Our Talking America

We live in a time in which the word “literally” routinely gets used metaphorically. “The deputies are literally walking on air,” a Texas policeman recently exulted in response to a pay raise. So perhaps we should not be surprised when the word “metaphor” gets used in a bluntly literal-minded way. In “An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper’s Magazine”--a collection of essays, stories and poems culled from the monthly’s 1,800 issues dating to June 1850--authors frequently stop the action to tell us when a metaphor is about to happen, is happening or has just happened.

In an image-strewn 1975 essay on the Galapagos Islands, Annie Dillard interrupts herself to explicitly announce: “This is not science; it is metaphor--I’m dealing in imagery, working toward a picture.” Writing in 1990, Richard Rodriguez does not say that San Francisco “is the farthest-flung possibility, the end of the line”; what he says is that San Francisco is “a metaphor for the farthest-flung possibility, a metaphor for the end of the line”; he also speaks of himself as someone who “respond[s] to the metaphor of spring.” “It’s almost too easy,” Pico Iyer worries self-consciously in his 1995 article on Los Angeles International Airport, “to say that [the airport] is a perfect metaphor for L.A.” No wonder that Harper’s current editor Lewis Lapham, in an introductory essay to “American Album,” describes the magazine’s writers over the generations as all “caught up in the making of metaphors, with which to find the spirit of an age that they could recognize as their own.”

If any single thread connects the works in “American Album”--they range in topic from morality in international affairs to Aimee Semple McPherson, from the 1969 “soccer war” between El Salvador and Honduras to Gertrude Stein--it obviously could not be their subject matter. Instead, it would have to be their style. Having so literally called our attention to the matter, “American Album” raises this question: Is there any such thing as a Harper’s metaphor--a unique and persisting way with simile or imagery, of painting a picture of the world through words? In fact, because the magazine’s writers--from Wharton and Dreiser to Tom Wolfe and David Mamet--have defined the “American character and turn of mind,” as Lapham puts it, “American Album” raises an even broader question. Is there any such thing as an American style of metaphor? Fortunately, the book also provides an answer: Indeed there is.

Two things stand out in the imagery that Harper’s writers have employed over decades. First, there is the use of places or spaces, of rooms and terrain, as metaphors for almost anything. People who are “against equality because of race or color,” William Faulkner writes in a 1956 essay, are like folks who live “in Alaska and [are] against snow.” James Baldwin, visiting Martin Luther King Jr. in 1958, surveys the “wilderness” of paper on King’s hotel-room desk. A newspaper’s police beat, Murray Kempton declares in a 1974 piece, is a “backwater” whose denizens know its “every weed and mud-bank.” In Thornton Wilder’s 1953 essay “The Silent Generation,” the U.S. Army becomes an “echoing gallery of out-dated attitudes and sentiments.” Even time can become a place: The era of biblical creation in 4004 BC, Annie Dillard says, is like a “small room” in which “[w]e were all crouched--against the comforting back wall.”

When James Meredith registered at the University of Mississippi in 1962--the first black person ever to do so--the white students, Walker Percy writes in a 1965 retrospective, reacted “as if he had been quartered in their living room”; a few lines later, Percy likens white Southern towns to “one big front porch.” In Alice Walker’s 1973 story “Everyday Use,” the main character describes her yard as “not just a yard. It is like an extended living room.” And here’s Tee Rodgers, searching for a way of explaining his life as an L.A. gang member during a 1989 Harper’s forum: “It’s like this: there’s this barrel, okay? All of us are in it together, and we all want the same thing. And if a homeboy rises up--and it is not so much jealousy as the fear of him leaving me--I want to come up with him--but when he reaches the top of the barrel, I grab him by the pants leg and I pull him back down.”

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So in “American Album,” almost anything at all can get metaphorically transformed into a place or a space, from barrels to small rooms, from wilderness to Alaska. But a second way with imagery also pervades the book: People--whether fictional or real, famous or obscure, singly or in groups--can get transformed metaphorically into almost anything at all.

In an essay on the summer of 1968, Norman Mailer reduces the Democratic delegates swarming the Chicago Amphitheatre to their various diseases and other flesh failures: “Cancer jostled elbows with acromegaly, obesity with edema, arthritis with alcoholism, bad livers sent curses to bronchias, and quivering jowls beamed bad cess to puffed-out paunches.” Dillard, in her 1975 piece, likens ephemeral human beings to “confetti torn from colored papers, tossed from windows, and swept from the streets by morning”; in Alice Walker’s 1973 story, the main character describes herself as a “Model A car.” George Plimpton, writing in 1966, finds Archie Robinson, business manager for Cassius Clay, to be “as impersonal as an injunction.” Lapham himself likens Jimmy Carter to a “coroner’s report.”

And then there’s Allan Gurganus’ sublime 1989 story “Reassurance,” in which a Civil War-era mother dreams of receiving a letter from her dead son, a Union soldier. Describing his having succumbed to pyemia as a result of a wounded knee, the boy likens himself to a terrain in which the disease was “set loose in me and taking all the early lights out, one by one, lamp by lamp, farm by farm, house by house--It was just one shot in the knee, but how could I have stopped it when it started coming up the body toward the last light in the kitchen in my head?”

“American Album” is thus rich in metaphors surrounding places and people, or “wheres” and “whos.” And so it raises this question: Why no “whats” or “whens”? Why no attempt, say, to transform “whats”--and by this I mean the grand “whats” such as love, glory, courage and anger--into other things so as to metaphorically illuminate them? And why no attempt to metaphorically transform things into “whens,” into mornings and evenings, moments and eternities, pasts and futures? Nothing ever becomes a metaphorical “when” in “American Album” except--on rare occasion--another “when,” as in Philip Roth’s comparison of summer to a “season of sunlight” (thanks, but don’t strain yourself). What, if anything, does all this say about the American style of metaphor?

Here’s a conjecture: On the one hand, the worlds of places and people, of “wheres” and “whos,” are populated by concrete nouns--Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King Jr., blacks and whites; or porches and wilderness, kitchens and backwaters. It is only in the worlds of “whats” and “whens” that one finds abstract nouns such as love, glory, anger; past, present, future--entities that exist only as mental concepts, that have existential status but are in a sense not real. Yet on the other hand, though there are next to no abstract “whos” and “wheres,” there certainly are innumerable imaginary ones, from Babbitt to Tony Soprano, from Yoknapatawpha County to the Springfield of Homer Simpson. By contrast, imaginary “whens” and “whats”--star dates, time machines--are far less plentiful, consigned when they arise to the realm of science fiction.

The worlds of “who” and “where” form the realm where the concrete and the imaginary come together. And that, of course, sounds very much like a description of America itself. The abstract and the existential, the worlds of “what” and “when”: that, perhaps, is more like Europe. “American Album” is a compendium of some of America’s very best writers and indeed some very fine writing. No wonder that its metaphors revolve so intensely, to borrow from Dillard, around “the places we have seen, the faces we have known.”