Peter Carey - Parrot and Olivier in America

You might think I was outraged, but I am worse than that, for I was flattered, although of this my tone gave not a clue.

"What, a hermit's cottage, that sort of thing? Like Rousseau? I believe he was always put up by nobles."

"Exactly."

"They say he gave away his children to the orphanage."

"Fortunately you have no children."

"But I do."

"No!" he exclaimed as if it were of death I spoke.

"Oh yes, and a wife, and her mother as well."

"So," he said, then paused. "Ah." He sighed. "A business."

What complication of emotions crossed his face I will never know, but he, urgently, unexpectedly, clamped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me roughly to him. The lemon smell was very strong.

"Well," he said as he finally released me, "there is no place for me."

We sat in silence. I did not know what to think or say.

"It will not ripen well."

"Sir, she is my wife."

"I do not mean your handsome wife. I mean this, democracy. It is a truly lovely flower, a tiny tender fruit, but it will not ripen well. You will see."

Poor devil, I thought. Is it not obvious to him that the people are making their own future very well? What of our little factory? What was that? And had he not been on the brink of living here himself?

"I tried to love it," he said. "I could not."

"What did you see upon your bedroom wall?" I asked, a stupid question but I was embarrassed by his pain and wished to cheer him.

"I saw the awful tyranny of the majority," he said.

You bloody sprat, I thought. I said, "Does your lordship wish me to write this down?"

"Sarcasm does not become you, John Larrit. Listen to me well. In a democracy there is not that class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts. Without that class, art is produced to suit the tastes of the market, which is filled with its own doubt and self-importance and ignorance, its own ability to be tricked and titillated by every bauble. If you are to make a business from catering to these people, the whole of your life will be spent in corrupting whatever public taste might struggle toward the light, tarnishing the virtues and confusing the manners of your country. Dear John Larrit, this is harsh and beastly. I mean nothing but kindness. Bring yourself away."

" America is new."

"Indeed," he said, and I frankly loathed the certainty of his judgment. He might go away and write a book about this, but what could he know from so short a visit? The time it would take to make this nation would be put in centuries and it did not do to come prancing around in your embroidered vests and buckled shoes and even if the New York Sentinel reported what you said, it did not mean you knew.

"These people are not the same as the people you distrust in France. They will be educated."

"Oh dear," he said, and held his head in his hands and I could not tell if this was because he thought it a very bad idea or if he considered education impossible and expected our people would all grow up ignorant and their children after them.

"From what will they get their culture?" he cried, "the newspapers? God help you all."

You think I will say I punched him in the nose, but I knew his heart was broken. I pitied him his nightmares. How dreadful it must be, to spend your days in terror of the common people, expecting them to tear out your entrails and burn them before your eyes.

Of course he apologized, but even when he apologized he went on to treble the offense. It was his opinion that the common American people preferred their leaders to be as undereducated as they were themselves.

"Ah, but they elect great men."

"Have you met Andrew Jackson? I have. He is a woodsman, an orphan. Mercy on you all."

"Then he is a miracle, and there will be more of him."

"Yes," he cried, and he had changed now, for there was none of the early condescension. He was no longer reclining but sitting, and his voice had risen. "Yes, and you will follow fur traders and woodsmen as your presidents, and they will be as barbarians at the head of armies, ignorant of geography and science, the leaders of a mob daily educated by a perfidious press which will make them so confident and ignorant that the only books on their shelves will be instruction manuals, the only theater gaudy spectacles, the paintings made to please that vulgar class of bankers, men of no moral character, half-bourgeois and half-criminal, who will affect the tastes of an aristocracy but will compete with each other like wrestlers at a fair, wishing only to pay the highest price for the most fashionable artist. Do not laugh, sir. Listen. I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare."

Miss Amelia Godefroy would not love him as he wished, he was flayed alive, and in his pain he revealed only his pessimism concerning the possibilities of life. I was hurt, of course, but a man could not be angry with a child of the awful guillotine.

"I'm very sorry," he said. "I have behaved disgracefully."

He stood. We embraced. He gave me the cup, the brandy pretty much untouched. A screech owl cried, despairing, hauntingly lovely. He sighed and walked up to the house alone, poor sausage.

I HAVE OBSERVED in the libraries and binderies of Paris that a book for gentlemen should carry its dedication at the start. Here, straight off, the author thanks some noble lord or lady without whom, etc., etc., but as I, Parrot, am now the citizen of a democracy and have not lived in his lordship's hermitage, I will place my dedication here, in a very kindly spirit. Indeed, I would offer it as solace for my tortured patron, for patron he was, even if he did not know it at the time.

I dedicate this account of our lives and travels to Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont in pretty much the same spirit that his mother, or more likely the Abbe de La Londe, offered him comfort during the fearful nights of his childhood. To him I say, in the fullness of my heart, sir, your fears are phantoms.

Look, it is daylight. There are no sansculottes, nor will there ever be again. There is no tyranny in America, nor ever could be. Your horrid visions concerning fur traders are groundless. The great ignoramus will not be elected. The illiterate will never rule. Your bleak certainty that there can be no art in a democracy is unsupported by the truth.

You are wrong, dear sir, and the proof that you are wrong is here, in my jumbled life, for I was your servant and became your friend. I was your employee and am now truly your progenitor, by which I mean that you were honestly MADE IN NEW YORK by a footman and a rogue. I mean that all these words, these blemishes and tears, this darkness, this unreliable history-although written pretty much as well as could be done in London-was cobbled together by me, jumped-up John Larrit, at Harlem Heights, and given to our compositor on May 10, 1837.

THIS NOVEL BEGAN when I read Alexis de Tocqueville's prescient Democracy in America. In the following three years I was nourished by a hundred other works, most notably George Wilson Pierson's Tocqueville in America, Andre Jardin's Tocqueville, and Hugh Brogan's delightful Alexis de Tocqueville, which was published just in the nick of time. The author's debt to Tocqueville himself will be obvious to scholars who will detect, squirreled away among the thatch of sentences, distinctive threads, necklaces of words that were clearly made by the great man himself. The very fanciful use I have made of these artifacts may not suit everyone, but as the world of Tocqueville seems to be filled with dissenting voices, it may not be inappropriate for a novelist to assume a minor place in the back row of that full-throated choir.