American Gold, by Ernest Seeman. The Dial Press, 283 pp. $8.95.
Enough has been written in North Carolina about the background of American Gold that I need not dwell on it here. Ernest Seeman worked in his father’s printshop as a young man and went on to head Duke University Press. When he was fired from that position for what were then considered radical views, his first marriage broke up, and he eventually settled with a new wife into a primitive existence in the mountains of Tennessee, where he wrote, among other things, six unpublished novels. Now, as he is ninety-one years old, living in a Tennessee rest home, his first novel is being published (a great shudder from all aspiring novelists). His is a fascinating story, of a remarkable man (the best account of it I have seen is by Mimi Conway, the discoverer of the manuscript of American Gold, in the summer 1978 issue of Southern Exposure).
I need not dwell, either, on the local interest that the book will obviously have, nor need I point out the many parallels with actual fact. The light will begin to dawn on any discerning local who reads of towns named Warham, Temple Hill, Dillsboro, and Walterville, and he should grow downright suspicious at the mention of a tobacco magnate who gives his name to a local university. It seems to me an insult to treat any book as a local event, or an inside joke. If American Gold has merit, it will have it for a reader who has never heard of Durham.
But I do have a quarrel with some of the publicity surrounding the book. Almost predictably, as at the site of so many literary finds, the term Great American Novel has been dusted off and hauled out again. Probably no publicity hype can do much harm to the great works of American literature, but it seems to me a great disservice to Ernest Seeman, and to serious readers, even to suggest such a claim. I often wonder if the multitudes of people who casually use the term Great American Novel have the slightest idea what they mean by it. I’m pretty vague on the term myself — I don’t use it freely — but I would imagine that the mythical book which it describes would be written on a massive scale, in a grand style, and would somehow sum up the American experience. American Gold is not such a book, nor does it attempt to be. It is not particularly gratifying for a reader or reviewer to come to a title expecting a novel on an epic scale and to find something altogether different. I have read one account in which Seeman is said to have described his manuscript as a book of stories about Durham; that remark serves as a much better indicator of what the reader will find than the exaggerated publicity that other people have written.
A point of immediate interest is the author’s striking style. Whatever his other virtues and vices, Seeman wrote with a strongly personal voice, which some readers will enjoy and others endure. His sensibility is open, fresh, close to nature, alive to experience, and essentially innocent (in that way, American Gold seems very much a first novel; it is hard to remember that it is the first novel of a man in his late thirties); he has a marvelous, almost childlike, attention to detail. In a chapter toward the end of the novel, Johnny Anders watches Warham awaken at dawn, and much of the novel is written with that same sense of wonderment, Adam naming the beasts in the Garden. But there are flaws associated with such a style. It lapses at times into the trite and sentimental. Though obviously I was not around Durham at the turn of the century, some of the dialogue sounds impossible to me (‘ “Holy hop-toads and bilge water! I’m a monkey’s uncle if she ain’t still a hangin’ on to that little old ragbaggedy whatchamadad of a Zulu dolly!’ ” is supposedly spoken by a hard-bitten circus hand), and some of the interior monologues inauthentic (“but aw, what the dad-slapped-dingbang-tarnal-boggered-wall-eyed dickens did it matter . . .”). The narrator who tries to reproduce a childlike sensibility treads a fine line between the poetic and the ludicrous.
The writer brought to mind by this sometimes annoying sensibility, and by many other aspects of American Gold, is one whose start in writing was strikingly similar to Seeman’s, Sherwood Anderson. He too left the world of business in the middle of his life to take up writing, and he too produced a book about a young man’s coming of age in a small provincial town. Any comparison of books by different authors is essentially unfair, and many books would suffer in comparison with Winesburg, Ohio, but seeing the two books in the same light is helpful in understanding certain weaknesses in Seeman’s book.
For the great problem with American Gold is in the form it takes. Like Sherwood Anderson, Seeman had two stories to tell, that of a place — more than Anderson, he was interested in the historical detail of a place — and that of a developing sensibility shaped by its surroundings. The two stories do not fit together particularly well; some of Seeman’s story, in fact much of the most interesting part, takes place when his protagonist, Johnny Anders, is not on the scene. Confronted with a similar problem, Anderson wrote a series of tightly knit stories in which his protagonist, George Willard, often appears, and in which he is often a felt presence even when he does not appear; he thus showed how Willard was influenced by his surroundings, but did not try to give his material a unity which it didn’t have: he did not try to form it into a novel. Ernest Seeman did, and it is in trying to become a novel that American Gold fails.
His story begins, for example, in 1887, and focuses on Anna Pulaski, a circus performer who is riding a helium balloon into the skies above Warham. After this rather obvious device to introduce the setting, it doubles back to the most interesting historical material in the book, the signing of a Civil War treaty in a farmhouse near Warham, then follows the history of the town through the rise of its major family, the Warhams, and the arrival of multitudes to support its burgeoning tobacco industry.
It is not until we are more than a third of the way through the book that we make it back to the chronological point at which it began, and only then do we meet the character, Johnny Anders, who is its unifying sensibility (he has appeared briefly before, but not as a dominant figure). On the one hand, it is obvious what the author is doing, developing the history of the setting to which the first chapter introduced us, and certainly much of the historical detail is fascinating. But the reader of the novel’s first hundred pages is entirely at sea. Who among the characters is the novel really about? Anna Pulaski, the first character examined in detail? (no, it turns out; she returns, but only in a sub-plot); the Warhams? (no; they are important, but eventually only as a backdrop). Which of the literally dozens of characters introduced — the cast of characters, at least, is on an epic scale — are important? What is one to make of long digressions (a whole chapter, for instance, on the arrival in town of a Chinese laundryman, and his eventual murder) which have no apparent connection with the novel’s central action except the fact that they take place in the same town?
The problem is that in the first third of American Gold the author has not really decided what kind of book he is writing. He is interested in a multitude of people, cannot resist mentioning them, but he does not, as Sherwood Anderson did, construct entire plots around any of them; in fact he doesn’t develop many of them as characters at all. He wants to tell the story of a place, but he does not do so as a novelist; rather he recites in the anecdotal style of a historian: except for scattered scenes, most of the action is undramatic. His large vision is tied too much to actual fact. He mentions events because they actually happened, people because they existed; he does not take the further step of amalgamating his material into an imagined narrative.
It is with the arrival of Johnny Anders that American Gold becomes a novel. Through knowing him, we understand the sensibility that has governed the book: the love of nature, affection and compassion for multitudes of common folk, the sharply satirical tone that arises at any mention of people of wealth, the abiding interests in history and literature. We follow Johnny through his education in the town, his discovery of work, his first love affair, his encounters with people on all strata of society. He develops into a man who has been shaped by Warham but is essentially apart from it, opposed to its commercialism and oppression of the poor. The book has no dramatic conclusion, but ends as Johnny and others watch the tearing down of the opera house which has served the town’s cultural side to make space for a commercial hotel which will serve its business interests, one more step in what Johnny has seen as an inevitable progression, the attempt of local capitalists to create the “Foremost City of the New South.”
Though I can imagine my opinion provoking howls of protest from the book’s local supporters, I can understand why American Gold was not originally published in its present form. I cannot, however, understand why some enterprising editor did not see its obvious potential and try to re-shape it into a more satisfying narrative. What I have read of Ernest Seeman’s life makes it seem a heroic and sad one. We do not know at present what may be contained in his five other unpublished manuscripts, nor do we know what writer might have developed if his work had been accepted and nurtured. Literature is full of such roads not taken, and it is futile to imagine them. We must accept what we have. American Gold is a book full of poetry, a book of history, the story of a place as it changes through fifty-eight years, the history of the shaping of a sensibility. It is not quite a novel. But it is a book worth having.
