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)
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