America

I have always loved America. The United States of America, that is. From the moment Huck Finn sailed down the Mississippi with the runaway slave Jim, I was sold. I loved the English classics, but for me American novelists like Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald drove a vibrant story. Their novels – the one about innocence, the other about the loss of it – have us question our humanity, and what it means.

These days, not just because of the pandemic, our values are being put to the test again. In Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn we confront the irrationality of racism through the eyes of a naïve but loving Huck. Forty-one years later, in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald explores the excesses of what for him was an openly-brazen, capitalist society. 

At university, my literature teacher hated the American novelist Joseph Heller. He said that Catch 22 was a rubbish novel, then continued to gaze out the window, presumably dreaming of a tenured position at Oxford. But we students all loved it. When I skim through the novel’s pages now, I see that it’s not great literature, but it is both memorable and clever writing which propelled a generation to oppose America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. (And Australia’s involvement too.) 

These days, the battle for hearts and minds rages on. But to any artist seeking to find the crack of light that lies within the darkness, its time for us to write, read a lot, sing out loud and paint our pictures and dance … and let the mighty river of creativity flow. Art will always help us find a way home again.