# The National Letters: On Literary Nationalism **URL:** **By** Jeff Riggenbach **Published:** August 1, 1981 --- “Cultural nationality is a good deal more than mere geography, however.” “Nationalism,” said Albert Einstein, “is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” “All nationalism,” said Rudolf Rocker, “is reactionary in its nature.... In this respect, so-called ‘cultural nationalism’ does not differ at all from political nationalism, for whose political purposes as a rule it serves as a fig leaf.” “The spirit of nationalism,” said Thorstein Veblen, “has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.” I beg to differ; or, at least, to redefine. “Nationalism” is ordinarily taken to mean a fierce devotion to the political and economic system and other social institutions of some particular nation, often coupled with a desire that the favored nation should conquer all other nations militarily, and always coupled with a degree of indifference or even hostility to the political and economic systems and other social institutions of other nations. But it is surely unnecessary to hate and fear other nations just because one loves one’s own. And it is equally unnecessary to desire the forcible conversion of other peoples to one’s own way of life, just because one’s own way of life suits one to a tee. Nor is it necessary to cultivate ignorance of other countries or to affect indifference to them, just because one chooses to boost one’s own. Yet if one does tirelessly revel in one’s own national culture, if one does tirelessly promote it as a wholly unique thing of great and irreplaceable worth—what is one but a nationalist, even if one also revels in other national cultures? Is there no such thing as a cosmopolitan nationalism? Is it impossible that a partisan of American literature should also know and appreciate English, Russian, and German literature, or that such a partisan should insist that every national literature be judged on its own terms and not be faulted for failing to resemble one of the others? This kind of cosmopolitan nationalism has, in fact, been present in the American literary world since the beginning. Ralph Waldo Emerson called in 1834 for a distinctively American literature to replace the feeble imitations of English literature then being produced by American writers; but he also knew and esteemed the national literatures of England and Germany; in fact, he has often been accused by his detractors of being little more than a popularizer of Carlyle and Kant. Nearly a century after Emerson, H. L. Mencken rose to national prominence as a literary critic by calling for a national literature which would be unmistakably American in character, but which would also live up to the high standard of artistic excellence which Mencken believed was routinely lived up to by European writers. And just the other day Tom Wolfe told the _Saturday Review_ that “in the arts and in all matters that relate to the intellectual, we still have a colonial complex. It’s always better if it comes from France or someplace similar. It’s really very funny. V.F. Calverton coined the term ‘colonial complex’ way back in the Twenties, saying ‘now it’s all over, we’ve found our own.’ Except it’s utterly not true.” (_SR_, April 1981) Wolfe is right. We haven’t found our own. We haven’t found it even though it’s lying all around us in plain view. We’ve been carefully taught from childhood by almost all of our teachers and journalists to devalue or disregard our native literary traditions in favor of English or French traditions. And as examples of great American writers we’ve been offered not Jack London but Henry James, not Ken Kesey but Philip Roth, not Henry Miller but Saul Bellow—that is, we’ve been offered a gaggle of second-rate practitioners of European arts, writers who are American only in the irrelevant sense of having lived from birth in the United States. Cultural nationality is a good deal more than mere geography, however. It might be said, in fact, that geography has scarcely anything to do with the matter of nationality. A man’s country is not whatever country he happens to live in; it is whatever country he can live in most happily. And if, as Thoreau said, most men lead lives of quiet desperation, this is partly because most men live their lives in unwitting exile from their true countries. “A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a nationality,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others….” And such common sympathies care nothing for geography. This is why so many of the most characteristically American writers have been adult immigrants from other countries. Offhand one can think of figures as diverse as Lafcadio Hearn, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, and Vladimir Nabokov to illustrate the point. These writers came to America in the first place precisely because they felt at home among its traditions, comfortable with its cultural heritage, and sympathetic to the peculiarities of its national character. Consider the case of Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov spent the first 20 years of his life in Russia, the second 20 in Western Europe (mostly in Berlin, London, and Paris), the third 20 in America, and the fourth not-quite-20 back in Western Europe (this time in Montreux, Switzerland). But from the time he first arrived in the United States in 1940, he regarded America as his country. When he moved to Montreux in 1960 to be near his son Dmitri Nabokov (the opera singer and translator), it was not to a new home he moved, but to a hotel. “I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England where I studied French literature, before spending 15 years in Germany,” he told _Playboy_ in 1963. “I am living in Switzerland for purely private reasons — family reasons and certain professional ones too, such as some special research for a special book. I hope to return very soon to America….” Three years later, still in Montreux, still in the same hotel, he told another interviewer from another magazine that although he had ‘always maintained, even as a schoolboy in Russia, that the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance…I think of myself today as an American writer who has once been a Russian one.” Nabokov retained his naturalized American citizenship after his move to Montreux, he continued to write his novels in English rather than in the Russian or French with which he was equally proficient, and he continued to publish his books through U.S. publishers. He also worked in all the most distinctively American genres: science fiction (_The Waltz Invention_, _Ada_), the murder mystery (_Pale Fire_), and, of course, Symbolism—he was the greatest American Symbolist since Poe, the man who invented Symbolism 150 years ago. Moreover, he was a thoroughgoing individualist—a classical liberal, in fact—in his politics. “\[S\]ince my youth,” he told _Playboy_ in 1963, “my political outlook has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.” Only the individual interested him, he insisted. “I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.” He was originally attracted to America for exactly such political reasons as these, of course, but having arrived, he stayed on to discover others, like America’s ‘rich intellectual life and easygoing, good-natured atmosphere,’ to say nothing of ‘its great libraries.’ Yet he never came back. Instead he lived out his life after 1960 as a transient, a hotel guest with no permanent address, a man without a country. And it is only since his death in 1977 that he has begun at last to be regarded in his own country, America, with the critical respect which has long been his due. Lately his reputation has received another boost from the publication of the _Lectures on Literature_ (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 352 pp., $19.95) which he originally delivered during the 1950s at Cornell (where his students included such writers-to-be as Joanna Russ and Thomas Pynchon)— possibly because they focus on European writers and therefore strike our ministers of culture as safe to take seriously? Whatever the reason, the great success of the lectures has unfortunately obscured a number of other fine specimens of Nabokoviana which had the ill luck to be published at about the same time. In the short essay which follows this one, Frederic Reynolds discusses one such unjustly neglected book—a volume which would seem to be of particular interest to the reader interested in Nabokov’s politics. Jeff Riggenbach is West Coast editor of LR.