Writing the Writer/Source Material Text #2

In the twenties and thirties, American writers and readers were teased by two myths, or prophecies, which still hovered in the air. One was the myth of the Great American Novel, that sui generis book which would reveal, or invent, the meaning of American exeperience once and for all. The other was the myth of the Promising Young Man, who would do with language what Lindbergh had done with flight - something bold and unprecedented and definitive, which would cross the Atlantic and speak for us to all the world. Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Wescott, among others, were setting the pace by 1930, but then, a few years later, Fitzgerald had confessed himself finished in The Crack-Up; Wescott appeared to have stopped writing; and Hemingway was giving more of his time to enacting the role in public than to fulfilling it in private.

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It is odd, how we expect our best writers to do more than make us novels and poems. In Europe, works are all that is required of them, and they are honored accordingly. Here they must also use their bodies and personal histories and failures (above all, their failures) to make us emblems. And it these emblems that we ultimately cherish. Is it for the truth in Walden that we still acknowledge Thoreau, or for the image of a superb Yankee crank that his own biography gives us? And didn't Poe, Melville, and Mark Twain, not to mention Hart Crane and Fitzgerald and most recently Hemingway, have to give us dramatic totems of themselves in order to make us take their work seriously? - Robert Phelps, Introduction to Letters of James Agee to Father Flye