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August 23, 2009

In the American Grain

I’m reading William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, soon to be reissued by New Directions, for review. The book is a kind of fictionalized (or perhaps artistically rendered) history of the New World, from Columbus to Lincoln. Here are two quotes from his chapter on the Puritans, “Voyage of the Mayflower”:

In referring to a Puritan story he has just recounted, which ends with a moral, he writes: And this moral? As with the deformed Aesop, morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds. (p. 67)

And the penultimate paragraph of the chapter, in which it presumably refers to the United States: It has become “the most lawless country in the civilized world,” a panorama of murders, perversions, a terrific ungoverned strength, excusable only because of the horrid beauty of its great machines. To-day it is a generation of gross know-nothingism, of blackened churches where hymns groan like chants from stupified jungles, a generation universally eager to barter permanent values (the hope of an aristocracy) in return for opportunist material advantages, a generation hating those whom it obeys. (p. 68)

One would be forgiven, I think, for wondering if Williams was writing last week, but the book was first published in 1925. The new edition, with an introduction by Rick Moody, will be released in October.

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