American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation

by Caleb Crain

“A friend in history,” Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “looks like some premature soul.” And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation’s literature.

In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America’s greatest writing--the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature--a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout this engaging book, Crain demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

321 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2001

About the author

Caleb Crain is the author of the novels Overthrow (coming from Viking in August 2019) and Necessary Errors (Penguin, 2013), as well as the critical study American Sympathy (Yale, 2001). He has written for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, and The Atlantic. He was born in Texas, grew up in Massachusetts, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this shortly after reading Crain’s novel, Necessary Errors, which had a compelling and sympathetic first-person narrative. It was this book’s full title—American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation—which made me link it with his novel. Reading the book confirmed that the themes in both were similar, that the narrator in Necessary Errors was trying, as were the writers described in American Sympathy, to forge new friendships and a new vocabulary for his experience of this affinity with others.

Crain lays out the book’s goal in his introduction: “[T]he special task of American literature … was the representation of bonds between men that kept men free—the provocation of sympathy, without any tethering of it. …[T]hemes this book explores: the power of sympathy, its close relation to imposture, romantic friendship between men, writing as a vehicle for men’s affections for one another, the conflict between sentiment and authority…”

In this same introduction, Crain takes a good deal of care in simply explaining what the concept of sympathy is, and it’s a perspective on human relations and art that is fundamental and at the same time refreshingly novel. (As a sidebar, I was reading some short stories by Raymond Carver at the time I was reading American Sympathy, and Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” was one of them. This particular story’s title has always resonated with me as possibly being the very essence of literature. Whether or not it describes all literature, the story does an admirable job of illustrating just how words—and apparently a good deal of alcohol—are used to bridge the gulf between individuals.)

Crain extends the definition and explanation of sympathy that philosopher Adam Smith set out: “although we have no direct access to our neighbour’s sensations, we may ‘by the imagination … place ourselves in his situation, … enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.’” It is this strong feeling that lies between American men—friendship—that Crain wants to explore.

In looking at the works of diarists Leander, Lorenzo, and Castalio (cognomens of James Gibson, John Fishbourne Mifflin, and Isaac Norris III, scions of upper-class Philadelphians all born shortly before the birth of the new nation), Crain examines how these men shared their diaries and in the process developed a vocabulary for their feelings for one another. It wasn’t for Mifflin enough that he might say he loved his friend: for him the extension of that expression with long and soulful speech about his emotions and imagined activities both invigorated and strengthened his underlying attraction to his friends.

In the case of Charles Brockden Brown—early 19th-century novelist who preceded James Fennimore Cooper—Crain examines the biographical wellsprings of Brown’s development as a writer through his epistolary relationship with his friend and mentor Elihu Hubbard Smith. It was in Smith’s ability to help re-shape Brown’s wild, fantastical, self-centered, and self-defeating fictions into narrative form. A principal metaphor for Brown came to be the image of infection and disease as correlates to affection and sympathy, which he exploited in his first, largely Gothic novels.

With Ralph Waldo Emerson, Crain focuses primarily on the mature essay “Friendship,” which circumstances of composition were established early in Emerson’s early years at Harvard when he felt drawn inexplicably to another undergraduate, Martin Gay. Emerson’s attraction to Gay was never articulated to Gay, and Emerson, instead, sought to purge and purify his emotions by devoting himself to art. Many years later, when he was in the company of Margaret Fuller and her free-love and free-thinking group, Emerson again found himself drawn inexplicably to another man, Samuel Gray Ward. At this stage in his life, Emerson was able to share his affection with Ward, using for exchange the language developed by Fuller and her coterie.

Herman Melville’s novella, Billy Budd, is explained as being a palinode, a refutation of the actions of Captain Vere. At the same time, the novel is a sincere dedication to a former sailor friend from his youth, and it stands as a sincere expression in itself of Melville’s esteem. Melville’s art is in keeping from the reader and Vere overt signs of his affections for Billy Budd, the handsome foretopman. It is both the emotion and the expression which are denied to Vere, and in the process of denying the emotion he is compelled to kill the young man who inspires the emotion. Crain would have it that Melville was telling his former friend that they two had better understood their bonds of fellow feeling.

In the course of the expressive and flutey declarations of Mifflin to the muted and repressed expression in Melville, Crain appears to outline a period of flowering and etiolation. There is description of a well-established ambiguity about the expression of male friendships, just how closely the words seemed to betoken physical coupling though there is no straightforward expression of it. This ambiguity makes elaborate expression of male friendship potentially dangerous.

Sympathy—the fiction that lies between individuals who feel some ineffable affinity—is fundamental and yet little considered, either in the psychology of day-to-day life or in the making of literature and the creation of characters in fiction. While not always convinced about the way in which Crain interpreted this or that bit of prose or poetry, the weight of this book’s argument felt sound and was thoroughly fascinating.

[Stephen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gave up. . . . Will pick it up another time.