Tillyard's tales

America's Oedipal struggle
May 19, 2000

It is a truism, but a suggestive one, that the American War of Independence was an Oedipal struggle, the rising up of a brash youth against a controlling father. It follows that the nation born from that conflict endlessly repeats, in other ways, the narrative of its nativity.

Celebration of the new and the young, and the overthrow of the outworn and the old, have always been entwined in the nation's myths-whether the discovery of the west, the push into space or the belief that individuals can remake themselves, physically, professionally or psychically. Like an inexperienced youth, America is constantly in search of happiness, never settling, as a jaded Europe often does, for the contentment of routine or the consolations of pleasure. American heroes, from Huckleberry Finn and James Dean to Jack Kerouac and Kurt Cobain, have tended to be handsome young men in search of new frontiers, who never have to grow up. Like them, Americans want to be eternally young, always in the exhilarated state of the new nation in 1783, when it had finally seen off its battered parent and stood pristine before its own great future.

But, perhaps, in the tussle of escape were sown the seeds of the longing to return. As memories of the Revolution faded, the distant siren voices of the fatherland were, inexplicably, still audible. At the end of the 19th century, when there was no longer a single veteran of the Revolutionary Wars alive, rich Americans indulged in an outburst of remembrance for the 18th-century days of belonging. They built European mansions, rode to hounds like English gentlemen, built gentleman's clubs and drove up the price of British 18th-century portraiture. Just before the first world war, Gainsborough commanded higher prices than Raphael and a decent Romney was much more expensive than a Rembrandt etching. The period of breakaway, with its stubborn monarch and degenerate aristocracy, had become a source of fascination and reverence. Here and there, in the upper echelons of American society, the angry youth was making a prodigal return, or at least bringing his father to the new land for a comfortable old age.

At the same time, those moneyed Americans began to treasure their own relics of the days before independence. I have just come back from Farmington, Connecticut, a colonial village rescued, preserved and inhabited by rich New Englanders in the first decades of the 20th century. Farmington was built by merchants who traded tobacco, sugar and rum with the West Indies; the place still has the practical and somewhat severe air of a settlement. The 18th-century houses are simple, rectangular, timber-framed and clapboarded, stately but not cosy. There was always money here but it was, in the tradition of New England, conserved and never flaunted.

By the late 19th century, philanthropy and politics had replaced trade in Farmington; talk of Roosevelts, Reynolds and return trips on The Adriatic supplanted rum and the list at Lloyds. Henry James, who made a profession exploring the desire of the youthful nation for its European fatherland, liked its "aristocratic" air.

Another man who became a captivated and lifelong resident was Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, a Californian who went to Yale before the first world war. Lewis's life was dominated by the need to reconnect, first with the old east coast and then with Britain. In Oxford, in 1922, he experienced a kind of epiphany one idyllic afternoon in the Master's garden at Magdalen, feeling suddenly at one with the universe. Already a collector of books, he soon bought his first 18th-century British manuscript, a commentary on the correspondence of the transvestite necrophiliac George Selwyn. Perhaps Selwyn was a bridge too far for a newly married man, but he led Lewis to Horace Walpole, the epistolary gossip-monger, founder of the gothic novel, and builder of Strawberry Hill.

Settling upon Walpole was an ultimate return, because Walpole was a man who represented everything the Americans were trying to escape-a degenerate father indeed. Horace was the son of Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister, a man of legendary corruption and staggering arriviste ostentation. Horace's own income came from the Clerkship of the Pells, a sinecure which brought in a heap of money for no work at all. Elected to parliament as member for a family seat, he took no interest in politics, roused only in defence of his cousin and lifelong love, Henry Seymour Conway. He hated the King, George III, but remained snobbishly obsessed with the monarch and indeed the whole royal family, recording every snippet of royal gossip in his memoirs. Horace Walpole was a man of sophistry and of masks, characteristics generally inimical to Americans, who pride themselves on their adolescent cult of the authentic, and even the na?ve. So much the better. Wilmarth Lewis fell as much in love with Walpole as Walpole did with Conway, and spent the rest of his life collecting Walpoliana. Letter by letter, book by book, Strawberry Hill came to Farmington: the 18th century came to the 20th, and the angry son and the decaying father were reunited. Now, sitting in the library, you feel how strong in some Americans was the desire for reconciliation, and how trusting was their affection. Because complicated, hidden, ever-old Horace Walpole would have hated-hated-severe, open, uncompromising, puritan Farmington. Good for Wilmarth Lewis, I found myself thinking, that mixed with his adoration was a tiny spark of rebellion, after all. It consisted in making Horace Walpole an American.