I find it unexpectedly in newsprint.