The Unceremonious American

...Like the more radical puritans, whose intensity frightened the world of the Stuarts, they want "reformation without tarrying"-a demand that many enthusiasts had no difficulty reading into Charles A. Reich's The Greening of America...

...In our inverted patriotism we insist on believing, as the French playwright Eugene Ionesco observed after a recent visit to the United States, that Americans are "the worst criminals of humanity...

...but perhaps the problem is not so much the monsters themselves as the black ceremonies with which they attempt to perpetuate themselves...

...There are even those who believe that the only honest ceremony in the great book is that black mass in which the harpoon sockets of the three pagan harpooners are filled with rum "hot as Satan's hoof in a sacramental dedication to the fiery hunt for that symbol of all evil, the white whale...

...Melville's unease with ceremony is everywhere apparent in his work, perhaps never so memorably as in that passionate meditation on the whiteness of the whale in Moby Dick...

...Nevertheless, Hemingway's stylistic connections are clearly with the spiritual, plain-speaking Puritans, though for secular rather than theological reasons...

...and poets, not finding the elements of the ideal in the real and true, abandon them entirely and create monsters...

...No doubt such a skimpy account made some of the couple's fans feel cheated...

...We consume as conspicuously on the level of popular culture as on the level of high culture...

...Coca Cola, Winston cigarettes, and Coors beer express the same optimism about becoming as do Reich's unhomogenized peanut butter, bell-bottom jeans, and rock music...

...foursome play on, or did they all gather around and kiss the bride...

...Were there rings involved and did they make the standard promises, menaced all the while, perhaps, by errantly sailing frisbees and foul tips from a nearby soft-ball game...

...Paradoxically enough, given its principled permissiveness and its rejection of the Puritan work ethic, the late but not yet dormant counterculture had its own affiliation with the spiritual, plain-speaking lifestyle of the Puritans...

...They get married parachuting out of airplanes, five fathoms deep in scuba gear, or topless and bottomless in nudist camps, during coffee breaks or between the halves of football games, on water skis, on horseback, or on ten-speed bicycles, in bowling alleys, beer parlors, or in arboreturns to the accompaniment of readings from the I Ching, Chairman Mao, Rod McKuen, the Bhagavad Gita, Erica Jong, Kahlil Gibran, or verses of their own devising...

...We have had, God knows, our share of monsters, spawned in our disillusion over our failed ideals...

...Tocqueville may have been talking about a pre-Civil War version of him when he observed that "In democratic ages, the extreme fluctuations of men, and the impatience of their desires, keep them perpetually on the move...

...Or, as the Puritan Richard Greenham put it in 16th-century England, "they are content with the shell, but want the kernel...

...If to begin with we had not refused to stand on ceremony and puritanically insisted on reformation without tarrying, we would conceivably still be colonials, but this grand refusal had the side-effect of making it easy to lose, as we recurrently do, that distinction between true and false ceremony without which no society can be civil and humane...

...According to reports that give every indication of being reliable, the most successful orgies, even in California, begin ceremonially, which, if one has read Burgo Partridge's History of Orgies, is exactly what one would expect...

...And let us not put Reich down too quickly either, although few minor writers have fallen more quickly from favor...

...In short, what begins in him as a productive effort to distinguish between true and false ceremony ends up in narcissistic and compulsive ceremonies of desperation...

...For him sexual love is authentic almost in proportion as it is beyond the need of ceremonial validation by State or Church, the function of which in his fiction, as in so much of modernism, is to dull the cutting edge of experience...

...One may question the taste of those who prefer beer to champagne after a wedding, but Jenny and Oliver, like Ali MacGraw and Steve McQueen, did get married, in whatever creatively stripped-down circumstances...

...Let us not put Hemingway down too quickly...

...But who in these accelerated times can remember how brave the overtures once were...

...Reich and the counterculture have gotten us no closer to the City on a Hill than the Puritans did, and one reason is that Reich's disposition, for all his emphasis on the historical dialectic that will inevitably produce Consciousness III, is just as unhistorical as theirs...

...the palaces of kings are built on the bowers of Paradise...

...Did the rest of the clergyman's John P. Sisk is professor of English at Gon-zaga University in Spokane, Washington...

...Of course, we weren't told more because the event was all too commonplace in its departure from traditional practices...

...It is no wonder, then, that the more Whitman wrote the more ceremonial his language became...

...Ceremony therefore limits options, rations the flow of information, and thus slows down time so that life does not exceed human powers of management...

...Reich himself is something of an American paradigm: One can find in him not only the ethos of the Puritan headstones but also bits and pieces of Roger Williams, Emerson, Paine, Thoreau, Whitman, Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, and those anpnymous Dutch sailors who at the end of The Great Gatsby experience a '' transitory enchanted moment" as they contemplate the "fresh, green breast of the new world...

...People living in deceremonialized non-marriage unions tend to favor a mode of discourse well salted with the vocabulary of the human potential movement (autonomy, authenticity, integrity, self-respect, self-fulfillment, personal growth, openness, etc...

...By singling out the quotidian event for special treatment, if only in the conventional formula of a headstone, even ordinary people can have some of those extraordinary moments without which life becomes a structureless sequence of one damned thing after another...

...Of course, Edwards' sermon is now a spook story, and Barton's book, no less than Reich's, has become an embarrassment...

...Of course, it is not quite that simple, as I discovered a few years ago while participating in a symposium on intersexual matters...

...Twain never tired of poking fun at the feudal ceremonies of the Old World, especially where he found his fellow Americans still in love with them- and so we have that final section of Huckleberry Finn in which the already freed Jim must be freed all 'over again according to the comically irrelevant feudal ceremonies of the Old World...

...While the clothes of the latter are uniforms for specific occasions, jeans, like Whitman's hat, are for all occasions...

...He does not need it...

...Couples that behave traditionally can, in a sense, get married and have it over with, whereas unmarried cohabitors have to keep on reminding themselves and others that they are doing something better...

...Browne, no less than the Whitman of "Democratic Vistas" or the rock saint Jim Morrison, was tormented by the gap between the ideal and the real-that gap which, without the mediation of ritual and ceremony, can drive humans to fanaticism or madness, if it does not first drive them to drink...

...Afterwards they "absolutely reject the champagne route" and go out to drink beer at Cronin's...

...It is hard to ceremonialize that which is perpetually on the move, committed to process and becoming...

...In this formulation, "becoming" is an absolute which at each successive moment makes obsolete and irrelevant the entire past that labored to produce it...

...Time in this concept is linear and upward bound, diachronic rather than synchronic, and would have to be represented on a graph as an exponential rather than logistic curve...

...or rather, he needs it around him to prove that he does not need it...

...indeed, human beings appear to be innately ceremonial, perhaps out of a need to rein themselves in for the purpose of identification, and civilization appears everywhere to be a tissue of ceremonials...

...And who is more ceremonial than Hemingway, to whom the killing of bulls and the catching of fish is a desecration unless done with ritualistic attention to detail-indeed, so much so that by the time you have come to the end of him you realize that for a long time he has himself been slapping up his proclamations one on top of another like a billposter...

...in the no-frills White House of President Carter...

...Great poetry, like great men, is candid...

...As Leonard Kriegel has pointed out in Partisan Review, Hemingway remains an American paradigm despite the fact that" few major writers have fallen so quickly from favor...

...In any event, there are historical resonances in this unease with ceremony that expresses itself so conspicuously (as one might expect) in the coming together of men and women...

...Movie stars get married under trees, or not at all, and hipsters refuse to dress for formal occasions in great part for the same reason that Whitman keeps his hat on indoors-because they are optimistically in a hurry...

...That which is not celebrated is lost forever-and no doubt often well lost...

...Unlike the ceremonial dress of Consciousness II, jeans, which express profoundly democratic values, "make it possible for people to be as direct, honest, and natural with each other as possible," to experience "a wholeness of self, as against the schizophrenia of Consciousness II...

...in the cult of vernacular English, whether in humorous or serious writing...

...Once a year the hookers of San Francisco interrupt the flow of their ancient profession for a ceremonial ball...

...Perhaps they are like those people who, preferring champagne but having no purse for it, must forever be extolling the glories of beer...

...Hence the advantage of locating so many of his love stories in Catholic countries, where ceremonial expectations are high and the possibilities for dramatic rejection correspondingly great...

...There he contemplates with a romantic's dismay the Newtonian universe in which color is "not actually inherent in substances" but is only a meretricious ceremonial disguise, "so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel house within...

...Thus in an equally famous passage in The Green Hills of Africa, and speaking in his own person this time, Hemingway pronounces that all true American writing comes from Huckleberry Finn, the master-work of another anti-Puritan Puritan, who more effectively than anyone else exploited the natural hostility between the vernacular and ceremony...

...But this, as it may seem, is to be ungenerously pessimistic about the resiliency of the human spirit...

...So too we are ambivalent about assorted fanatics and terrorists, whose conspicuous refusal to stand on ceremony troubles our conscience as they pose over and over again the 300-year-old question of the plain-speaking English Puritan Robert Browne: "What is reform but the casting out of every evil thing and every evil person completely and at once...

...they are mere writers of rhetoric...

...Indeed, in Paine we see the bias against ceremony that characterizes anarchism, that endemic temptation to anti-politics which Americans are able to resist largely because of their desire to make it big in the New World...

...In one direction Paine connects with the iconography of nudity in the Italian Renaissance, which, says the art historian Irwin Panofsky, "was mostly identified with simplicity, sincerity and the true essence of things as opposed to circumlocution, deceit and external appearance...

...This is the time concept that rules in the myth of progress, in the more naive versions of the American Dream, and in advertisements...

...in the theory and practice of Ernest Hemingway's fiction...

...In the other direction he connects with attacks on middle-class ceremony that take the form of literal or metaphoric nudity in the musicals Hair and Oh...

...In the novel they are married in an old building in Harvard Yard by a Unitarian chaplain, she reading from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnets From the Portuguese" and he from Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road...

...in the frontiersman image of Andrew Jackson (anticipating President Carter, he campaigned with the promise of "a plain system, void of pomp...

...The phrase itself is revealing: To stand on ceremony is to interrupt the flow, to be rather than become, as if, for the moment at least, one had lost confidence in one's ability to manage change...

...in the temperance movement (an intemperate attack on the human impulse to make life a continual celebration...

...In The End of the American Era, Andrew Hacker observes that most people are far too ordinary, too undisciplined, too easily discouraged, far too lacking in "any special quality of talent or creativity" to display much of the individuality that is currently believed to be their birthright...

...his fear is that he will be locked into roles and commitments that foreclose available options...

...They even have a dietary analogue: peanut butter that in an unhomogenized state has kept its virginity against the ceremonial lust of technology...

...This rhetorical deceremonialization, which led even in death rites to the equation of the plain and the profitable, has its analogues everywhere in American life: in the political radicalism of Samuel Adams...

...Bedeviled by what appears to be the perversity of our lot, we depend for temporary revitalization of morale on novels like Robert Coover's The Public Burning or movies like Robert Altman's 'Nashville...

...You're all I've got," she would have scandalized the Puritans no less than the Catholics...

...With his emphasis on the sensuous immediacy of experience, he may appear to be as liberated from Puritan constraints as Erich Segal...

...in the farcical desecrations of the Marx Brothers...

...therefore, he repeats in "Democratic Vistas," it has no need of the conventional ceremonials that characterize the "feudal" poetry of the Old World...

...Indeed, the key to his famous economy in Walden is that it does not stand on ceremony...

...One may even suspect that the American's extraordinary capacity to lose this distinction, so that the only available choice appears to be between ceremony and honesty or between manners and morals, helps to produce conditions of national disillusionment in which this capacity can be most vigorously exercised-as if it were a kind of conspicuous consumption of the spirit by which periodically we attempt to redefine ourselves...

...Calcutta!, in encounter therapy, and in such anticipations of the bowers of Paradise as Esalen and Sandstone...

...Thus when-already, as it seems, light years ago-the Ali MacGraw-Steve McQueen marriage went sour one reporter remembered its distant pastoral beginnings...

...in the unostentatious style of life of self-made millionaires like Carnegie and Rockefeller...

...Unfortunately, when all traditional ceremony is perceived as evil and all established manners are perceived as opposed to morality, virtue becomes cheap...

...In Greening "the foundation of Consciousness III is liberation...

...In this blank unawareness Reich's New Man calls to mind those passionate purifiers who in Hawthorne's ironic fable "Earth's Holocaust" hope to burn up all the "worn-out trumpery" of the world in a "fierce and riotous blaze...

...Whereas a Consciousness II person "understands himself and others in terms of traditional role-based ceremonials," a member of the new generation ."might be completely, blankly unaware of the titles, positions, and reputations of persons he had met...

...But ultimately our uneasiness about standing on ceremony takes us back to our Puritan beginnings in 17th-century England and America, where Whitman's rejection of feudal poetry is anticipated in the Puritan's rejection of "witty" preaching in favor of "spiritual" or "plain" preaching...

...Indeed, Americans are never more conspicuously quarreling with time than when they are refusing to stand on ceremony...

...As for Miss MacGraw, her fans might have been reminded of her in the role of Jenny in the movie version of Erich Segal's Love Story, the authenticity of whose marriage to Oliver is indicated in her refusal to accede to her father's wishes and be married in a Catholic ceremony ("Kind of negative on it, Phil," she tells him, refusing to diminish her authenticity by addressing him in a role relationship...

...Emerson was no less a candid rejector of corrupting ceremony when, having abandoned the Unitarian ministry along with the courtly muses of Europe, he went conspicuously walking in nature on Sunday while lesser mortals went routinely to church...

...And, as Lawrence Stone points out, funerary rites too were part of this austere dialectic: "Funeral sermons," he says, "were occasions for theological encouragement of the living rather than individualized eulogies of the dead, and grave monuments were no more than plain headstones, in conformity with Puritan hostility to graven images...

...Witty preaching, William Haller tells us in The Rise of Puritanism, employed "literary allusions, conscious Euphuism, farfetched metaphysical metaphors" and was culturally committed not only to Renaissance humanism but also to the ceremonials of the Church of England and, even worse, to those of that Whore of Babylon, the old Roman Church...

...In the 1930s and 40s Raymond Chandler was something of a bargain-basement transcendentalist, with his recurrent theme of the corrupt ceremonials of metropolitan life, a theme that Mickey Spillane womed grosser variations on in the 1950s and Lenny Bruce obscener variations on in the 1960s...

...his overriding and generally narcissistic concern is the realization of his own potential...

...Nor should we overlook that quintessential if part-time American, Tom Paine, for whom government ("in its best state," he declares in Common Sense, "but a necessary evil") is itself something of a white whale...

...in that indigenous American radicalism, the heritage of which, says the historian C. Vann Woodward, "is pervaded by anti-authoritarianism, anti-institutionalism and antistatism...

...in the myth of the Common Man...

...Ceremony not only distinguishes among moments of time in terms of relative value, but is a way of structuring time so that value can be secured and the meaningful past kept alive in the present...

...in the religious fundamentalism of the several Great Awakenings...

...They defined "the world" somewhat differently than the late rock star jim Morrison but the more intense among them would have understood the anti-historical urgency of Morrison's demand, "We want the world and we want it now!'' Chet Flippo remarks in the tenth anniversary issue of Rolling Stone that "the real rock & rollers live with an intensity that is frightening...

...Tocqueville observed that he had seen "no country in which Christianity is clothed with fewer forms, figures and observances" and that even the Roman priests were conspicuous for clinging less to the letter than the spirit...

...Americans have always prided themselves on not standing on ceremony-to the point, at times, where the rejection of ceremony becomes itself a kind of ceremony...

...The history of these states is to a considerable extent a history of structuring ceremonies, including the ceremony of refusing to stand on ceremony...

...they were simply nervous, in their American way, about the capacity of ceremonies to become idolatries...

...Communities, including families, that can't stand still long enough to celebrate their constituent events soon become mere collections of people...

...The deceremonialized separation of Reich's New Man from the corrupt Old World is most visibly expressed in his new clothes, bell-bottom jeans...

...As for those others- Melville, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau-they are, says the kudu-hunting Hemingway, exiled English colonials...

...The individual discovers in acts of desecration, degradation, or pollution an easy access to the experience of honest, authentic, autonomous, and self-respectful life...

...Certainly, when Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms, after telling Frederick that not having any religion she does not need to get married, goes on to say, "You're my religion...

...So we are easily cowed by the proponents of the obscene and pornographic, half persuaded as we are that the degradation of our sexual pieties is the candid and indispensable prologue to the establishment of Tom Paine's "asylum for mankind...

...The principals, being at the time under a cottonwood tree in a Cheyenne, Wyoming, city park, were married by a clergyman who interrupted his golf game long enough to perform the ceremony...

...This combination is expressed in the description of Consciousness III as "always in a state of becoming...

...In "Song of Myself" Whitman prides himself on wearing "my hat as I please, indoors or out" and asks "Why should I pray...

...No one was more intransigent a rejector of ceremony than Thoreau, who not only wore his hat wherever he pleased but was sometimes tempted to devour woodchucks unceremoniously raw-though he was practical enough to go home periodically to eat his mother's cookies, which, one may imagine, were ceremoniously baked...

...I think of the spontaneous innovation in the otherwise routine marriage ceremony of an entertainer, who interrupted the ritual at the "till death do us part" moment to object that "nothing lasts forever," so that when a month later the marriage ended in divorce she was well remembered indeed...

...The choice of beer over champagne is no less important an authenticator of the marriage than is the rejection of the church wedding...

...Indeed, one is tempted to say that in bad times-or simply in boring times- Americans have a tendency to affiliate themselves with that ancient tradition of transgressive black ceremonies classically represented in the black mass, which our Puritan forebears believed to be a prime source of vitality in the Satanic community...

...In the meantime an increasing number of couples, having suffered "an alarming loss of faith in institutions," as Newsweek charitably puts it, are being driven by the need of creative innovation to the ultimate point where there is no ceremony and no marriage...

...Edmund S. Morgan in The Puritan Family points out how wary the Puritans were of the romantic impulse, as if they knew that it was likely to terminate not only in idolatry but also in that relegation of the person to a sex object which Rollo May has identified as a mark of the New Puritanism...

...why should I venerate and be ceremonious?'' All faults can be forgiven him who has perfect candor, he proclaims in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, unwittingly preparing to become a charismatic presence at Jenny and Oliver's wedding...

...Such preaching was a verbal idolatry that prevented direct encounter of the soul with God...

...Tocqueville foresaw even direr consequences when he observed that among democratic nations the sources of poetry, being grand but not abundant, "are soon exhausted...

...Thus in Farewell Frederick is puritanically embarrassed "by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain" which he likens to proclamations "slapped up by billposters over other proclamations"- rhetorical ceremonials that cancelled one another out in their mutual meaningless-ness...

...And in this too Hemingway is paradigmatic...

...This is especially clear in their desperately stereotypical attempts to be individual and creative in their weddings...

...For them, as for Emerson, the past was a prison guarded by courtly muses from which they had to escape...

...With a figure like Bruce, in fact, we arrive at a point where the energy derived from modernist transgressiveness is formalized and dissipated within the secular ceremonials of nightclub life, so that what is regenerated is the capacity to be entertained by desecrations of institutional pieties...

...which appears to have the effect of an ongoing surrogate ceremony...

...Bell-bottom jeans, which were self-conscious rejections of middle-class values to begin with, have long since been profitably assimilated into the world of middle-class ceremonial...

...At our worst, then, we become boorish and even diabolic Americans, compulsive transgressors and desecrators who, in our efforts to be free of the social enchantments of ceremony, act as if the only acceptable version of the national anthem would be one adapted to the needs of a punk rock group...

...The fortunate possessor of Consciousness III is a variation on the personality type that the psychologist Robert J. Lifton has called Protean Man...

...This is some kind of attack on the Whore of Babylon, truly enough, but it is not quite what the Puritans had in mind...

...The rhetoric of Consciousness III, whether oral, sartorial, or dietary, is, in short, plain and spiritual in the best Puritan tradition...

...In fact, for Reich no less than the Puritans, the anti-ceremonial plainness and the unhistorical disposition go together...

...The plain-speaking Puritans, however, wanted very much to save some things (hence, like the communally pot-smoking flower children of a later time, they were ceremonial in their fashion...

...Nothing in his history suggests that he would have read Love Story with pleasure, but perhaps he would have understood the substitution of beer for champagne at a wedding feast...

...Here, apparently, is the one moment in their lives when even the most ordinary people feel compelled to rise creatively above conventional ceremony lest the ceremony and not themselves be all that is remembered...

...By opposing the witty preaching of the Anglicans the Puritans were expressing what the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper has called their essentially unhistorical disposition, their strong need of a purity beyond the ceremonial entanglements of the past...

...in the unbuffered encounter with nature as the nation moved west...

...Against this kind of preaching, says Perry Miller in The New England Mind, "Puritans opposed their own conception, the plain and profitable way of doctrine, reasons and uses, which perfectly reflected in form and style as well as in substance the mentality and taste of Puritans, Roundheads, and Lovers of the Word of God...

...they are literary, not accurate...

...Protean Man is always in process...

...Feudal ceremonies, especially those associated with the "Royal Brute of Great Britain," bothered him at least as much as they were later to bother Twain and Whitman: "Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence...

...What was she wearing...

...In its own way it is as spiritual as Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" or Bruce Barton's attempt in The Man Nobody Knows to reconcile Christ and big business...