Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read online

  Multiculturalism is honorable to the extent it welcomes the newcomer and mediates a monotonous Anglo-Saxon model of Canadianness. In Canada-after-Trudeau, one can be Chinese and fully Canadian. One can be Pakistani or Greek. Canada will respect the fact that You are not I. You who are different shall be welcomed into the idea of the whole without suffering the loss of your exception. Curiously, however, not a few brown immigrant children in today’s Canada regard multiculturalism as implausible. After all, Canada is real weather and landscape and a distinct set of ideas and hotcakes and values—one of the values being the value of diversity. Canadian multiculturalism, in other words, is not “multi” at all, but culturally biased to the degree that it expresses a Canadian respect for individualism not shared by most countries in the world.

  To borrow from Professor McLuhan, multiculturalism is cool. Too cool. The favored metaphor of multicultural Canada, the “mosaic”—separate units; composite by satellite—propounds a most unerotic notion of society. You will never inextricably entwine with I. Croatian and Pakistani will not graft a varietal. Montreal, once an erotic city of jazz and mix, has become the noun-splitting capital of the world. Eyes remain suspicious, tongues are held in check. French-language police in rubber soles patrol the streets, writing tickets for bilingual menus and shop signs.

  With some regularity I hear from CBC radio or television (the French service in Montreal). The question is always the same: Are Hispanics in the Southwest destined to forge some sort of new Quebec?

  Nope, madame. And here’s why: Though Hispanics, particularly Chicanos in the Southwest—the noisiest among us—made their reputations “against” assimilation, Hispanics nevertheless trust most the ancient Spanish pronoun, the first-person plural pronoun, the love-potion pronoun—nosotros. We. Try as we will to be culturally aggrieved by day, we find the gringos kind of attractive in the moonlight.

  From Radio CBC, this is dedicated to the one I love: Mexico, whence the majority of America’s Hispanics derive, has no idea of anything that might resemble Canadian multiculturalism. Mexico is only learning the meaning of eighteenth-century individualism. Mexico is cruel toward her indigenous peasants in Chiapas, because Mexico is distrustful of a separate claim. Mexico speaks of her many as mix—the mestizaje—the marriage of races. Whereas Canada dispenses an equal prophylaxis for Syrian and Sikh, Mexico’s appetite for genetic novelty is omnivorous. No one is safe when Mexico comes into heat.

  Confronted by a steaming pile of runny, red-hot Mexican inevitability and a bottle of clear, cool Canadian exceptionalism, what’s the American to do? In the American classroom, we preach the Canadian gospel of cultural relativism until every head nods with boredom: Celebrate diversity. Unity through diversity. Mahala. Yo! But after school we become more like Mexicans: The Filipina flirts with the African American. Difference is danger; danger is sexy. And America seeks a midsummer night’s dream resolution to all civic dilemma.

  Bookstores display the American appetite for a new kind of travel book not concerned with exotic locale or contretemps, but with the unknowable, with Olympian awe—mountains, seas, furious storms, acts of God. At the end of a westering era, whereby we sought to control Nature, readers now seek to know how fragile we are, how small we are, how little we matter.

  Just at the moment, American imagination is more intrigued with cold than with hot, with Ernest Shackleton than with Lawrence of Arabia (five books last year on Shackleton). Though both adventures lie south, one is cold and one is hot. The South, as mythology, is not so neatly borne out by the facts. The South, as mythology, is insupportable. Though the South Pole is ice, the South remains hot in popular imagination. South remains bottom. Gravity dictates things must fall from top to bottom, from high to low. Water runs down, sinners fall, the nude descends the staircase and is not cold, presumably, though heat rises, as we shall see.

  Perhaps Americans will be rescued by the South. The South may be the region of leisure and retirement, even regeneration (a Protestant Reformation is forming in Latin America); the South is also the climate of the inevitable—the cant and the tow are inevitable. Down, down, to the netherworld of biology, sex, hair, infection, blackened skin, multiplicity, as of grains of sand. But also of faith. Abrahamic religions, religions we call “Western” are, in truth, oriental and connect us to the desert, which is southerly in our gothic imaginations. It was there Yah weh pitched His tent; lured His beloved there.

  The gardener in my neighborhood (I never knew his name), a friendly jut of his chin over the whine of his leaf blower was all I knew of him. His van filled with shovels and rakes was found in the desert. His body lay some distance away. Volute, like a shell.

  Another man, the man who lives around the corner, modest, tall, his eyes bent toward some concavity of the sidewalk, passes in front of my building on many afternoons. I’ve heard this man has been up and down Everest several times. Whenever I see him, dressed in his business suit, I feel I must—like a Victorian shopkeeper, a chemist or greengrocer—I feel I must rush out to the High Street, approach the ultramontane hero: Please, sir, what is it like? What is Nature? What is intemperance? What does Nature intend?

  The famous nineteenth-century explorers were British, traveling to the far edges of Empire to extend Empire; making of Queen Victoria, that homely woman sitting by her fire, a symbol of the Age of Adventure. By comparison, nineteenth-century America was also a nation of travelers, not in the same dictionary sense. Most American travelers were exploring in order to settle. They were looking for home; making of that wild man Daniel Boone a symbol of the search for domesticity.

  Home, ancestors, marriages made in heaven, mama, papa, family trees, monuments are vertical thoughts. Old men’s thoughts. My father would often jerk his thumb upward to indicate where he was headed next—that eager, maddish smile of his, the eagerness of the Mexican boy headed north.

  Americans exchange baseball and football for “extreme sports”—in which I include reckless driving, day-trading, unprotected sex, and high school massacres—whereby one’s contest is with one’s own body, one’s nerve, one’s solitude, one’s fear. Death keeps score.

  In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez observes Americans “as temperate zone people have long been ill-disposed toward deserts and expanses of tundra and ice.” Lopez is topographically correct, and historically. And imaginatively, insofar as we were an east-west people. Insofar as we are becoming a north-south people, Americans exist in a region of mind, of spirit, between hot and cold. And we feel ourselves in the middle, an edgy, extreme place to be, as so-called Midwesterners know, especially in summer, especially on those afternoons when satiric Canadian air collides with the flatteries of the Gulf. Then tornadoes tumble cows in the sky, babies rock in the treetops, swimming pools fly and birds are dashed to the ground.

  My father died of neither hot nor cold. My father was as leathern as a saint. He required no trees. As unrefreshed as a Muslim courtyard. He required no fountain. No music. Whenever he saw a baby he said “poor baby.” His questions were the basic questions, as prosaic as footsteps.

  What is heaven like?

  Will I be young?

  Will I be with Mama?

  Will I go to sleep? (I don’t know, Papa; how can I know?)

  Absurdly, I gave answers.

  FOR HIM.

  Minatitlán, Colima, 1905-San Francisco, California, 2001

  Chapter Eight

  GONE WEST

  THAT SUMMER I WAS STILL YOUNG ENOUGH TO CALL THE last summer of my youth, I drove cross-country with three college friends. From the freeway on-ramp at Thirtieth and J Streets in Sacramento to the Lincoln Tunnel.

  Or bust.

  We left California after dinner. Around midnight, we reached Reno where men wearing cowboy hats were pumping gas at the Chevron station. I had never been so far west before, which is to say, so far east.

  Native Californians always spoke of the West as though it lay east of here. Any imagination I had of the West (a landscape suggested
by studio backlots in Burbank, which was south) lay east. The Sierra Nevada appeared on the horizon, a sheer and dreadful portal from which the Donner Party would never descend. In summer, the range was obscured by Zeusy yellow clouds; sometimes storms of lightning—Olympian ruminations never communicated to the valley floor.

  Except in the writings of John Muir. In 1869, Muir spent a summer traversing the Sierra. His more provocative ruminations ran to the California coastline. Muir had arrived in San Francisco by ship and he grasped the implication of the coast. America, he saw, comes to an end here.

  I paid the cowboy for the gas. From the moth-intoxicated brightness of the Chevron station, I launched the car once more into the dark. The others were asleep. I listened to Wolf-man Jack on a 50,000-watt L.A. radio station. Several hundred miles across the desert, just before dawn, the earth curved. The radio station’s grip loosened, shredded into static, released me.

  American myth has traditionally been written east to west, describing an elect people’s manifest destiny accruing from Constitution Hall to St. Jo’ to the Brown Palace Hotel to the Golden Gate. Now a classics professor in Oregon rebuts my assertion that California is not the West. His family moved to Anaheim from Queens. They moved west. Simple. The way the East Coast has always imagined its point of view settled the nation.

  In Warner Bros.’ cartoons the sun went down with a kerplop and a hiss into an ocean that had to be the Pacific. Because I assumed I knew where the day ended, the more interesting question was: Where does the West begin?

  I recall James Fenimore Cooper’s description of a lighted window on the frontier. No place else in American literature does a candle burn so brightly. That small calix of flame was a beacon of the East—all the fame of it. Where the light from the candle was extinguished by darkness, there the West began.

  A couple of years ago, at a restaurant in the old train station in Pittsburgh (as coal cars rumbled past our table), my host divulged an unexpected meridian: “Pittsburgh is the gateway to the West.” The same in St. Louis; the same in Kansas City. At a Mexican restaurant in Texas: Dallas is where the East begins; Forth Worth is where the West begins.

  We did bust.

  In Iowa. I can’t remember what the matter was—probably the water pump. It was eastern influence that drew us on. Chris’s father knew an executive for the Ford Motor Company. Phones rang in Des Moines on a Sunday morning. The Ford Motor dealership summoned their mechanic from his recliner.

  At Stanford University, in those last years of the sixties, we referred, not yet with irony, to “Western civ.” I remember one professor’s observation that, whereas the Iliad is tragic (good men die; the mediocre survive), the Odyssey is comic (a restoration). Ever after, I would imagine my coming life, in retrospect, as comic.

  I was a baby boomer. I believed in movement. That was the theme of California. People were coming to California to begin life anew; I believed in the necessity of abandoning Sacramento, if I were ever to amount to anything. But it was the same impulse. I assumed there would be room enough on the freeway for my ambition.

  I was trained east. Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey wrote “westerns.” Westerns sold for twenty-five cents to old men with wires running from their ears down to the batteries in their shirt pockets; men who would otherwise spend their evenings staring at the linoleum.

  I was trained east, an inveterate reader of “easterns”: Wharton, James, Kazin, Baldwin, O’Hara. I noticed the highest easterns—Wharton, James—were written as though they were westerns (the arrival of an innocent). Isabel Archer of Albany, New York, journeys to Europe where she achieves inexperience amidst the etiolated foliage, the thicker light, the thinner blood, the charged conversations.

  We crossed the Mississippi around nine o’clock Sunday night. I remember thinking we had left the West behind.

  Go East, young woman! I think we are just now beginning to discern an anti-narrative—the American detective story told from west to east, against manifest destiny, against the early Protestant point of view, against the Knickerbocker Club, old Ivy, the assurances of New England divines.

  Josiah Royce, Nick Carraway, Damon Runyan, Lynn O’Donnell—for many of us who had grown up west of the Mississippi, New York was finishing school. Eating clubs at Prince-ton, Eliot House, authority, memory—all the un-American themes. After Lynn died it seemed imperative to get her obituary into the New York Times.

  I remember thinking nothing could be more glamorous than to be the New Yorker correspondent who would hold any hinterland—be it Paris, Rio, or Sacramento—up to the amused monocle of Eustace Tilley. An entire literature of the West was made up of such correspondents: Harte, Muir, Twain. Coldest winter I ever spent was one summer in Saaan Francisco. HAW. HAW. HAW.

  Oh, god, now bored Athene, heavily rouged, reaches down through cloud cover into history to pluck the scrolling arrow in its flight, to bend it backward; watch the joke.

  A florid, balding gymnopede bellows to me from an adjacent StairMaster that he is abandoning California. “Too . . . ,” he raises fur-epauleted shoulders to portray constriction. He is moving “out West”—that is the expression he uses—to a house on three acres, thirty minutes from Boise where there are still trees and sky.

  To find where the West begins I will need to follow Athene’s U-turned arrow straight through nineteenth-century Wall Street, across the Atlantic to Enlightenment Paris, down the bronzed coast of Western civilization to ancient Greece.

  The Greeks associated identity with action. The heroic ideal is the active life. I think of Odysseus. Specifically, the last book of the Odyssey—Homer unable to finish his tale. Odysseus, father to Telemachus, son to Laertes, finds his way home to resume his rightful role as husband to Myrna Loy. But the ordered world, prepared and preserved by the heroic deed, does not suit. What, after all, does the achievement of stasis mean for the warrior whose very name connotes wandering?

  Such is the rate of change in the West, you end up sounding like some hoary Ancient if you recollect the fragrance of almond orchards where the mystic computer chip clicks; if you remember cattle where almond trees bloom. I meet such middle-aged ancients. The man in Albuquerque has seen his hometown completely changed in forty-two years, even the sky. “They” have changed everything. They, presumably, are his own parents.

  The limitation of the Greek ideal is apparent the morning after you have found your way home. The curtains are drawn. The room is close. Too many ruffles. You stare at the ceiling. You look at your watch. Now what?

  Now shit-souled Athene has to invent Vietnam because Odysseus still has his muscle tone and a ripe old age is part of his contract. He signs on for another pic.

  Left behind, Myrna Loy seeks an aperture as her life constricts to ice cubes and Cablevision. She does not for a moment consider California when she decides to retire in the West. She settles in Santa Fe with its ancient, reassuring patina recently applied with little sponges. She wears blue jeans; nods to “Howdy”; she goes to the opera; sometimes to Mass.

  The apparent flattery the East Coast pays California is that the future begins here. Hula hoops, beatniks, Proposition 13, LSD, skateboards, silicon chips, Malibu Buddhism. California, the laboratory; New York, the patent office. The price Californians pay for such flattery is that we agree to be seen as people lacking in experience, judgment, and temper. It seems not to have occurred to the East that because the West has a knowledge of the coastline, the Westerner is the elder, the less innocent party in the conversation.

  Californians have been trying to tell Eastern America that our nation is, after all, finite. Only within the last few years—a full century after the closing of the frontier—have we gotten a bite on the cliché: Tonight, Peter Jennings asks: Is the Golden State tarnished?

  A few years ago, after an earthquake in Los Angeles, a television producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asked for an interview on the future of California. There had been a race riot in Los Angeles. The Berkeley hills had burned. Floo
ds in the canyons had carried away a Topanga grandmother. The Canadian producer decided we would have our televised conversation at Venice Beach, the place tourists come on Sundays to experience comic extremity by the sea. I would sit in an Adirondack chair, the blue Pacific over my shoulder.

  And, by and by, there I was on Venice Beach, wired for sound and my hair blowing east. I had become a correspondent. But this was Tuesday, a gray afternoon, the fog pouring in on a gale. Teenagers wearing Raiders jackets stomped over cables that were lying about, kids so accustomed to TV crews they didn’t even pause to gander. An old guy wanted five bucks to stay out of the shot. A trio of German tourists, two men and a woman, and they all looked like Beethoven, stopped at each of the hundred and one T-shirt and counterfeit stands that lined the beach. The Tarot readers set up their card tables and sat with their backs to the gray ocean, limp-haired priestesses of that monotonous turbine. Panning the scene for something golden to shoot, we did eventually find one happy face—at the concrete Muscle Beach exhibition booth, a sunburned old salt with sagging breasts, eager to pose for the camera in his red nylon bikini, winking insanely with every revolution and flex.

  Athene roars with laughter; switches channels.

  An arrow pointing straight up: LINCOLN TUNNEL. A thun derstorm hid the famous ruminant skyline whose opinions I had memorized through thousands of pages. Following the arrow, we found ourselves immediately in the heart of the city. Theaters were letting out. The Booth, the Plymouth. We turned right. People waited for cabs under an awning at 21. Park Avenue. Thirty blocks of glorious redundancy. When we got to Chris’s building, several doormen, uniformed like Soviet generals, advanced to seize our luggage.

  In the morning, Chris’s mother half turned from her correspondence to ask if I had brought along my dinner jacket. There was to be a party on Thursday at the Met for “Tom” and his new wife. Downstairs, a doorman stood watching the slow progress of traffic along Park Avenue.