America the beautiful, the instructive, the arid, the malevolent

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, January 4, 1998

Page: D2

Section: Books

William Bartram had one of those 18th-century minds, modest, intrepid, wondering, and philosophical, that I find irresistible. He was born of Quaker stock in Philadelphia in 1739 and, after a couple of failed adventures in making a living as other men did, succumbed to his first love, the exploration, collection, and description of nature. Indeed, the present volume includes maps and a wonderful selection of the author's drawings of plants and animals.

The main theater of Bartram's operations was the eastern coast of Georgia and Florida, which then lay balanced between State of Nature and scene of despoliation. There is something ominous, even unendurable, to the 20th-century reader to see this judicious romantic accompanied on one leg of his journey by surveyors whose job was to measure the land out from under the feet of the Indians and set the stage for the development that blights the landscape today. Bartram, a defender of the Indian as well as a great believer in reason and goodness and their coincidence, is convinced that things work out if they are properly ordered. One sees him struggling to find a moral order in the advance of civilization upon the Indian. But his clearsightedness is forever betraying his hopes; and the reader again and again detects his uneasiness that there is an insoluble contradiction in the whole project.

This is the melancholy element in these writings, but it is with Nature herself and the lessons she teaches that Bartram is most concerned and, in fact, delighted. Although it is considered wrong these days to anthropomorphize nature, it is chiefly in that way that I find it interesting. I was, for instance, completely smitten by Bartram's description of the bald eagle, ``an execrable tyrant'' who ``supports his assumed dignity and grandeur by rapine and violence, extorting unreasonable tribute and subsidy from all the feathered nations.'' Here is matter for national reflection, I'd say, particularly when one compares this scoundrel, as Bartram does, with the fishing hawk, which ``princely bird subsists entirely on fish which he takes himself, scorning to live and grow fat on the dear earned labours of another.''

In addition to supplying moral lessons, the creatures of nature provide evidence that evil exists as a nightmarish force that occupies itself with the destruction of men. Bartram finds it incarnate in the subtle, greedy, and thoroughly horrid alligator: ``Behold him rushing forth from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. . . . The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder.'' Bartram describes being attacked in his little boat by a multitude of these terrible beasts: incidents, we learn from the excellent notes, that left a permanent mark on his spirit.

After reading Bartram I found that he does, in fact, make more than an arbitrary companion to Jonathan Raban. Both are little-boat men, though in ``Bad Land'' Raban's sailing is only imaginary. More to the point, they both convey a sense of the hopefulness and bounty that unsettled territory represents in America. For Bartram, Florida was nothing less than a cornucopia of natural plenty, a treasure to be used wisely with an eye to its divinely ordained purpose. For the settlers described by Raban, Montana was a land to be improved and made fruitful by advances in science and technology. It would be hard to say which view is more at odds with reality, but as it is Raban's intent to say something about American optimism confounded, his book is the more macabrely amusing.

For subtlety and greediness, not to say horridness, the railroad companies who lured settlers to the arid vastness of eastern Montana in the first decades of the 20th century had few rivals outside the Florida wetlands. They promoted the idea that though the area was ``dryish,'' as Raban puts it, most of the rain fell during the growing season, and that, in any case, rainfall would soon increase, produced, as at least one scientist projected, ``by the disturbance of electrical currents caused by the building of the railroads and the settlement of the country.'' Still dubious? Well, for $2.50 anyone could learn to farm arid lands in ``Campbell's Soil Culture Manual,'' a truly inspirational work equipped with experiments that could be performed in your own kitchen, where ``even as you sat at home in the smoke and din of the city you knew that you were stealing a march on the mass of farmers, toiling in their fog of ignorant tradition.''

The denouement is, of course, terribly sad, but also made to echo brilliantly with bathos by Raban as he describes his visits to the wowsers of Ismay, Mont., who have changed their town's name to ``Joe'' in failed pursuit of tourist gold. America is, after all, made up of schemes, ``a land of limitless imagining, where ideas were no sooner conceived than they became concrete entities.''

This is where Don DeLillo's far-too-long novel, ``Underworld,'' will have to intersect with ``Bad Land.'' In DeLillo's America, the very land itself has taken on the evil print of man's devices and now confronts him, a treacherous enigma, a paranoid concatenation of shadow worlds. Out on weapons-testing ground in Arizona, for instance, ``the interplay of terrain and weapons was a kind of neural process remapped in the world, a hollow sort of craving lifted out of the brain stem, or wherever, and painted over with words and sky and diamondback desert.'' America is a giant, malevolent intelligence broken loose from its origins and now diabolically baffling us all. How can you tell, one character wonders, ``the difference between orange juice and agent orange if the same massive system connects them at levels outside your comprehension?'' This view expressed again and again (and again) throughout this novel strikes me as being, as a worldview, the New Age's evil twin and as such not very interesting. Still, it amuses me to think how William Bartram would stare if confronted with it.