Why are dragons afraid of Americans?

The chief business of an essayist — I speak here of the kind of essayist that I occasionally manage to be, and that better men than I are sometimes reduced to when not at their best — is to tilt at windmills. The second greatest delight such an essayist can know is to tilt at a windmill, in the full knowledge and expectation that it is really a windmill, and that he shall end by making a quixotic fool of himself, and discover in the heat of combat that it is only a giant after all.

I say ‘only a giant’ advisedly. A windmill is an awful thing, in more than one sense of the word: a soulless creature born of sheer inanimate nature, grinding without desire, crushing without intent, turning its tireless arms in response to a commandment more inexorable than the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not. I believe that the windmill was invented by Koshchei the Deathless, while wearing the guise in which he used to appear to James Branch Cabell — ‘the Master of Things As They Are’, as Cabell called him. How wonderful it is, then, having tried one’s lance against a windmill, to find that after all it is just another creature of flesh and blood like oneself — bigger and stronger, no doubt, but just as fallible, just as uncertain, just as liable to err, to weary, and to die. The greatest delight of an essayist is to tilt at a windmill and find that it really is a windmill, that one has crossed lances, in some way, with the fundamental bedrock of reality. But that experience is a great deal rarer.

So I spend a lot of my time tilting at windmills, and most of them, as it turns out, are nothing but giants. This language is figurative. I mean that I pick quarrels with the conventional wisdom or fashionable opinion that different sorts of people are apt to accept as unalterable truth; and then I find that they are only opinions, and dubiously founded ones at that — or else I do not. Since both conventional wisdom and fashionable opinion are fallible and largely wrong, and nearly everybody takes comfort in one or the other, I make a terrible nuisance of myself to virtually everybody. In the past, for instance, I have gone jousting in aid of Ursula K. Le Guin, and particularly for her views on the diction and rhetoric of fantasy, though she needs my help almost as much as a whale needs a life jacket. Today I feel the urge to turn my lance against her, or against one of her windmills, and see whether I score a hit on a giant.

The occasion of this joust is the arrival today, per post, of a long-awaited copy of The Language of the Night, Ms. Le Guin’s first, and perhaps best-known, book of critical essays. It has been allowed to go out of print, but several of the essays in it have been so widely reprinted that not even the folly of publishers has suppressed their well-earned fame. Some of these I first read long ago, when I was in my early youth, and Ms. Le Guin was already an accomplished past master of her craft; which is odd, because I am now several aeons older than the hills, and Ms. Le Guin is still only in her early eighties. I attribute this discrepancy to the well-known habit women have of telling lies about their age.

Now, in those days, in the first flush of youth, or at least in an epoch when I was still thrusting upwards by orogeny and not merely wearing down by erosion, I was strongly impressed, and somewhat flattered, by the first proper essay in Language, which bears the fine polemical title, ‘Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?’ Impressed, because I had not much experience of the world, and thought that the people who seemed in public not to care for fantasy or imaginative fiction must necessarily have the same fault in private life; flattered, because by implication I was one of the happy few not so afflicted. I was far from being the only one so impressed, or so flattered. This essay, or rather, the extraordinary claim made in its title, has been taken up into the received wisdom of Western culture: so that people feel themselves wise and learned for granting the antecedent, or rather, begging the question, and simply assuming that Americans are afraid of dragons.

In support of the idea, I admit, Ms. Le Guin tells a pretty tale, and she could probably get the average jury to convict. To summarize baldly: America, more than any other country, is the heir to the Puritan tradition, which values worldly things only according to their immediate usefulness, and utterly rejects magic and wonder as tools of the Devil. Even when Americans (and their unenlightened brethren in other industrialized nations) reject the idea of the Devil, they retain a vague and rootless distrust of the sort of things that were once considered the Devil’s handiwork, such as l’art pour l’art, and aesthetic experience, and the free play of the imagination. American men in particular are subject to this disease; they are wholly consumed by the hateful materialistic philosophy of ‘get on or get out’, and have a practised disdain, ultimately phobic in nature, for any kind of art or literature that will not immediately help them get money for themselves. However, like all those who reject the overt manifestations of fantasy, the American Male lets the irrational in by the back door of superstition; so he will sometimes let himself read bestsellers, because bestsellers are good business, and some of their luck may rub off by a kind of sympathetic magic. He is, of course, never consciously aware of such a motive, but it is there just the same, and plain enough for a Le Guin to diagnose. For the rest he will stick to non-fiction, or else

end up watching bloody detective thrillers on the television, or reading hack Westerns or sports stories, or going in for pornography. . . . That all these genres are sterile, hopelessly sterile, is a reassurance to him rather than a defect. If they were genuinely realistic, which is to say genuinely imagined and imaginative, he would be afraid of them. Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.

Now this is a masterpiece of character assassination, and all the more because the victim is entirely imaginary. The American Male of this depiction never existed: not in 1974, when Le Guin wrote this rant against him; not in 1900, when imaginative and (in the old-fashioned sense) ‘romantic’ literature were being ruthlessly squeezed out of the limelight and into the backwaters of American culture; not in 1830, when American literature was just beginning to take a shape of its own, after the fallow half-century that followed the cultural severance of the colonies from Europe. Americans, of course, and even American males, are as varied a group as any other nationality you might choose to name, and more varied than most. There are Americans with the solid commercial practicality of the Dutch, the quick-witted rationality of the French, the dreamy and intermittently dangerous sentimentality of the Germans — to say nothing of the peculiar cultural complexions of the island nations of Europe. And that is only to count the immigrants who formed part of the cultural matrix in the earliest years of the Union. It leaves out the Slavs, the Mediterranean peoples, the Asians, the Africans (who were present in those early years, but forcibly prevented from contributing to the culture till later). For that matter, it leaves out the American Indians: Hiawatha and Black Hawk are as much a part of American culture and American history as Captain John Smith and Andrew Jackson.

For all this variety, one can still draw a sort of composite picture of what we might call the culturally typical American; that is, of the cultural qualities that were thoroughly boiled down in the ‘melting pot’, and became the common property of the whole nation. Our composite American has never shied away from fantasy or the imagination. He loved tall tales long before he learnt to read; and since he grew up in a landscape of wild and wonderful possibilities, he did not much care whether the tall tales were strictly impossible or not. He is equally delighted with Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. He will swallow the feats of Natty Bumppo, which are flatly impossible without being magical, right along with the ghost stories of Edgar Allan Poe, which are magical and might not be quite impossible. He has the advantage of loving adventure stories, and the greater advantage of living in a land where adventure has never been banished ‘beyond the fields we know’ into the realms of fantasy. He likes to play at being a juvenile Don Quixote, like Tom Sawyer, or a juvenile Marco Polo, like Huckleberry Finn. He doesn’t believe in dragons — quite — but he has cousins who went West by covered waggon and turned back because they ‘saw the elephant’. He likes taking day trips into the future, conducted by the folks at the circus of science fiction, even though he knows that one day the voyage will be as permanent and estranging as Rip Van Winkle’s. He enjoys travelling abroad, where he entertains himself by pretending to be a barbarian to scandalize the snobs; he had great fun playing this game in King Arthur’s court. His chief official hero is George Washington, a real person credited with doing things that never happened, like chopping down the celebrated cherry tree. His unofficial heroes include Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck, entirely unreal persons who somehow managed to accomplish all sorts of perfectly real things. American adventure fiction takes reality and fantasy, magic and technology, sober exploration and wild travellers’ yarns, chucks them all up together in the air as high as they will go, and makes a glorious game of taking them just as they fall. It may happen to exclude the elements of fantasy in particular instances, but it has no prejudice against them; and neither, we must conclude, has its audience.

This is the common or melting-pot American, in the particularly masculine form that Ms. Le Guin has singled out for castigation: and if he is afraid of dragons at all, he is probably afraid that they may be a shade too dull for him. Old-world etiquette requires him to be a St. George and kill them, but he would really rather climb on their backs, rodeo style, and see if he can stay on for the whole eight seconds. He used to be wonderfully served by what we may call his official culture, the Arts and Literature and Other Good Things with Capital Letters. Cooper, Irving, Poe, Melville, Twain, O. Henry — the earlier part of American literary history is a glorious constellation of tall-tale tellers who didn’t care a rap whether they were being ‘realistic’ or not. Moby-Dick is filled with painstaking detail about life aboard a whaling boat, but it is also the ultimate fish story about ‘the one that got away’; the great white whale is as mythic a figure as the fish that swallowed Jonah, and the one has sometimes been mistaken for the other. The same whale (I have it on good authority) used to go by the name of Fastitocalon, and lurk about in the mediaeval bestiaries, pretending to be an island until unwary sailors tried to land on him and pitch a camp. Fantasy and realism play together with perfect freedom, en tutoyant, neither of them putting on airs or pretending to dominate the other.

It is sadly true, however, that the typical American, especially the male American, of the 1970s and thereabouts, as Ms. Le Guin knew him, did not have much time for fiction, except for the dull mass-produced stuff served to him by network television; and this phenomenon has got to be accounted for. He may not have been afraid of dragons, but there were certainly no dragons in his life. How can we account for this? The hypothesis suggests itself that it was the dragons who were afraid of the Americans, and not the other way round. Something frightened them off.

In ‘On Fairy-Stories’, J. R. R. Tolkien remarks that fantasy came to be associated with children, not because it was peculiarly suitable for them, but because their elders had ceased to like it; just as the old furniture in a house would be banished to the nursery for the children’s use. But it was not only fantasy that was treated in this way. The whole tradition of adventure fiction — all the tropes and categories that descended ultimately from the mediaeval romance, and that were still called ‘romantic’ in English until that word was misappropriated and applied exclusively to love-stories — was quite abruptly banished from polite circles in the latter part of the nineteenth century, not only in the U.S. but in other industrial countries as well, and remained in exile until it crept back in through the new medium of the mass-market paperback in the years after the Second World War. If you want to examine the truth of this claim, you have only to consider the kinds of fiction that were regarded as ‘boys’ stories’ in the first half of the twentieth century. This is George Orwell in ‘Boys’ Weeklies’:

Examination of a large number of these papers shows that, putting aside school stories, the favourite subjects are Wild West, Frozen North, Foreign Legion, crime (always from the detective’s angle), the Great War (Air Force or Secret Service, not the infantry), the Tarzan motif in varying forms, professional football, tropical exploration, historical romance (Robin Hood, Cavaliers and Round-heads, etc.) and scientific invention. The Wild West still leads, at any rate as a setting, though the Red Indian seems to be fading out. The one theme that is really new is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible men, robots, helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely: here and there there are even far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless glands.

Orwell is talking here about the British boys’ magazines, but the same subjects, with minor variations, predominated in the American pulp magazines. The pulps showed far greater specialization than the British boys’ weeklies; there were hundreds of titles, most of them monthly, against the ten papers that served the same market in the tight oligopoly of the British press; but then the American market was a bigger one, and it could be profitable to cater to quite small segments of it. Millions of Americans read the pulps for pleasure, and by no means all of them were boys; but the pulps were aimed at boys, edited for the reading-level of boys, and censored ferociously to keep out any subjects that might be thought to corrupt the impressionable minds of boys. It is this accident, by the way, that accounts for the remarkable sexlessness of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction.

Clearly there was an insatiable market for imaginative fiction; clearly our ‘common American’ had not died out, or given up reading, or even altered his tastes. But his preferred reading-matter had been banished to the cheapest magazines; the literati sneered and called it trash. After the pulp magazines disappeared, their place as the lowest common denominator of narrative fiction was taken over by television: very inadequately, for where there had been hundreds of pulps publishing thousands of stories per month, there were only three major television networks, broadcasting no more than about eighty prime-time series at any given time. There was much less variety in the televised pulp fiction of 1960 than in the printed pulp fiction of 1940. Naturally, the literati sneered at television twice as hard, fearing its tremendous reach and influence (and profitability) even more than they hated its deadly sameness.

But our common American stuck to his TV set and gave up, for the most part, even pretending to read ‘serious’ fiction, though he retained a certain taste for paperback Westerns and detective stories. The literati had not changed his tastes; they only managed to drive him out. They did not drive out his female counterpart, who was more interested in love-stories and domestic melodrama (which the electronic media call ‘soap opera’). They could not; they needed her money. In the years after the Second World War, more than ever before, American popular fiction became a women’s preserve. Those were the years that saw the rise of the Harlequin romance, and the mini-novel, ‘complete in this issue’, that was for a while a staple of the women’s magazines; but also the rise of ‘women’s fiction’, the ordinary bestselling novel that contained nothing imaginative in the wider sense, but pushed the emotional buttons of the average female reader within a carefully limited domain of ‘realistic’ domesticity.

Ms. Le Guin, of course, has no more time for this stuff than she has for the television shows that the menfolk were using to pass the time:

[L]acking training and encouragement, her fancy is likely to glom on to very sickly fodder, such things as soap operas, and ‘true romances’, and nursy novels, and historico-sentimental novels, and all the rest of the baloney ground out to replace genuine imaginative works by the artistic sweatshops of a society that is profoundly distrustful of the uses of the imagination.

But once again, it does not occur to her that the Common American (Female Division) simply took the ‘fodder’ that was actually available. The decision to push this kind of material was made from on high, in the élitist (and profoundly sexist) confines of the Higher Publishing. During what Ms. Le Guin herself has called the fifty-year halt of American feminism, women readers were not encouraged to read ‘serious’ fiction; but their interest in domestic matters and family drama (as old, and as evident, as the village gossip that has been with us since Neolithic times) meant that some of their interests could be catered to without risking the deep forbidden waters of the old-style romance. In these latter days, when women are perfectly free to range over the literary landscape however they choose, I have known any number of female readers who liked both ‘sickly fodder’ and ‘genuine imaginative works’ — women who voluntarily read (for example) ‘nursy novels’ in one mood, and science fiction in another, and find entertainment, even nourishment, in both. The readership of fantasy in the U.S. nowadays, I am told, is about three-fourths female. The same range of tastes, we may well suppose, was latently there in the women of fifty years ago; but the publishing business made a deliberate choice to cater to only one small part of that range.

It begins to look as if we are faced with a deliberate plot; and already I can hear a chorus warming up in the wings, getting ready to call me a crackpot and a conspiracy theorist. I can only reply that there was such a plot, and that some of the original principals have confessed. In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis professed that he had never heard anyone actually and explicitly say that works of pure imagination (such as fantasy) were per se not literature, or ought not to be read; but I have seen both those claims made. As late as the early 1990s, I could go into any ‘independent’ bookshop in my home town and confidently expect not to find any science fiction or fantasy, except for stuff like Nineteen Eighty-four or Lord of the Flies, which had been suitably disinfected by being taught as Literature — so much the better if it was unbearably depressing, as those two books are to most people. If I wanted such books, I had to look in the chain bookshops, where the staff and the distant owners were not too proud to carry ‘cheap commercial trash’.

But where did this attitude start? I have elsewhere repeated Dave Wolverton’s assertion, which he can back with formidable evidence (as befits a retired professor), that it began with the American Socialist movement that arose around 1870, and in particular with William Dean Howells, the ‘father of American realism’. Here it is again, from ‘On Writing as a Fantasist’:

He claimed that authors had gone astray by being imitators of one another rather than of nature. He proscribed writing about ‘interesting’ characters — such as famous historical figures or creatures of myth. He decried exotic settings — places such as Rome or Pompeii, and he denounced tales that told of uncommon events. He praised stories that dealt with the everyday, where ‘nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is no ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the course of the whole story’. He denounced tales with sexual innuendo. He said that instead he wanted to publish stories about the plight of the ‘common man’, just living an ordinary existence. Because Howells was the editor of the largest and most powerful magazine of the time (and because of its fabulous payment rates, a short story sale to that magazine could support a writer for a year or two), his views had a tremendous influence on American writers.

Howells was still alive, and still wielding that tremendous influence, in the first years of the twentieth century, when names like Henry James and Edith Wharton were the new giants of American letters. Howells’s disciples — it is not too strong a word — had risen to the highest positions in New York publishing, and the editorships of the most prestigious literary reviews. Together they founded what we might call the ‘secular Puritan’ school of fiction, dominated by the idea that strict realism is the only valid form of literature, because only strict realism is good for you. And how do you know that it is good for you? Why, because it is dull. There are those who profess to be fascinated by James’s and Wharton’s fiction, but they are well outnumbered, as I believe, by those who admire their technique, but admit that the bulk of their stories, considered as stories, are terribly and sustainedly boring. This attitude of studied admiration for deliberate dulness was appallingly common at the time; it is brilliantly lampooned in Saki’s short story, ‘Filboid Studge’, in which the world’s worst breakfast cereal becomes a daily staple precisely because anything that foul-tasting must be good for you — if not nutritionally, then morally.

It was not only the younger writers who geared up to write literary Filboid Studge. Mark Twain’s last years furnish sad evidence of Howells’s power. Twain and Howells were close friends in those years, and Howells influenced Twain’s work, I believe, markedly for the worse. Among my books are two volumes of Twain from the Library of America: one containing a sample of his shorter pieces from 1852 to 1890, the other from 1890 to his death in 1910. They might almost have been written by two different men. The stories in the first volume are imaginative, wild, free, and nearly always funny, in the finest tradition of the American tall tale. Those in the second volume are increasingly solemn, sober, preachy, and depressing, and when they depart from strict realism, it is apt to be in the service of heavy-handed satire, like the attack on religion in The Mysterious Stranger. Among these latter pieces is a little screed that he wrote to glorify Howells. In this, he makes a great effort to convince us that a little word-picture by Howells (of menial labourers shovelling snow in the Piazza San Marco in Venice) is a masterpiece of poetic prose. It isn’t; it is a string of pretty words, prettily put together, and wasted on an utterly trivial object.

But Howells would not have it any other way; he devoutly believed literature ought to be about trivial objects. He thought that snow-shovellers in Venice were worth writing about precisely because they were ordinary and prosaic, and because they were poor and downtrodden; and if only the art of literature could be engaged to make them seem fascinating and important, it would enlist the sympathies of the middle classes on their behalf, and then — hey presto! The Socialist Utopia would ensue. This method was followed by Upton Sinclair and others, and ultimately perfected by Steinbeck. One could call it ‘Socialist Realism for the bourgeoisie’. Such work has a powerful attraction for the literati to this day, for the literati are still Socialists for the most part, and are still, after all these years, waiting for their Utopia. The ‘sentence cult’, the habit of heaping extravagant praise upon works that combine exquisite prose with utterly vapid subject-matter, is as congenial to their ideology now as it was in Howells’s time.

For it is the characteristic mark of the Utopian Socialist in particular (there are other and better kinds of Socialists) that he must be in a perpetual stew lest people hanker after the wrong Utopia. Even to find a modicum of happiness in this life is liable to be condemned by such people as ‘escapism’; and of course stories of fantasy and adventure are ‘escapist’ by definition. It does not much matter whether the stories are realistic or not, in the sense of being formally possible in real life. The Utopian view is that ‘realism’ requires an unrelenting focus on the dreary, the depressing, the degrading; that, as Lenin put it, the worse things are, the better they are — for it is miserable people who can be talked into backing revolutions. Happy and contented people are too liable to accept the status quo.

The idea was perfectly expressed, back in the 1920s, by an American union organizer who complained because workingmen were buying motorcars:

The Ford car has done an awful lot of harm to the unions here and everywhere else. As long as men have enough money to buy a second-hand Ford and tires and gasoline, they’ll be out on the road and paying no attention to union meetings.

But this kind of thinking — ‘the worse, the better’ — persisted strongly in Socialist parties all over the world until the 1980s, and in some of them it persists to this day. A genuine turning-point came in 1987, when another union leader — a British one, this time, the late Ron Todd — confessed that this whole method was mistaken:

What do you say to a docker who earns £400 a week, owns his house, a new car, a microwave and a video, as well as a small place near Marbella? You do not say, ‘Let me take you out of your misery, brother.’

But misery remains a selling-point for the literati; as long as it is other people’s misery. The élite of the New York publishing business, and the élite of the famous reviews, all earned their élitehood by acquiring the strongest possible taste for Filboid Studge; they cannot possibly admit that the game is up, that the unwashed masses were right all along to take their nourishment from food that tasted good. It was these élites that fought to keep J. K. Rowling off the Times bestseller list (and succeeded in banishing her to a separate children’s list); it was their British counterparts who cried out that literature was dead because polls of the British reading public showed that The Lord of the Rings was regarded as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. According to the Filboid Studge theory, no work of fantasy (‘escapist trash’) should have been allowed on the list at all; the highest place should have been reserved for Ulysses, no matter how the vote had to be rigged to make it come out right.

Tom Shippey tells a lovely tale about a famous British critic who said, on hearing that The Lord of the Rings had topped the poll: ‘Has it? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’ Such things are not supposed to happen; and to a good Utopian Socialist, who still believes in the Marxist dogmas he imbibed in his credulous youth, such things cannot happen. History is the inevitable progress of humanity out of the ignorant past and into the glorious Marxist future. Fantasy is dead, the adventure story is dead, just as religion and laissez-faire are supposed to be dead; our glorious predecessors killed them a hundred years ago. If the dead are seen walking abroad, they can only be ghosts; and we cannot believe in ghosts. For a Utopian of 2000, the continued popularity of Tolkien was intolerable, as the victories of Thatcher and Reagan were for a Utopian of 1980. They refuted the theories; they confounded the prophecies.

In 1974, when Ms. Le Guin wrote her snide attack on the taste of the American public, it was still just barely possible to believe that the Socialist Utopia was still inevitable; and rather easier to believe that the triumph of literary realism was complete. At that time, the publishing industry had convinced itself that fantasy was unsalable after all, that Tolkien had been a passing fad of the hippie culture, like tie-dye or acid rock. But it was only the publishers who believed it. The American public were never deceived. Many of them had never heard of Tolkien, or of any modern fantasy for grown-ups; the knowledge had been carefully kept from them. But the attitude that Le Guin fathers onto them, the contempt for fantasy and adventure fiction, hardly existed outside the circle of the literary élite and their hangers-on.

Some people — it was a common thing in academia — hated fantasy because it was fashionable to hate it, because that was the way to get up and get on in their profession. Some had an honest distaste for it. Some people loved it. The great mass of the people liked fantasy, when they could get it; they enjoyed taking their children to Disney movies (often more than the children themselves did). TV programs like Bewitched were always popular. As fantasy goes, these things were pretty thin gruel; but a man will take thin gruel and be glad of it, if he can get no other food. But it was never true that the mass of the American people were afraid of fantasy, or of imaginative fiction in general.

Just three years after Ms. Le Guin published ‘Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?’, the dam burst once and for all. In one amazing year, 1977, the film industry was changed for ever by the astounding success of a fantasy movie with science-fiction visuals — Star Wars. The biggest selling book of the year was The Silmarillion. In the same year, The Sword of Shannara and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever proved that Tolkien was not alone, that there was a huge pent-up demand for fantasy by other authors as well. By the early eighties, science fiction and fantasy books were frequent bestsellers, and SF and fantasy movies were reliable box-office hits. The Common American (of both sexes) was back; the American tall tale, in all its forms, was alive and impossibly well. Raiders of the Lost Ark showed that the pure adventure story, even without the trimmings of SF, had lost none of its old power to enchant an audience. The auteurs of the 1970s ‘new cinema’ have been mourning their lost glory and counting their losses ever since. They tried to conquer Hollywood for the kingdom of Filboid Studge — and failed. And since that day, the very citadel of Filboid Studge in America, the New York Literary Establishment, has been under siege.

That, in brief, is the story of the American who was never afraid of dragons. He took to dragons with childlike delight, as soon as the dragons were allowed to get near him again. And sad to say, the people who were afraid of dragons all along — the people who went to war upon the dragons, and made the dragons afraid of them — were not the hated capitalists, the money men reading ‘that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report’. They were the literati themselves, the Progressives, the enlightened and cultured ones — people a lot more like Ms. Le Guin than the straw men she mistook for her opponents. Like Pogo in the famous comic strip (another masterpiece of the American imagination), Ms. Le Guin could aptly have proclaimed: ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’