Somewhat to the surprise of the critics and the public, the exiled
company of the
Royal Opera House had a great success with their production of Benjamin
Britten's “operetta,” Paul Bunyan, just before Christmas,
1997. Everyone knew
the difficulties in advance – for instance, the piece has absolutely
no dramatic
momentum – but no one seems to have foreseen that the splendid music
would
carry all before it in a theatre, or that a highly accomplished cast would
find so
many moments of real comedy and pathos in performance. Even now it is hard
to imagine the piece entering the regular repertory, but it is easy to
foresee
frequent revivals, and still more frequent concert performances.
To an Americanist, however, the work presented as many unexpected
problems as pleasures. The fault was entirely W. H. Auden's. His libretto
is in
many respects as brilliant and beautiful as the music (though at times
it sinks to
doggerel) but the theme he expounds sticks in my craw. Once upon a time
the
New World, he says, was nothing but virgin forest. Then Paul Bunyan, the
giant,
was born, and dreamed of felling trees – of being the greatest logger
in history.
And such he became. When the forests had all been cleared, “America”
had
emerged – the America of the farmer, the clerk, the hotel manager,
and
Hollywood. Paul Bunyan therefore moved on, leaving his followers with the
message, “America is what you make it.”
The difficulty is not simply that this myth of America seems ecologically
and
historically unsound to anyone who knows something of the pollution and
despoliation inflicted by American logging companies; nor even that the
total
elimination of the natives from the story (except for one reference to
fighting
Indians) is a grave falsification; nor even that the accumulation of these
and many
other simplifications produce an effect that in today's terms is politically
incorrect
and in 1941 seems to have been thought patronizing. It is that to anyone
with
actual knowledge, however slight, of American history, Auden's myth
is so
inaccurate as to make any suspension of disbelief largely impossible. To
take but
one detail: as Auden said himself, Paul Bunyan is a post-industrial-revolution
myth: he is a product of the nineteenth-century frontier, in the tall-tale
tradition.
The loggers, like the mountain men, the boatmen, the cowboys, and the slaves,
were at the mercy of large economic forces; they consoled themselves for
their
impotence by developing the legend of the giant lumberjack who was invincible
and omnipotent. The forests were far from virgin: if they were silent it
was
because first the game and then the original inhabitants had been driven
off by the
process of European settlement. Even in 1939, when the influence of F.
J. Turner
was at its height, Auden could have discovered these points – probably
did
discover them. But he chose to ignore them.
