Mystery
Train
Glyn Davis
Don
Watson
American Journeys
Knopf, $49.95 hb, 352 pp, 9781740513166
Travel
in America is a journey crowded with literary acquaintances. For
centuries visitors have striven to make sense of the United States,
drawn by its energy, admiring or disturbed by its civic culture.
Charles Dickens visited twice, in 1841 and 1867, capturing his
ob-servations in American Notes (1842). His experience
of American democracy confirmed him a political radical. Novelist
Frances Trollope, on the other hand, travelled to America a liberal
and returned a Tory. America has always confronted visitors with
the possibilities of freedom but also the consequences of a market
society, private wealth alongside public squalor.
One stranger in this strange land set the tone for many who followed.
Alexis de Tocqueville arrived from France to study American jails,
but wrote more broadly in the first volume of De la démocratie
en Amérique, published in 1835 and still the single
most influential rumination on the United States. How, wondered
Tocqueville, did the New World sustain a vibrant and practical
democracy? Americans, he observed, had developed a distinct character
through access to vast new territories, the absence of a strong
central state, and values stressing self-reliance and hard work.
The resulting tensions kept their society vigorous: a love of
individual liberty but attachment to community; a suspicion of
government yet celebration of nation; a land of unrestrained capitalism
where access to riches ensured a rough equality.
In American Journeys, his account of travel in the continental
United States, historian Don Watson mentions his distinguished
predecessors only occasionally. Yet they sit, quietly, in the
design. While Tocqueville was explicit about his aims, Watson
is cautious about enunciating any wider purpose. Yet both are
fascinated by the Americans, and make uncommon effort to see beyond
the obvious. They share a preference for close observation, and
a startling capacity to draw broader patterns from the small and
familiar. Where Tocqueville studied the endless small local newspapers,
Watson ponders the content of talk-back radio. Tocqueville reflected
on civic culture as unifying forces in the American outlook, while
Watson notes the pervasive influence of religion. American
Journeys, in part, is a conversation across nearly two hundred
years.
Tocqueville journeyed to America on a commission from King Louis-Philippe
with fellow jurist Gustave de Beaumont. Don Watson travels alone,
interest and opportunity selecting his destinations. He chooses
to view America from a train, to follow the tracks, to see images
flicker past the carriage window. As Watson observes in one superb
passage,
I’m
not obsessive about trains, but I do like the way they ease
you in and out of towns and cities; the way they deliver you,
like Spencer Tracy at the start of Bad Day at Black Rock, into
the heart of things. I like being able to get off and stretch
my legs on station platforms and breathe a local sample of the
earth’s air. I like the sound and sway of them. I like
the way they commune with the countryside. I like the fact that
the rails on which trains run – or at least the paths they
follow – were in the main surveyed a century and a half
ago and, much more than modern roads, follow the contours of
the land. I like the way trains change speed according to those
contours, and how you feel the variation in the rhythmic clatter
of the wheels.
Travelling
by train also involves the silence of sidings and empty stations,
as Watson discovers the poor state of Amtrak, deprived of investment
and left as transport of last resort for the poor. Many tracks
have been ripped up; the whistle of the Chattanooga Choo Choo
is no longer heard, the lines gone and the station now a Holiday
Inn. Such missing links force Watson onto highways, listening
in the hire car to radio shows offering the Lord’s Prayer
and Fox politics.
The result is an America less often seen. It is the needy who
travel on trains: people accustomed to being forgotten; people
who can be left waiting for hours because the rail tracks are
now owned by freight companies which give priority to packages
over people. Watson develops an endearing relationship with ‘Julie’,
the recorded voice detailing the latest delays across the Amtrak
network.
Many on the trains are black, particularly in the south. Watson
journeys through Louisiana shortly after Hurricane Katrina breaks
the levees and drowns thousands. The carriages are filled with
those moving north, those seeking shelter locally, a few heading
home. The conversations convey anger at President Bush for neglecting
New Orleans after the disaster, and despair about the national
response. Through the carriage window, Watson and his fellow passengers
see ‘row upon row of gutted houses. Thousand of rusting,
abandoned, useless cars. Mountains of rubbish. Mangled hoardings.
Uprooted trees. Empty streets.’
Yet the people Watson encounters are rarely fatalistic. They embody
an optimism apparently at odds with personal circumstances. Things
can and will get better. Americans, conclude Watson, ‘are
geared to believe in themselves’. Indeed, no other culture
seems ‘so disinclined to believe in the futility of existence.
The cross, the high-five and the facelift all express the same
conviction that life is winnable.’ Even the beggars are courteous,
with a well-developed and crisply delivered personal narrative,
as though chance alone put them on a decaying street in Washington
DC rather than an LA movie studio.
For many on the trains and in the motels, diners and gas stations,
in bars and on the streets, the answer to every question is God.
Jesus as explanation and solution, an America in which ‘God
is in the storm and the pancake batter’, as Watson observes.
A land where football teams pray before the game, rodeo riders
drop to their knees in the ring and intone a hymn of thanks, a
land which separates church and state but expects politicians
to invoke the Lord. A nation of medical innovation in which nearly
half the population reject the science of evolution. Watson cites
Tocqueville on religion, observing that when people do not believe
in government, they incline to believe in God.
Watson works hard to understand this ‘multi-party theocracy’.
He visits preachers and churches, previews a Christian museum
promoting creationism, watches a stand-up Christian comedian,
wanders across the AM dial listening to clerical voices. He passes
a hillside on which Noah’s Ark is being reconstructed. Perhaps,
muses Watson, America should be understood not as a nation but
as a spiritual pilgrimage, a place in which millions of people
quest daily to grasp the meaning of their lives through personal
encounters with God.
American Journeys is selective. Watson avoids set-piece
descriptions of the great cities. There are no vignettes from
New York, only glancing mention of Chicago or San Francisco. The
focus is on spaces in between: the back-drops glimpsed from trains;
the tar and cement landscapes of travel; food served on polystyrene;
modest hotels on the edges of town, with ‘cars spearing through
the night, the distant sirens, the beige walls and bad art, the
lights flickering in the vertical blinds’.
With a map to sketch the journey, and a handful of line drawings
by Craig McGill to catch the fleeting, Don Watson has produced
an engaging meditation on the United States. He offers no narrative
save movement, no purpose but description, yet conveys a powerful
sense of time and place. The book is beautifully written, with
a form that evokes W.G. Sebald’s wandering across Europe.
Watson must move among a people both familiar and deeply foreign,
people who choose to live without cynicism or irony. The task
is not always easy for an Australian sensibility.
In drawing his book to conclusion, Watson senses remarkable continuities
between his America and Tocqueville’s nation of small landowners
and ever-expanding frontier. There are important differences,
too. Tocqueville demonstrated little interest in the plight of
southern slaves, while Watson shows a lively appreciation of black
America. And neither can integrate all the strands and contradictions
of observation. Watson acknowledges his picture may not be complete.
After outlining the brutality of life and its sinister mirror,
television, he observes that amid
every
variety of weirdness, ignorance and brutality, it easily goes
unnoticed that, in the day to day, America is the most civilized
of places: how often you see in Americans and the way they deal
with each other the graces you should like to see in yourself
and your compatriots.
There
are passages in this book so good they demand to be read aloud,
aphorisms worth turning over and examining closely, the distillation
of a life thinking about the glamorous America first seen in childhood,
later complicated by a thousand contrary images, but still tugging
at the imagination. Don Watson has written a profound and deeply
personal work that makes for itself a place in the great tradition
of American journeys.
Glyn Davis is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne and
will co-chair (with the prime minister) the Australia 20/20 summit
in late April.
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