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| (David P.)... |
 Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 9:21 pm |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/books/04alexis.html
Postcards From the Edge: Tocqueville’s Letters Home
By Charles McGrath: Nov 3, 2009
Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of the landmark
“Democracy in America,” was in many ways a typical
Frenchman. Practically the minute he got off the boat,
in Newport, R.I., on May 9, 1831, he started making
generalizations: the only thing Americans really care
about is making money. American women are good homemakers
but boring wives. Southern men care more about honor
than Northerners do. Americans drink no wine but stuff
themselves with stupefying amounts of food.
But Tocqueville was also unusual, especially for a
Frenchman of his class and background, in immediately
warming to America, a country that most European
travelers considered uncouth, and Americans in turn
warmed to him. His letters home fairly bubble with
enthusiasm. “Here we are truly in another world,” he
wrote to his brother Édouard, and in a letter to his
father he said, “This population is one of the happiest
in the world.”
Most of Tocqueville’s letters from America, which were
written between the spring of 1831 and February 1832,
when he sailed for home, have never been published in
English, but Frederick Brown, a biographer of Flaubert
and Zola, has collected & translated them for a volume
that Yale University Press is to release next year. A
sample of the letters, roughly 20 percent of the whole,
appears in the current issue of The Hudson Review, and
they reveal a Tocqueville different from the one we know,
or think we know, from “Democracy in America.” For one
thing, he’s much younger-seeming. Tocqueville was 30
when he published “Democracy in America” but only 25
when he made his nine-month trip, and his letters have
a boyish ebullience. He writes about dancing on the deck
of Le Havre, the ship that carried him here, and crawling
out on the bowsprit to watch the foam break. He writes
one letter to his father while perched in a sycamore tree
overlooking the Hudson River. In another to his brother,
he asks for two dozen yellow kid gloves, because he’s
been going to so many balls that he runs through a pair
every two or three days.
Ostensibly, Tocqueville & his friend & traveling companion,
Gustave de Beaumont, were here to study the American prison
system for the French government, and on their return they
dutifully filed a lengthy report — a book so forbidding
that, though he owns a copy, Mr. Brown has so far avoided
reading it. But almost from the start of his trip Tocque-
ville, at least, seems to have imagined another kind of
book, a study of Americans themselves, and he turned every
encounter with them into a reporting mission. “No one is
better set up for the study of the American people than we
are,” he wrote to Édouard. “Our mission and our letters
open all doors; we rub shoulders with all classes.”
The letters are in a way field notes for “Democracy in
America.” Their observations are more spontaneous, less
nuanced and considered than those in the book, without
the note of regret that sometimes pops up there — for
example, the idea that American individualism is isolating
as well as liberating. In these letters Tocqueville likes
pretty much everything he sees except for slavery and the
forced resettlement of the Indians. The most moving passage
in the sample is a long description of some Choctaws
boarding a riverboat in Memphis. “The whole spectacle had
an air of ruin and destruction,” he writes. “It spoke of
final farewells and of no turning back.”
The existence of these letters was not exactly a secret,
Mr. Brown said last week. Most of the ones to Tocqueville’s
family are in the volume called “Correspondence Familiale”
in the Gallimard edition of his complete works. Many of
those to his friends are in the Beinecke Library at Yale.
In 1938 George Wilson Pierson, a Yale scholar, translated
and quoted from several of the letters in a book he wrote
about Tocqueville in America. “But he used them mostly as
source documents,” Mr. Brown said. “He didn’t consider the
letters an epistolary accomplishment.” Oddly, when Brown
began to collect the letters, he discovered that the
originals had vanished. They exist now only in handwritten
copies, some from the 19th century and some made later at
Professor Pierson’s request. “It’s just a mystery,” Brown
said. “Someone is probably sitting on them somewhere, and
they’re worth a fortune.”
Mr. Brown considers the style of the letters, or most of
them anyway, as interesting as the content. “There’s a
long letter about the judicial system in Pennsylvania,”
he said, “and it’s — well, not fascinating.” But most,
he went on, have a tautness and an elegance that derive
from Tocqueville’s education in 18th-century prose. They
were written in part as entertainments, to be read aloud
by his family back home. “The letters are written with a
kind of concision you don’t find in ‘Democracy in America,’ ”
he said. “The vocabulary is relatively small, & not
romantic. Chateaubriand was one of Tocqueville’s relatives,
and there was plenty of romanticism in Tocqueville’s soul,
but not here.”
Yet if the letters aren’t romantic, they’re often exuberant,
and this quality, Mr. Brown guessed, came both from Tocque-
ville’s youthfulness and from his feeling of liberation.
“This trip was his great escape,” he said. “I think he felt
imprisoned by his family and the past. He came from the
ancien régime, from a royalist family, and the Revolution
of 1830 more or less consigned his father to retirement.
Alexis was a young lawyer and very much of two minds about
the constitutional monarchy. He wanted to keep his job, and
that required pledging loyalty to Louis-Philippe. On the
other hand he felt like a traitor to his family. In America
he imagined a world without that kind of conflict, without
a past.”
Once he got here, Tocqueville was dazzled by the country’s
sheer expansiveness, Mr. Brown said, and found in all that
physical space a sense of inner space and freedom. “But
what’s remarkable,” he went on, “is how open he was to
everything. He wasn’t snobbish at all. All right, so
Americans spit — it just didn’t bother him very much.”
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| Bret Cahill... |
| Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2009 5:32 am |
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[quote]http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/books/04alexis.html
Postcards From the Edge: Tocqueville’s Letters Home
By Charles McGrath: Nov 3, 2009
Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of the landmark
“Democracy in America,” was in many ways a typical
Frenchman. Practically the minute he got off the boat,
in Newport, R.I., on May 9, 1831, he started making
generalizations: the only thing Americans really care
about is making money. American women are good homemakers
but boring wives. Southern men care more about honor
than Northerners do. Americans drink no wine but stuff
themselves with stupefying amounts of food.
But Tocqueville was also unusual, especially for a
Frenchman of his class and background, in immediately
warming to America, a country that most European
travelers considered uncouth, and Americans in turn
warmed to him. His letters home fairly bubble with
enthusiasm. “Here we are truly in another world,” he
wrote to his brother Édouard, and in a letter to his
father he said, “This population is one of the happiest
in the world.”
Most of Tocqueville’s letters from America, which were
written between the spring of 1831 and February 1832,
when he sailed for home, have never been published in
English, but Frederick Brown, a biographer of Flaubert
and Zola, has collected & translated them for a volume
that Yale University Press is to release next year.
[/quote]
Collected them from where?
Does the book indicate which are backed up by authenticated originals
and which are "copies."
Who "copied" these letters.
"Antiques Road Show" needs to become "Antiques International Show."
Bret Cahill |
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| ZerkonXXXX... |
| Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2009 6:21 am |
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On Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:21:24 -0800, (David P.) wrote:
[quote]Most of Tocqueville’s letters from America, which were written between
the spring of 1831 and February 1832, when he sailed for home,
[/quote]
Two excerpts from an essay on Mark Twain by George Orwell:
.................
Born in 1835 (he came of a Southern family, a family just rich enough to
own one or perhaps two slaves), he had had his youth and early manhood in
the golden age of America, the period when the great plains were opened
up, when wealth and opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt
free, indeed were free, as they had never been before and may not be
again for centuries. Life on the Mississippi and the two other books that
I have mentioned are a ragbag of anecdotes, scenic descriptions and
social history both serious and burlesque, but they have a central theme
which could perhaps be put into these words: ‘This is how human beings
behave when they are not frightened of the sack.’
.................
In Roughing It there is an interesting account of a bandit named Slade,
who, among countless other outrages, had committed twenty-eight murders.
It is perfectly clear that Mark Twain admires this disgusting scoundrel.
Slade was successful; therefore he was admirable. This outlook, no less
common today, is summed up in the significant American expression ‘to
make good’.
In the money-grubbing period that followed the Civil War it was hard for
anyone of Mark Twain’s temperament to refuse to be a success. The old,
simple, stump-whittling, tobacco-chewing democracy which Abraham Lincoln
typified was perishing: it was now the age of cheap immigrant labour and
the growth of Big Business.
http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/marktwain.htm |
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