Advance apologies, but this is going to be a long and rambling post. I’ve been wanting to write a short review of the book Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon, but have been at a loss for words for quite some time. The confluence of a few recent events have helped me frame my discussion, and there are a few things I need to touch upon to get from here to there. So bear with me, and if it seems like I’m wandering, give me a chance, and I’ll try to bring it back together.
I saw Hit and Run play this weekend at Avo’s. They’re a fantastic up and coming bluegrass band, based out of Boulder and Ft. Collins, and they played a couple of great sets. Everyone in that band is quite talented. My only complaint is that the female guitarist, who sings lead vocal in lots of the tunes, doesn’t let her voice off the leash often enough. They played a lot of songs that involve a tight three part harmony, which didn’t afford her a chance to really let loose and belt. But for a few tunes, she let it all hang out and boy howdy, has she got some pipes.
As I was sitting there and enjoying the show, I was continually struck by the pure Americanness of the bluegrass genre, as well as its relationship with another pure American genre of music, jazz. Both have deep ties to the music that the slaves brought with them from Africa. While Americans didn’t invent slavery, they were certainly “good” at it. And for better or for worse, that peculiar institution was a major factor in the development of American culture.
Although it is chic to bemoan the apparent tawdriness of American culture, I still find it unique and interesting and beautiful, no matter what certain highfalutin’ Europeans might think. While we are the land of Oprah and Britney and reality tv, we are also the land of jazz and Hemmingway and Kerouac. Which is why I felt deeply sentimental when Hit and Run asked us to take a moment of silence to remember the 3rd anniversary of 9/11.
Yeah, that.
Cheap television specials aside, think for a minute about what America stands for, and it should get your blood boiling to think that someone like Osama bin Laden or an group like al Qaeda hates our culture so much that they wish to destroy it. No culture or country is perfect, but in the scheme of things, I’d say that America has done a hell of a lot more good for the world than bad. If ever there were a justification for the “war on terror”, it would be the elimination of scum of the earth who claim that America is the great Satan. Like I said, far be it from me to claim that it’s a perfect country or that everything we do is good, but to claim that the majority of our actions are evil is pure lunacy.
But enough overt nationalism for now. This is still primarily a book review of sorts, and peripherally a celebration of Americana, remember?
I’d imagine that a few of you out there in readerland have had the chance to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. If you haven’t, you really ought to. And after you read that, you should read his other book, Lila. I just finished that book recently, and it continues on in the same vein as Zen. Chock full of ideas and observations, I already know that I’ll need to revisit it a few more times before grasping all of the points he was trying to make.
There’s an interesting section where he mentions both Steinbeck and Hemmingway in adjacent paragraphs:
The new intellectualism looked to the “common people” as a source of cultural values rather than to the old Victorian European models. Artists and writers of the fifties, such as Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, James Farrell, Faulkner, Steinbeck and hundreds of others dug deep into the illiterate roots of white American culture to find the new morality, not understanding that it was this white illiterate American culture that was closest to the value of the Indian. The twentieth-century intellectuals were claiming scientific sanction for what they were doing, but the changes that were actually taking places in Amercia were changes toward the values of the Indian.
Even the language was changing from European to Indian. Victorian language was as ornamental as their wallpaper: full of involutions and curlicues and floral patterns that had no practical function whatsoever, and detracted you from whatever content was there. But the new style of the twentieth century was Indian in its simplicity and directness. Hemmingway, Sherwood Anderson, Dos Passos and many others were using a style that in the past would have been thought crude. Now this style was a reincarnation of the directness and honesty of the common man. (p. 320)
And finally we get to my point. I’m a big fan of Steinbeck, and I’ve heard him described as the quintissential American author, but I disagree in a way. It’s Hemmingway that captures the voice and character of the American, with his brusquely elegant style. Short sentences, but not really choppy, each one hitting with full impact — that’s what I think of when I think of the American voice, and Hemmingway captures it like few others.
Travels with Charley is a fantastic book. Steinbeck writes of his travels across America in his faithful truck Rocinante, and when I read it, I felt that I was getting a taste of Americana. I’ve spent my fair share of time on the road in the dusty backwaters of this country, and Steinbeck’s account of the common people really resonated with me.
A few months ago, I picked up Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. He was a Native American by blood, a college professor by trade, and his restless soul was able to capture the true voice of Americana. He was fired from his job and his wife wanted to leave him, so he too packed up his truck, Ghost Dancing, and travelled the country to find himself.
I was shocked at how much more poetic and genuine his book seemed compared to Steinbeck’s. He writes in a Hemmginway-esque style, only moreso. Pirsig spends quite a bit of time in Lila discussing the voice of the Native American and its simplicity and direct honesty. Pirsig gives a few quotes and excerpts from famous Indian speeches to bolster his point, but to read an entire novel in that style was mind-blowing. Least Heat Moon seems to pull his words directly from the breast of the good earth and records them on paper so lesser mortals can get a taste of the richness of the land.
If America — the land, the culture, the people — could speak, the result wouldn’t be too far off from what Least Heat Moon was able to capture in Blue Highways.
Were I a high school English teacher, I’d want to teach a course called “A Study in Americana”. The syllabus would look something like this (books to read and discuss in this order):
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig. You kinda need to read this to get a feeling for Pirsig and his style of writing. You could actually spend a whole semester talking about this book, so it’s kinda a shame that I’m really only using it to build a foundation for the later books.
- Lila by Pirsig. He spends a lot of time discussing the American voice, as well as presenting a new metaphysics. Again, this book could be the basis for another semester of discussion, and his metaphysics is really the point of why he’s writing, so it’s a shame that I really only would want it for his insights on Native American quality.
- The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck. You really need to read a few Steinbeck books to get a feel for him, and to jump directly into Travels with Charley is to get an incomplete view of narrative talents. Grapes of Wrath would be a good choice in this syllabus since we’re talking about the shaping of the American character.
- The Sun Also Rises by Hemmingway. You could really use any Hemmingway book here, as the point is to get a grasp of his style of writing. As Travis said in Taming the Star Runner (by Hinton) “his sentences are smooth and cool like Laddie pencils.”
- Travels with Charley by Steinbeck. A good book in and of itself, so it’s a shame that I’m only using it here to set up the next book.
- Blue Highways by Least Heat Moon. I think I’ve given enough justification on this one already.