JOHN NEAL, Part 2: Literary Influence
It’s been some time. My work on these posts about John Neal has taken a back seat to numerous other projects. In the meantime, I must note, Dugan Murphy, who provided much of the content and pointed the way to the rest through his work on the Wikipedia entry on Neal, has joined the ranks of Portland’s tour guide community with a business called Portland by the Foot. He doesn’t appear to be offering a John Neal tour, but I am confident his tours are as well-researched, interesting, and informative as his work on Neal. We welcome him and wish him all the best.
John Neal Part Two: Literary Influence
Given Neal’s background and childhood, it is amazing he even survived to adulthood. Yet, he’d be considered a man of great accomplishment if he’d done none of the things I wrote of in the last paragraph, but had only done half of the other things he did in his life.
Neal’s father died only a month after John and his twin sister Rachel were born. His mother Rachel supported the family by opening her own school and taking in boarders. With the assistance of their Quaker community, the Neal family lived in “genteel poverty.” At age 12 Neal left school and home for full-time employment.
He began his business career as a haberdasher and dry goods salesman, became an itinerant penmanship and watercolor instructor and miniature portrait artist, moved to Boston to work in dry goods again, and became a partner in a business with stores in Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston. The business went bankrupt, stranding him in Baltimore in 1816 at age 22 without enough "money to take a letter from the post-office."
His solution to his poverty reveals something about his ego, abilities, and energy. He resolved to become a lawyer. In order to earn a living during his studies, he decided "there was nothing left for me but authorship, or starvation, if I persisted in my plan of studying law."
From 1816 until his departure from Baltimore for London in 1823 he “taught himself to read and write in eleven languages, published seven books, read law for four years, completed an independent course of law study in eighteen months that was designed to be completed in seven-to-eight years, earned admission to the bar in a community known for rigorous requirements, and contributed prodigiously to newspapers and literary magazines, two of which he edited at different points” according to Murphy’s Wikipedia entry on Neal.
One of the novels he wrote at this time, Seventy-Six, is the first book ever to use the phrase “son of a bitch.” Among his goals in writing his first novel, Keep Cool was to discourage dueling.. Dueling was positively epidemic at the time, especially among young military officers, but also among those fancying themselves “gentlemen.” I’ll write more about Neal’s anti-dueling stance when I address his influence on progressive causes in a later post.
He moved to London with the goal of bringing American writing a more positive reputation among English literary elites. He set out to change the answer to the question, “Who, after all, reads an American book?” from a given “nobody” to an automatic “everybody.”
To put Neal’s work in context, and support my argument for his importance calls for at least a brief overview of American literature before and after him. American literature in the 1660’s was basically journals and diaries, in the 1770’s it was mostly religious and political. After the revolution, “and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native.” But who was doing the exhorting? John Neal, for one. The Britannica article linked above names William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe as America’s early literary figures. However, all of them were thoroughly British in their influences, forms, styles, and subjects. Bryant, Cooper and Irving gained attention around the same time Neal was writing in Baltimore. Poe came into his own a decade later, encouraged by support from John Neal in Yankee.
The leading figures of the next wave of American literature, the New England Brahmins and Transcendentalists all knew and interacted with Neal. Portland’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the greatest American poet for 100 years, was directly influenced by him, as was Longfellow’s Bowdoin classmate Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Jonathan Cilley, a fellow member of the Bowdoin class of 1825, wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1836, asking, “What sort of book have you written, Hath? I hope and pray it is nothing like the damned ranting stuff of John Neal, which you, while at Brunswick, relished so highly.” At the time Cilley was Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives. I’ll mention Cilley again in a future post.
Neal edited the literary weekly The Yankee for the two years of its existence (January 1, 1828-January 1, 1830). In it he provided the first substantial sponsorship or praise of the early works of Poe, Whittier, Hawthorne, and Longfellow. He called Poe “a fellow of fine genius,” encouraged Whittier in response to the latter’s despairing “I will quit poetry, and everything else of a literary nature,” published the first review of Hawthorne’s first novel, and praised Longfellow’s “The Spirit of Poetry” for passages of exquisite beauty. In later correspondence with Longfellow, he accused the poet of imitating Irving and asked, “Why not be yourself, and only yourself?”
I find Neal’s critique of Longfellow interesting. Longfellow has “a fine genius and a pure and safe taste” but is too derivative, and lacking “a little more energy and a little more stoutness.” Those are the qualities that made Longfellow America’s most popular poet for 100 years, and that are gradually allowing his reputation to erode as it recedes.
Benjamin Lease, in That Wild Fellow John Neal, (source for many of the quotes about Neal in this post), argues convincingly that Neal also influenced Walt Whitman.
The support Neal gave these writers at the start of their careers was returned. Whittier later wrote, “Critics may talk as they please, but for ourselves we do like the bold, vigorous and erratic style of Neal…. “The startling language – the original idea, standing out in bold relief of all its native magnificence, rouse up our blood like a summoning trumpet-call.”
Hawthorne contrasted most American writers with “that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned my boyish brain with his romances.”
Poe ranked Neal “first, or at all events second, among our men of indisputable genius.” Poe regarded Neal as endowed with a “philosophical and self-dependent spirit which has always distinguished him, and which will even yet lead him… to do something for the literature of the country which the country ‘will not willingly,’ and cannot possibly ‘let die.’”
Neal studied Blackwood’s before becoming a contributor, Poe studied Blackwood’s, including numbers featuring Neal’s ‘American Writers’ and ‘Late American Writers.’ “It is not surprising that his [Neal’s] poetic theory foreshadows and influences Poe’s,” Lease writes.
Poe and Neal argued for a romantic poetics and against long poems, setting American literature on the route to today’s lyric poetry.
Neal and Twain have more in common than their mutual disdain for Cooper. There is a direct line of influence from Neal to Twain, and of course Twain is the giant of American literature for early modern writers.
Neal’s works, “with all their crudities and absurdities,...are a significant foreshadowing of the coming of Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Twain,” according to Lease.
To recap, when Neal begins to write, Irving and Cooper are starting to create an American literary tradition derived from British literature. By the time Neal finishes, and because of his influence, truly American writers like Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whitman, and Melville are acclaimed as distinctly American voices, and Mark Twain is well-established. Perhaps most importantly to my argument, influenced by Neal, Poe shifted from poetry to stories and developed literary theories based on Neal’s work.