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what calls for thinking in Emerson occurs before or as our
life of perplexities and aspirations and depressions and despera-
tions and manifestations of destiny resolve themselves into prac-
tical problems. 37 That is: resolve themselves into the kind of
problems a Pragmatist would want to address.
I have been describing the attempt to bring Emerson into
American society. But if you bring him in, you find that your guest
is not Emerson but James Russell Lowell. Emerson is a fearsome
person because he claims the power of creating himself, becom-
ing God to himself, and the fact that he makes the same claim for
everyone does not take the harm out of it. If you stand thrilled by
the sight of Emerson creating himself, you call him a strong poet,
as Harold Bloom does. If you are appalled by the pretension and
think it satanic, you know why America has repressed Emerson or
domesticated him. He sets terrible conditions for his being willing
to be human. The first of these is that he must be divine. The
other conditions follow from that one.
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Emerson and The American Scholar
The most telling parable of the personalist authenticity of
Emerson and the Emersonians it is Geoffrey Hill s phrase38
is (so far as my reading goes) Lawrence Sargent Hall s short story
The Ledge, written in 1959. A fisherman goes out on Christmas
Day with his son, aged thirteen, and his nephew, aged fifteen, to
hunt sea ducks along the outer ledges of the bay. He is a hard,
fierce man, master of himself. He is the sort of man who might
have said, as President Bush belatedly did, Let s roll. But he is
also capable of being driven to affection and tenderness. The
fisherman and the boys start up the skiff with an outboard engine
and transfer it to the big boat, anchored farther out, securing it on
the stern. From the mouth of the channel he could lay a straight
course for Brown Cow Island, anchor the boat out of sight behind
it, and from the skiff set their tollers off Devil s Hump three hun-
dred yards to seaward. It takes them two hours at full throttle to
reach the Hump. When they come to it, they anchor the big boat,
take the skiff loaded with their guns, knapsacks, and tollers to
the ledge and set the decoys. When the first flock of ducks comes
over, the hunters shoot into them. Then the fisherman and his son
take the skiff to gather up the dead birds. They return to the ledge
and pull the skiff up to wait for the next flight of ducks. When they
prepare to head for home, they find that the skiff has drifted away
and is now a quarter of a mile to leeward. For a moment, the
fisherman considers trying to swim for it, but it is impossible. He
simply sat down on the ledge and forgot everything except the
marvelous mystery. The mystery is presumably what you divine
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Emerson and The American Scholar
when, like the fisherman in this predicament, you are for a mo-
ment or two beyond good and evil. The hunters try to attract at-
tention by firing off their guns. The tide is rising, covering the
ledge. In the event, and inevitably, the fisherman and the boys are
drowned. The story ends with these sentences:
As the land mass pivoted toward sunlight the day after
Christmas, a tiny fleet of small craft converged off shore
like iron filings to a magnet. At daybreak they found the
skifffloating unscathed off the headland, half full of
ducks and snow. The shooting had been good, as some-
one hearing on the mainland the previous afternoon
had supposed. Two hours afterward they found the un-
harmed boat adrift five miles at sea. At high noon they
found the fisherman at ebb tide, his right foot jammed
cruelly into a glacial crevice of the ledge beside three
shotguns, his hands tangled behind him in his sus-
penders, and under his right elbow a rubber boot with
a sock and a live starfish in it. After dragging unlit
depths all day for the boys, they towed the fisherman
home in his own boat at sundown, and in the frost of
evening, mute with discovering purgatory, laid him on
his wharf for his wife to see.
She, somehow, standing on the dock as in her fre-
quent dream, gazing at the fisherman pure as crystal on
the icy boards, a small rubber boot still frozen under one
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Emerson and The American Scholar
clenched arm, saw him exaggerated beyond remorse or
grief, absolved of his mortality.
I read this story as a parable, dire indeed, of Emersonian self-
reliance. The fisherman, immersed in circumstantial forces, insists
on creating himself despite those forces. Such a man has several
possibilities. If he is lucky, he can win, surviving to have the grati-
fication of being master of himself. If he is not lucky, he can as-
sent to the conditions of his life, as the fisherman does when he
tells his son that he could not swim out to the skiff. A hundred
yards maybe, in this water. I wish I could, he added. It was the
most intimate and pitiful thing he had ever said. 39 Or, still with-
out luck, he could drive himself beyond good and evil, as if he de-
termined not to be willing to live. To live is to be among condi-
tions, willingly if one is wise. In the end, the one who understands
this last possibility and settles for it is the fisherman s wife, when
she looks at the corpse on the dock; the fisherman pure as crys-
tal on the icy boards. She sees him exaggerated beyond remorse
or grief, absolved of his mortality. It is an Emersonian exagger-
ation, the American version of hubris. Absolved of his mortality:
released, removed from its further claims.
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2
Moby-Dick
in the slush
Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones
Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast
Bobbing by Ahab s whaleboats in the East.
Robert Lowell, The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
1
When we refer to literature and its contexts, we mean to advert to
the various ways in which a particular work is sensitive to forces at
large. Some of these are immitigably personal, an affiliation of
genetic, familial, and social circumstances. Some are more dis-
tant: the forces, political, economic, religious, or cultural, by
which a writer is surrounded and, it may be, beset. A writer may
yield to any or all of these forces, or may press back against them.
Some of them may be ignorable. Jane Austen paid little attention
to current affairs. George Eliot seems to have ignored nothing.
Joyce lived in Europe through one war and the start of another
without letting his mind be deflected by news from the Front.
There is a choice. When we speak of the contexts of reading, we
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Moby-Dick
allow for choices. Sometimes one takes up a book and withdraws
into its privacy: the world outside might as well not exist. At other
times, one is reading with half a mind and listening, with the other
half, for a knock on the door. Sometimes not even half of one s
mind is available, and the knock on the door brings demands that
can t be ignored. The context of reading also includes the other
people who have read the same book and made sense of it in ways
that don t coincide with one s own. Ideally, reading is a conversa-
tion, a debate, a round table, a seminar. But the ideal conditions
are hard to find. We create them notionally or in default.
In 1972 I gave the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at the Uni-
versity of Kent at Canterbury under the title The Promethe-
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