I spoke about how some of the Letters, notably #12, "Distresses of a Frontier Man" also exist in French versions in Lettres d'un cultivateur Américain, which Crèvecœur published in a two volumes in 1784 and then in an expanded three volume set in 1787. There was a lot of interest when I explained that whereas the English version, published in London during the American Revolution, makes a veiled or implicit loyalist position on the war, the French version takes a more propagandist anti-British stand. Here's an abridged version of a paper I first delivered at a conference in 1994.
Crèvecœur's Political Translation in Lettres
d'un Cultivateur Américain
Crèvecœur was a profoundly political and
autobiographical writer, and his political opinions were volatile and
self-interested and reflected his own experience. I will argue this point with reference to the French
editions entitled Lettres d'un Cultivateur Américain, published in 1784 and 1787. In the French Lettres, using the same tools of sentimental propaganda
and often with the same stories already published in the English Letters, Crèvecœur reversed the position that his texts
appeared to support, from loyalist to patriot. Although this political translation can be explained by the
opinions of the audiences in England and France for which Crèvecœur and his publishers
were working, I believe that the polar reversal shows that Crèvecœur held
passionate anti-war beliefs that were at once sentimental and cynical, but
neither patriotic nor loyalist.
The climax of my argument involves a close reading of two stories of
frontier families which Crèvecœur translated closely from English into French,
while artfully reversing their political message. Before getting to that, I would like to summarize the
history of Lettres d'un Cultivateur Américain.
The
tragic and fortunate outline of Crèvecœur's life from 1779 to 1784 is fairly
well known. Ironically, much of
the information related in capsule biographies is drawn from the 1787 edition
of Lettres, but it has been
repeated so many times that some who learn this information still know nothing
of the French edition. Crèvecœur
left his farm at Pine Hill, in Orange County, New York, in 1778 and went to New
York City, where he was imprisoned by the British forces controlling the
city. Major-General James Pattison
sent to his commander Sir Henry Clinton a letter telling of the papers found in
a trunk confiscated from Crèvecœur.
This letter is the first review of the now-famous text, and Pattison
reported that the political cast of this "irregular journal of America,
& a State of the Times of some Years back" was "to favor the side
of the Government and to throw Odium on the Proceedings of the Opposite Party,
and upon the Tyranny of their Popular Government." (quoted by Howard Rice, p58) This is also the first time that Crèvecœur's
politics conveniently suited his audience. If his letters had favored the revolutionary party, he would
no doubt not have been able to set sail in 1780 for England. The ship
crossed through a French blockade, but was wrecked on the coast of
Ireland. Crèvecœur, his son, and
his famous trunk were all saved.
In May, 1781, he sold some of his manuscripts to London Publisher Davis and Davies, who brought out the
first edition of 15 Letters from an American Farmer. It
was an immediate success, and was followed by editions in Dublin and Belfast,
Leyden and Leipzig. The reception
of the work by English reviewers, which has also attracted a good deal of
critical attention, included some doubt of its authenticity and some criticism
for an overly optimistic portrayal which would encourage greater
emigration.
In
August 1781 Crèvecœur landed in Caen, Normandy. More dramatic events of his biography from the latter part
of 1781 are also culled from the Lettres, this time the 1787 edition.
The first letters of the third volume, which appeared for the first time
in 1787, tell of how he rescued five american soldiers who landed in a sixteen
foot boat on the Norman coast near Crèvecœur's family home, after escaping from
a British prison near Portsmouth.
The author who'd just sold a manuscript with a loyalist bent was now
aiding patriot POWs. He arranged for
their passage from L'Orient in Brittany back to America in December, 1781. Crèvecœur writes that he was concerned
about his family still on the farm and wished to send them some money, and that
the five soldiers gave him the name of Gustave Fellows as a useful
contact. Crèvecœur sent with the
five a bill of exchange in Fellows' name.
The 1787 story continues with Crèvecœur's arrival in New York after
being named French Consul in 1783.
He learns of his wife's death and the burning of his farm, but also that
his two other children survived and are staying in Boston. He hurries to Boston through the snow
and discovers that the honest Gustave Fellows had received his letter of two
years earlier and travelled all the way to Fishkill, New York, also in winter,
to rescue the two children Fanny (América-Frances) and Philip
(Philippe-Louis). This tale of
happy coincidences (and Crèvecœur stresses that it all began with the chance
that led the five soldiers in their boat to the spot on the coast where he was)
is repeated as fact by Crèvecœur's biographers Allen and Asselineau (p112-15),
and in the introduction by Albert Stone to the popular Penguin edition.
(13) I do not wish to question the
truth of this account, but merely to point out that scholars who believe the
English Letters to be a clever
fiction nevertheless accept the French Lettres as biographical fact.
Admittedly,
internal evidence in the French edition links the Lettres more closely to their author than the Letters. Nearly every lettre is headed by a place and
date. These generally corraborate
what is known from other sources about Crèvecœur's movements. Many are signed "Comté
d'Orange" or Orange County, NY where his Pine Hill farm was, and only a
few [“Femme des Frontières” is the only one I've found so far] are headed
"Comté de Carlisle" Pennsylvania where James' farm is located. The French editions also include many
letters from others copied into the text, such as Fellows' reply to Crèvecœur's
plea for help (which did not reach him until he arrived in America), an
anonymous settlement narrative "Origine de l'etablissement de
Socialburg" translated from a 1757 manuscript, and speeches by George
Washington. The dates and places
encourage the reader to consider the book an epistolary travel narrative from
America, similar to many published in the eighteenth century, including the
book by Thomas Anburey, who as a lieutenant in the British Army under General
Burgoyne would have been responsible for the persecution of Crèvecœur's
"Femme des Frontieres" as we shall see below. These epistolary travel writers
often blended a few fabulous anecdotes into a predominantly factual account,
and who were likewise cited as fact and spurned as fantasy, sometimes by the
same historians.
The
best biographical and historical study of Crèvecœur's texts was published in
1933 by Howard C. Rice. Rice was
an American scholar who also edited and translated the Marquis de Chastellux' Travels
in North America in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782.
However, he wrote in French
Le Cultivateur Américain: Etude sur l'oeuvre de Saint John de Crèvecoeur
(Paris: Honoré Champion).
This work came shortly after the publication of the rediscovered Sketches in 1925, and Rice also had access to the English
manuscripts of the Letters, owned by the Crèvecœur family. Rice reveals, for
instance, the suppression in the 1782 Davis and Davies edition of passages in
the Letters which would have
weakened the farmer James persona, including direct plagiarisms from Raynal and
autobiographical comments such as in the second Letter where James expresses
his contentment at not having become a minister or lawyer. (Rice p61, it would have appeared on
p52 of Penguin at end of paragraph)
Using the dates in the French editions, Rice is able to sort Crèvecœur's
writings into five periods or categories, based not on some epistemic shift or
political coming of age, but on the events in Crèvecœur's life as he was
writing.
The first covers the years 1769-70 and includes
conventional travel writings such as the Nantucket chapters in the Letters and
descriptions of Bermuda, Jamaica, and of all the colonies on the coast between
New York and Newfoundland. It's
possible but not likely that Crèvecœur visited all these places himself. For
another example, he third volume of the 1787 Lettres also includes an account of Ohio and
Kentucky. It suggests that in 1767
Crèvecœur undertook a trip down the Ohio to St. Louis and back across the Great
Lakes by the old French fur trade route.
He says he as accompanied by Robert Hooper and some other Englishmen,
and describes the trip in an unpublished "Mémoire sur la Région située à
l'ouest des Montagnes d'Alléghany: arrosée par les rivières Ohio, Mississippi,
Illinois, Cherokée, etc."
(Rice p15) The narrative in
the 1787 Lettres, however, is
dated 26 August, 1784 and purports to be based on a later journey.
The second group of writings, 1773-75 is more
derivative of Raynal, whose Histoire des Deux Indes Crèvecoeur could have read after 1770 and whose
physiocratic, deist, and abolitionist ideas are evident in the general
descriptions of the American colonies in "What is an American?" and
"Reflections on the Manners of the Americans."
The third group includes the bucolic or pastoral
sketches based on life around the farm: "Thoughts of an American Farmer On
Various Rural Subjects," "On the Situation, Feelings and Pleasures of
an American Farmer, and the famous
"Snow Storm" sketch.
These date from 1774-75.
Fourth we have the war stories. The pro-loyalist English ones obviously
date from 1777-78 and this includes three of the five English essays
rediscovered with but not included in the Sketches,
"The Grotto," "Ingratitude Rewarded," and "The
Commissioners."
The fifth group consists of the accounts of his
incarceration in New York during the winter of 1779-80 and published at the end
of the first volume of Lettres. Rice believes that this fifth group was
written by Crèvecœur in prison in English, but notes that these have never been
published in English, but only in French, and that the manuscripts have not
survived. Rice does not add as a
potential sixth group the autobiographical letters I discussed above, written
in 1784 or later and included only in the 1787 edition.
Thus
far I've given a lot of dates and facts, but little sense of the astonishing
reversal of the political purpose in the Letters and the Lettres. I'd
now like to proceed to a close reading of two pairs of letters which are in
large part translations of sentimental anecdotes concerning the Frontier Man
and Woman, but in which the political translation is achieved by the addition
or alteration of important circumstantial details.
The
famous "Distresses of a Frontier Man" is the only one of the fifteen
letters published in 1782 in which the utopia created by farmer James is
threatened by the Revolutionary War.
Exactly whom it is that the Frontier Man fears, Tory, Patriot, or Indian
mercenaries is left ambiguous, however.
At one point he speaks in a kind of social scientist's code which
suggests he's leaning toward the patriots, "As a member of a large society
which extends to many parts of the world, my connexion with it is too distant
to be as strong as that which binds me to the inferior division in the midst of
which I live." (203) But the
most inflammatory passage condemns the Tories: "Must I then, in order to
be called a faithful subject, coolly and philosophically say it is necessary
for the good of Britain that my children's brains should be dashed against the
walls of the house in which they were reared; that my wife should be stabbed
and scalped before my face; that I should be either murdered or
captivated;" (207) Yet this
sardonic question attacks the very justification of the war more than it does
the loyalist cause. The Frontier
Man condemns the breakdown in trust and civility which has led to an
apocalyptic mood reminiscent of the captivity narrative. He fears the woods and
the barbarity therein, a threat which is not associated with either political
party: "You know the position of our settlement; I need not therefore
describe it. To the west it is
inclosed by a chain of mountains...From the mountains we have but too much
reason to expect our dreadful enemy; the wilderness is a harbour where it is
impossible to find them." (201)
All three of these passages are translated in "L'Homme des
frontières" in the second volume of the French editions. But the French version soon departs
from the English one.
In
the English version, the Frontier Man's fear leads him to interrogate the rational
Enlightenment ideals which had been advanced in the first fourteen letters, and
which now help him neither to choose his party nor to save his skin:
"After all, most men reason from passions; and shall such an ignorant
individual as I am decide and say this side is right, that side is wrong? Sentiment and feeling are the only
guides I know. Alas, how should I
unravel an argument in which Reason herself has given way to brutality and
bloodshed!" (204) Reason and
Nature no longer dictate a political stance, "Self-preservation is above
all political precepts and rules," (210) and so whereas when Mary
Rowlandson was taken from rationality and civility into "barbaric"
Native American life the propaganda message for King Philip's War was crystal
clear, the Frontier man is forced to reject politics, abandon his outpost of
civility and seek a safer life among the Indians. Reason parts way from Nature; the former created the
outrages of the war, and the latter is retained only in the instinct for
survival and by the noble savages in this text which neatly signals the
transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism.
The
French version departs entirely from the English before the point where the
Frontier Man begins his plans for a new life among the Indians. For "l'homme des frontieres,"
the terrors of savagery are British.
The passage about his children's brains being dashed against the walls
continues in French toward these words:
S'il étoit possible que la Grande-Bretagne eût
transporté des lions d'Afrique, & les eût déchainés dans nos bois, ils nous
dévoreroient sans doute pour se repaître de nos cadavres; mais leur appétit
d'exigeroit point autant que Brandt & Butler; en ont immolé à la teneur de
leurs Commissions." (II: 269)
[If it were possible that Great Britain had
transported lions from Africa, and set them loose in our forests, they would
devour us no doubt to sate their hunger on our corpses, but their appetite
would not demand nearly so much as Brandt and Butler have destroyed in carrying
out their orders.]
Joseph Brandt, the Mohawk leader who is still
today heroized in Canada, and Butler, the British commander of troops "non
moins barbares, vêtus à la sauvage." (II: 274) are depicted as
bloodthirsty savages. The
connection between British colonialism and African and Indian barbarity
continues when Crèvecœur inserts one of several references in the Lettres to recent British atrocities in India, "Ils
connoissent bien peu le coeur humain, ou ils nous prennent pour des habitants
du Bengale, dont toute la vengeance consistoit à venir mourir aux pieds de ceux
qui les affamoient." (II: 270-71) [They know so little the human heart, or
else they take us for the inhabitants of Bengal, for whom vengeance consisted
in coming to eat at the feet of those who had starved them.]
"L'Homme
des frontières" is more propagandistic and less interesting than the
fantasy of a utopian Indian captivity in the English Letters.
Crèvecœur did not abandon the story of running off to join the Indians,
however. A loose translation of
the second part of "Distresses of a Frontier Man" turns up two
letters later in the second volume, in "Lettre Ecrite pas Francis _H_UR,
Irlandois, Colon de l'Etablissement de Cherry-Valley." As an Irishman, Francis has already
been once a victim of British colonialism, and fled to this town in New York
where he has cleared a hundred acres and built a valuable farm. At first he was confident that hidden
in the American woods, the British would not able to find and destroy his farm,
but he was wrong. Francis is a
simple man who does not espouse the philosophical ideals of his Anglophone
counterpart, but like him, in time of danger, "La preservation de
nous-mêmes est le premier des préceptes, c'est un sentiment supérieur, même aux
opinions les plus chères;" (II: 333)
[Self-preservation is the first principle, its a superior sentiment,
even to the most dearly held opinions]
The plan for a new life among the Indians is not a direct translation,
but a rearranged version of most of the same elements as in the English
version, including the comparison with the ancient Picts, the horror of
intermarriage, the plan to teach the Indians to construct mills, and the intent
to pay his children for their labor to prevent them from becoming savage hunters. The French version adds
greater historical specificity, however.
Francis recognizes that in seeking asylum among the Iroquois, he is
appealing to the same nations who provide many troops for Brandt and Butler,
but he relies upon payment in the form of a wampum belt, his knowledge of the
language, and contact with a coureur de bois.
Now
I'd like to switch to the Frontier Woman, and compare that brief piece in the Sketches with "La Femme des Frontières" in the
first volume of the French edition.
Nearly all of the English version is translated into the French, but
again, specific additions of names and places fix the blame on the British for
what in English was attributable to the Patriots, if only by the context of
other anti-revolutionary Sketches. In the English, the piece begins with
the narrator's encounter of "an ancient acquaintance" who confesses
remorsefully to atrocities committed by his band of soldiers. In the French there is an additional
paragraph at the start which both gives the Frontier Woman a name, Mademoiselle
Macrea, and which opens "Quelle destruction terrible n'a pas causé l'Armée
du Général Burgoyne, depuis son arrivée à Tyconderoge" (I: 335) [What terrible destruction has not been
perpetrated by the army of General Burgoyne since his arrival at
Ticonderoga?] It's not clear that
Mademoiselle Macrea, who was planning to marry a British officer, is the
Frontier Woman in the subsequent anecdote told by the acquaintance, but that is
the implication. (The name alludes to the legend of Jane McCrea, a colonial woman who falls in love with a British soldier, and is killed by Indians as she travels to visit her lover. It is best known today from John Vanderlyn's painting Death of Jane McCrea, but Crèvecœur probably knew it from Michel René Hilliard d'Auberteuil's 1784 romance novel. I reprinted that in the anthology I edited. American Captivity Narratives.)
The
text of the story of the soldier acquaintance is translated directly, including
the befuddling line "Her husband had been a rebel, and no rebel's wife
should be spared." (404) The
presence of this sentence in the English implies that it is a British regiment
which attacks the Frontier settlement and slaughters the farm families, which
would contradict the dominant political purpose of the Sketches. In
the French version, however, this fits with the resumption of the text after
the soldier's story, which begins "C'est ainsi que la Grande Bretagne nous
traite." (I: 341) [This is how Great Britain treats us.] and again reviles Joseph Brandt. The two versions diverge for about a
page, the content of which is not very significant. They then rejoin for the final page, only there is an
important addition to the French text.
After this non-polarized anti-war sentence on page 406 of the Penguin
edition, "Had a proper moderation, so useful and so necessary in the most
just wars, been prevalent, it would have saved from ruins a great many innocent
families." the French adds, "dont le sang a cimenté, d'une façon plus
forte encore, la haine implacable de l'Amérique envers l'Angleterre." [the
blood of which has cemented, in an even stronger manner, the implacable hatred
of America toward England.]
Although I would have to look at the manuscript for proof, the presence
of this one sentence in English suggests that not all the sketches from the
1778-79 period, Rice's fourth group, are pro-loyalist, or alternatively that
the English text from the Sketches
is a censored version of a French essay which was actually written first,
though presumably not as early as September 10, 1778, at Carlisle County,
Pennsylvania, the heading which the letter carries in the French edition.
How
should this exposure of the mercenary literary technique of Crèvecœur change
our perception of his literary stature?
The greater historicity of some sections of the Lettres may promote a judgement that the French work
lacks the creative genius of the canonical Letters. I believe that Crèvecœur's mercenary instincts
do not make him less of a novelist and more of a hack, but rather more of both,
for ambiguous political statements are part of the novel's heritage. Daniel Defoe, the consensus choice for
first novelist, is after all notorious for supporting and betraying Whig and
Tory causes in his writings at the same time. Lennard Davis has written "Defoe's career was one in
which his political ideology seemed to change with the winds of power and
opportunity, and his writings always had the nature of a disguise, a fiction
contrived for whoever would pay." (168) and "This contradiction in
Defoe is at the root of the contradiction of the novel." (173) The same holds true for Crèvecœur, who
apparently brazenly reversed his position on the American Revolution between
1781 and 1784 as he translated and refashioned his work from English back into
his native French. That his
propagandist politics is part of his fictional creation should not lead readers
to brand him a mercenary or hypocrite, but to admire the sentimental ethical
message of his writings, which deliver a humanistic and pacifist appeal through
representations of the violent excesses to which men are led by their political
convictions.
Crèvecœur, J. Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer /
Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. Ed. Albert E. Stone. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
______. Lettres
d'un Cultivateur Américain addressées à Wm. S___on, Esquire, 1770-1786, traduites
de l'Anglois. Paris: Chez Cuchet, 1787.
Davis, Lennard, Factual Fictions: The Origins of
the English Novel. New York: Columbia
UP, 1983.
Rice, Howard.
Le Cultivateur Américain: étude sur l'œuvre de Saint John de
Crèvecœur. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1933.
