Written by Professor Leslie A. Fiedler
Originally published in the Partisan Review, December 1949
Hier oder nirgends ist Amerika. GOETHE
There is a sense, disturbing to good Montanans, in which Montana is a by-product
of European letters, an invention of the Romantic Movement in literature.
In 1743 a white man penetrated Montana for the first time, but there was
then simply nothing to do with it: nothing yet to do economically in the
first place, but also no way of assimilating the land to the imagination.
Before the secure establishment of the categories of the interessant and
the
"picturesque," how could one have come to terms with the inhumanly
virginal landscape: the atrocious magnificence of the mountains, the illimitable
brute fact of the prairies? A new setting for hell, perhaps, but no background
for any human feeling discovered up to that point; even Sturm und Drang was
yet to come.
And what of the Indians? The redskin had been part of daily life in America
and a display piece in Europe for a couple of hundred years, but he had not
yet made the leap from a fact of existence to one of culture. The Spirit
of Christianity of Chateaubriand and the expedition of Lewis and Clark that
decisively opened Montana to the East were almost exactly contemporary, and
both had to await the turn of the nineteenth century. Sacajawea, the Indian
girl guide of Captain Clark (the legendary Sacajawea, of course, shorn of
such dissonant realistic details as a husband, etc.), is as much a product
of a new sensibility as Atala - and neither would have been possible without
Rousseau and the beautiful lie of the Noble Savage. By the time the trapper
had followed the explorer, and had been in turn followed by the priest and
the prospector, George Catlin in paint and James Fenimore Cooper in the novel
had fixed for the American imagination the fictive Indian and the legend
of the ennobling wilderness: the primitive as Utopia. Montana was psychologically
possible.
One knows generally that, behind the thin neo-Classical facade of Virginia
and Philadelphia and Boston, the mythical meanings of America have traditionally
been sustained by the Romantic sensibility (the hero of the first American
novel died a suicide, a copy of Werther lying on the table beside him); that
America had been unremittingly dreamed from East to West as a testament to
the original goodness of man: from England and the Continent to the Atlantic
seaboard; from the Atlantic seaboard to the Midwest; from the Midwest to
the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. And the margin where the Dream has encountered
the resistance of fact, where the Noble Savage has confronted Original Sin
(the edge of hysteria: of the twitching revivals, ritual drunkenness, "shooting
up the town," of the rape of nature and the almost compulsive slaughter
of beasts) we call simply: the Frontier.
Guilt and the Frontier are coupled from the first; but the inhabitants of
a Primary Frontier, struggling for existence under marginal conditions, have
neither the time nor energy to feel consciously the contradiction between
their actuality and their dream. Survival is for them a sufficient victory.
The contradiction remains largely unrealized, geographically sundered; for
those who continue to dream the Dream are in their safe East (Cooper in Westchester
or New York City), and those who live the fact have become total Westerners,
deliberately cut off from history and myth, immune even to the implications
of their own landscape. On into the second stage of the Frontier, it is dangerous
for anyone who wants to live in a Western community to admire the scenery
openly (it evokes the Dream); such sentiments are legitimate only for
"dudes," that is to say, visitors and barnstorming politicians.
But the schoolmarm, pushing out before her the whore, symbol of the denial
of romance, moves in from the East to marry the rancher or the mining engineer
(a critical cultural event intuitively preserved as a convention of the Western
movie); and the Dream and the fact confront each other openly. The schoolteacher
brings with her the sentimentalized Frontier novel, and on all levels a demand
begins to grow for some kind of art to nurture the myth, to turn a way of
life into a culture. The legend is ready-made and waiting, and speedily finds
forms in the pulps the movies, the Western story, the fake cowboy song manufactured
at first by absentee dudes, but later ground out on the spot by cultural "compradors." The
Secondary Frontier moves from naivete' to an elementary consciousness of
history and discrepancy; on the one hand, it falsifies history, idealizing
even the recent past into the image of the myth, while, on the other hand,
it is driven to lay bare the failures of its founders to live up to the Rousseauistic
ideal. The West is reinvented!
At the present moment, Montana is in some respects such a Secondary Frontier,
torn between an idolatrous regard for its refurbished past (the naive culture
it holds up defiantly against the sophistication of the East, not realizing
that the East requires of it precisely such a contemporary role), and a vague
feeling of guilt at the confrontation of the legend of its past with the
real history that keeps breaking through. But in other respects, Montana
has gone on to the next stage: the Tertiary or pseudo-Frontier, a past artificially
contrived for commercial purposes, the Frontier as bread and butter.
In the last few years, Montana has seen an efflorescence of "Sheriff's
Posses"; dude ranches; chamber of commerce rodeos, hiring professional
riders; and large-scale "Pioneer Days," during which the bank clerk
and the auto salesman grow beards and "go Western" to keep the
tourist-crammed coaches of the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern rolling.
The East has come to see its ancient dream in action -and they demand it
on the line, available for the two-week vacationer. What the Easterner expects,
the Montanan is prepared to give him, a sham mounted half in cynicism, half
with the sense that this is, after all, what the West really means, merely
made visible, vivid. There is, too, a good deal of "play" involved,
a not wholly unsympathetic boyish pleasure in dressing up and pulling the
leg of the outlander, which over-lays and to some degree mitigates the cruder
motives of
"going Western." But in Montana's larger cities and towns a new
kind of entrepreneur has appeared: the Rodeo and Pioneer Days Manager, to
whom the West is strictly business. There is scarcely a Montanan who does
not at one remove or another share in the hoax and in the take; who has not,
like the nightclub Negro or the stage Irishman, become the pimp of his particularity,
of the landscape and legend of his state.
Astonishingly ignorant of all this, I came from the East in 1941 to live
in Montana, possessing only what might be called the standard Eastern equipment:
the name of the state capital (mispronounced); dim memories of a rather absurd
poem that had appeared, I believe, in The Nation, and that began: "Hot
afternoons have been in Montana"; some information about Burton K. Wheeler;
and the impression that Montana (or was it Idaho?) served Ernest Hemingway
as a sort of alternative Green Hills of Africa. I had, in short, inherited
a shabby remnant of the Romantic myth; and, trembling on an even more remote
periphery of remembering, I was aware of visions of the Indian (out of Cooper
and "The Vanishing American") and the Cowboy, looking very much
like Tom Mix. I was prepared not to call cattle "cows," and resolutely
to face down any student who came to argue about his grades armed with a
six-shooter.
I was met unexpectedly by the Montana Face.* What I had been expecting I
do not clearly know; zest, I suppose, naivete', a ruddy and straightforward
kind of vigor - perhaps even honest brutality. What I found seemed, at first
glance, reticent, sullen, weary - full of self-sufficient stupidity; a little
later it appeared simply inarticulate, with all the dumb pathos of what cannot
declare itself: a face developed not for sociability or feeling, but for
facing into the weather. It said friendly things to be sure, and meant them;
but it had no adequate physical expressions even for friendliness, and the
muscles around the mouth and eyes were obviously unprepared to cope with
the demands of any more complicated emotion. I felt a kind of innocence behind
it, but an innocence difficult to distinguish from simple ignorance. In a
way, there was something heartening in dealing with people who had never
seen, for instance, a Negro or a Jew or a Servant, and were immune to all
their bitter meanings; but the same people, I knew, had never seen an art
museum or a ballet or even a movie in any language but their own, and the
poverty of experience had left the possibilities of the human face in them
incompletely realized.
"Healthy!" I was tempted to think contemptuously, missing the conventional
stigmata of neurosis I had grown up thinking the inevitable concomitants
of intelligence. It was true, certainly, that neither the uses nor the abuses
of conversation, the intellectual play to which I was accustomed, flourished
here; in that sense the faces didn't lie. They were conditioned by a mean,
a parsimonious culture; but they were by no means mentally incurious - certainly
not "healthy," rather pricked invisibly by insecurity and guilt.
To believe anything else was to submit to a kind of parody of the Noble Savage,
the Healthy Savage - stupidity as mental health. Indeed there was, in their
very inadequacy at expressing their inwardness, the possibility of pathos
at least - perhaps even tragedy. Such a face to stand at the focus of reality
and myth, and in the midst of all the grandiloquence of the mountains! One
reads behind it a challenge that demands a great, liberating art, a ritual
of expression - and there is, of course, the movies.
*Natives of Montana, it is only fair to say, don't believe in, don't see
the Montana Face, though of course they can describe the Eastern Face, black,
harried, neurotic. It takes a long time before newcomers dare confide in
each other what they all see, discover that they have not been enduring a
lonely hallucination; but the unwary outlander who sets down for public consumption
an account of what he has noticed before he forgets it or comes to find it
irrelevant must endure scorn and even hatred. Since the first publication
of this essay, I have been reviled for putting in print my (I had supposed)
quite unmalicious remarks on the "Montana Face" by men who have
never read the Partisan Review - indeed by some who, I suspect, do not read
at all. Yet some of those most exercised have been quite willing to admit
the inarticulateness, the starvation of sensibility and inhibition of expression,
of which "the Face" is an outward symbol To criticize the soul
is one thing, to insult the body quite another!
The seediest moving-picture theater in town, I soon discovered, showed every
Saturday the same kind of Western picture at which I had yelled and squirmed
as a kid, clutching my box of jujubes; but in this context it was different.
The children still eagerly attended, to be sure - but also the cowhands.
In their run-over-at-the-heels boots and dirty jeans, they were apparently
willing to invest a good part of their day off watching Gene and Roy, in
carefully tailored togs, get the rustlers, save the ranch, and secure the
Right; meanwhile making their own jobs, their everyday work into a symbol
of the Natural Gentleman at home.
They believed it all - not only that the Good triumphs in the end, but that
the authentic hero is the man who herds cattle. Unlike, for instance, the
soldier at the war picture, they never snickered, but cheered at all the
right places; and yet, going out from contemplating their idealized selves
to get drunk or laid, they must somehow have felt the discrepancy, as failure
or irony or God knows what. Certainly for the bystander watching the cowboy,
a comic book under his arm, lounging beneath the bright poster of the latest
Roy Rogers film, there is the sense of a joke on someone - and no one to
laugh. It is nothing less than the total myth of the goodness of man in a
state of nature that is at stake every Saturday after the show at the Rialto;
and, though there is scarcely anyone who sees the issue clearly or as a whole,
most Montanans are driven instinctively to try to close the gap.
The real cowpuncher begins to emulate his Hollywood version; and the run-of-the-mill
professional rodeo rider, who has turned a community work-festival into paying
entertainment, is an intermediary between life and the screen, the poor man's
Gene Autry. A strange set of circumstances has preserved in the cowboy of
the horse opera the Child of Nature, Natty Bumppo become Roy Rogers (the
simple soul ennobled by intimacy with beasts and a virginal landscape), and
has trans-formed his saga into the national myth. The boyhood of most living
Americans does not go back beyond the first movie cowpuncher, and these days
the kid without a cowboy outfit is a second-class citizen anywhere in America.
Uncle Sam still survives as our public symbol; but actually America has come
to picture itself in chaps rather than striped pants.*
*The myth of the Cowboy has recently begun to decline in popular favor, crowded
out of the pulps by the Private Eye and the Space Pilot; and is being
"secularized," like all archetypes that are dying, in a host of
more or less highbrow reworkings of the archetypal theme: Shane, High Noon,
etc.
Since we are comparatively historyless and culturally dependent, our claim
to moral supremacy rests upon a belief that a high civilization is at a maximum
distance from goodness; the cowboy is more noble than the earl.
But, on the last frontiers of Montana, the noble lie of Rousseau is simply
a lie; the face on the screen is debunked by the watcher. The tourist, of
course, can always go to the better theaters, drink at the more elegant bars
beside the local property owner, dressed up for Pioneer Days. The cowhands
go to the shabby movie house off the main drag and do their drinking in their
own dismal places. And when the resident Easterner or the visitor attempts
to pursue the cowpuncher to his authentic dive, the owner gets rich, chases
out the older whores, puts in neon lights and linoleum - which, I suppose,
serves everybody right.
But the better-educated Montanan does not go to the Westerns. He discounts
in advance the vulgar myth of the Cowboy, where the audience gives the fable
the lie, and moves the Dream, the locus of innocence, back into a remoter
past; the surviving Cowboy is surrendered for the irrecoverable Pioneer.
It is the Frontiersman, the Guide who are proposed as symbols of original
nobility: Jim Bridger or John Colter, who outran half a tribe of Indians,
barefoot over brambles. But this means giving up to begin with the possibilities
that the discovery of a New World had seemed to promise: a present past,
a primitive now, America as a contemporary Golden Age.
When the point of irreconcilable conflict between fact and fiction had been
reached earlier, the Dream had been projected westward toward a new Frontier
- but Montana is a last Frontier; there is no more ultimate West. Here the
myth of the Noble Woodsman can no longer be maintained in space (the dream
of Rousseau reaches a cul-de-sac at the Lions Club luncheon in Two Dot, Montana);
it retreats from geography into time, from a discoverable West into the realm
of an irrecoverable past. But even the past is not really safe.
Under the compulsion to examine his past (and there have been recently several
investigations, culminating in the Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Montana
Study), the contemporary Montanan, pledged to history though nostalgic for
myth, becomes willy-nilly an iconoclast. Beside a John Colter he discovers
a Henry Plummer, the sheriff who was for years secretly a bandit; and the
lynch
"justice" to which Plummer was brought seems to the modern point
of view as ambiguous as his career. The figure of the Pioneer becomes ever
more narrow, crude, brutal; his law is revealed as arbitrary force, his motive
power as - greed. The Montanan poring over his past comes to seem like those
dance-hall girls, of whom a local story tells, panning the ashes of a road
agent who had been lynched and burned, for the gold it had been rumored he
was carrying. Perhaps there had never been any gold in the first place.
It is in his relations with the Indian that the Pioneer shows to worst advantage.
The record of those relations is one of aggression and deceit and, more remotely,
the smug assumption that anything goes with "Savages."
There are honorable exceptions among the early missionaries, but it is hard
for a Protestant culture to make a Jesuit its hero. For many years the famous
painting of Custer's Last Stand hung in the state university, where the students
of history were being taught facts that kept them from taking Custer for
the innocent Victrm, the symbolic figure of the white man betrayed by crafty
redskins that he is elsewhere. In Montana it is difficult to see the slaughter
at Little Big Horn as anything but the result of a tactical error in a long
warfare with whose motives one can no longer sympathize.
Driving across Montana, the conscientious sightseer who slows up for the
signs saying "Historic Point 1000 Feet" can read the roadside marker
beside US 2 at Chinook, which memorializes "The usual fork-tongued methods
of the white which had deprived these Indians of their hereditary lands,"
"One of the blackest records of our dealings with the Indians..." Or
at Poplar he can learn how the Assiniboines "are now waiting passively
for the fulfillment of treaties made with 'The Great White Father.' "*
*I have since been told that these signs were composed by a self-conscious
"rebel," who later accommodated to the ruling powers and grew rich;
but such an account is itself an American Legend - and anyway the words of
the
"rebel" have never seemed inappropriate to legislator, road commissioner,
or traveler on the highways.
It is at first thoroughly disconcerting to discover such confessions of shame
blessed by the state legislature and blazoned on the main roads where travelers
are enjoined to stop and notice. What motives can underlie such declarations:
The feeling that simple confession is enough for absolution? A compulsion
to blurt out one's utmost indignity? A shallow show of regret that protects
a basic indifference? It is not only the road markers that keep alive the
memory of the repeated betrayals and acts of immoral appropriation that brought
Montana into existence; there are books to document the story, and community
pageants to present it in dramatic form. The recollection of a common guilt
comes to be almost a patriotic duty.
What is primarily involved is, I think, an attempt to identify with the Indian.
Notice in the sentences quoted from highway signs the use of Indian terminology, "fork-tongued," "Great
White Father" - the attempt to get inside the Indian's predicament.
If the Pioneer seems an ignoble figure beside the Indian, it is perhaps because
he was, as a Noble Savage, not quite savage enough; as close as he was to
nature, the White Pioneer, already corrupted by Europe and civilization,
could not achieve the saving closeness.
"Civilization," a road sign between Hysham and Forsyth ironically
comments, "is a wonderful thing, according to some people." The
corpse of Rousseau is still twitching.
At the beginnings of American literature, Cooper had suggested two avatars
of primeval goodness: Pioneer and Indian, the alternative nobility of Natty
Bumppo and Chingachgook; and the Montanan, struggling to hang on to the Romantic
denial of Original Sin, turns to the latter, makes the injured Chief Joseph
or Sitting Bull the Natural Gentleman in place of the deposed Frontiersman.
But the sentimentalized Indian will not stand up under scrutiny either.
"The only good Indian is a dead Indian," the old folk saying asserts;
and indeed the Montanan who is busy keeping the living Indian in the ghetto
of the reservation cannot afford to believe too sincerely in his nobility.
The cruelest aspect of social life in Montana is the exclusion of the Indian;
deprived of his best land, forbidden access to the upper levels of white
society, kept out of any job involving prestige, even in some churches confined
to the back rows, but of course protected from whisky and comforted with
hot lunches and free hospitals - the actual Indian is a constant reproach
to the Montanan, who feels himself Nature's own democrat, and scorns the
South for its treatment of the Negro, the East for its attitude toward the
Jews. To justify the continuing exclusion of the Indian, the local white
has evolved the theory that the redskin is naturally dirty, lazy, dishonest,
incapable of assuming responsibility - a troublesome child; and this theory
confronts dumbly any attempt at reasserting the myth of the Noble Savage.
The trick is, of course, to keep the Indian what he is, so that he may be
pointed out, his present state held up as a justification for what has been
done to him. And the trick works; the Indian acts as he is expected to; confirmed
in indolence and filth, sustained by an occasional smuggled bout of drunkenness,
he does not seem even to have clung to his original resentment, lapsing rather
into apathy and a certain self-contempt. The only thing white civilization
had brought to the Indian that might be judged a good was a new religion;
but one hears tales now of the rise of dope-cults, of "Indian Christianity,"
in which Jesus and Mary and the drug peyote are equally adored. Once I traveled
for two days with an Indian boy on his way to be inducted into the Army;
and, when he opened the one paper satchel he carried, it contained: a single
extra suit of long underwear and forty comic books -all the goods, material
and spiritual, with which our culture had endowed him.
On the side of the whites, there is, I think, a constantly nagging though
unconfessed sense of guilt, perhaps the chief terror that struggles to be
registered on the baffled Montana Face. It is a struggle much more diflicult
for the Montana "liberal" to deal with than those other conflicts
between the desired and the actual to which he turns almost with relief:
the fight with the Power Company or the Anaconda Copper Mining Company for
the instruments of communication and the possibilities of freedom. The latter
struggles tend to pre-empt the liberal's imagination, because on them he
can take an unequivocal stand; but in respect to the Indian he is torn with
inner feelings of guilt, the knowledge of his own complicity in perpetuating
the stereotypes of prejudice and discrimination. In that relationship he
cannot wholly dissociate himself from the oppressors; by his color, he is
born into the camp of the Enemy. There is, of course, no easy solution to
the Indian problem; but so long as the Montanan fails to come to terms with
the Indian, despised and outcast in his open-air ghettos, just so long will
he be incapable of coming to terms with his own real past, of making the
adjustment between myth and reality upon which a successful culture depends.
When he admits that the Noble Savage is a lie; when he has learned that his
state is where the myth comes to die (it is here, one is reminded, that the
original of Huck Finn ended his days, a respected citizen), the Montanan
may find the possibilities of tragedy and poetry for which so far he has
searched his life in vain.
Originally published in the Partisan Review, December 1949;
Republished in An End of Innocence, 1955 (Beacon Press)
Second edition of An End of Innocence published by Stein and Day, 1971
From INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1971
...many of the contradictory impulses memorialized in Montana; or the End
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau-impulses which led me first to abandon the East,
then to criticize the place to which I had come-presently possess the minds
of the those young men and women, the children of fathers who unlike me stayed
in the Urban East, who are just now abandoning the city and moving into what
survives of the West. Such young wanderers constitute a third westward migration
which promises to become as significant in the making of American culture
as was the mid-nineteenth-century first wave. I can now see my own move as
part of a small second wave, whose goals were more ironically and less sentimentally
defined than either of the other two since we sought not mining camps (like
the first) or communes (like the third) but only universities and colleges,
fortresses of culture in a dying wilderness. But we managed all the same
to keep alive in a time of paralysis and timidity the notion of heading westward,
the dream of getting out.
*Here or nowhere is America. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)