I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company
By Brian Hall
Viking, 419 pages, $25.95
Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness
By Thomas P. Slaughter
Knopf, 231 pages, $24
For almost two centuries, the Lewis and Clark expedition has held a special place in the history and mythology of America. Go west, young man: Thomas Jefferson’s order to his 28-year-old personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, embraced not only a geographic frontier but also a psychic one. An emerging nation was in search of its footing.
The traditional story of the expedition focuses on the tangibles: the route, the scientific discoveries, the hardships. In his best seller “Undaunted Courage,” historian Stephen Ambrose pushed the boundaries, taking a closer look at the depressive whom Jefferson had put in charge.
But a huge gap remained, and it’s one explored in two new books–one fiction, the other a work of scholarship–that read between the lines of the record left behind. Each probes the cultural clash and psychological conflicts that weaved through the trip. Each shifts our attention from the foreground to the long line, which involves the cultural conditioning and emotional lives of the participants. As the 20th Century has taught us, these things tend to skew perceptions.
Brian Hall re-creates this context with remarkable verisimilitude in his novel “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company.” Combining fine prose with a factual foundation, he produces a stunning tribute to the upcoming 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Remember Irving Stone and James Michener? In the olden days–and here we’re talking in decades, not centuries–novelists such as these defined historical fiction. They gave readers a solid dose of fact wrapped around characters (some real, some concocted) whom we watched riding their boats or carriages into the annals of history.
This template is still in use. But now, as Hall shows, there’s another approach: Novelists write the heck out of a subject while looking more closely and critically at the drivers and those who came along for the ride.
So, in “I Should Be Extremely Happy,” Lewis is less the proud leader than a young man who doesn’t really trust himself. Sitting patiently through Jefferson’s monologues (“Mr. J needs to speak his ideas aloud in order to judge how they sound,” he says), he’s anything but the perfect amanuensis. The president’s learned allusions sail over his head.
It is Jefferson, of course, whose foresight and intellectual curiosity form the backbone of the expedition. But it’s Lewis and his Corps of Discovery who end up in the wilderness with a few guns and some tobacco. “I Should Be Extremely Happy” whips us out of the drawing room and into their landscape. This visceral encounter is a tour de force.
Hall imagines the world through the eyes of five participants–Lewis; William Clark; Shoshone guide Sacagawea; her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau; and Clark’s black slave, York–in a way that makes them no longer the cardboard cutouts of history. They are human beings set adrift in an unknown environment among people whose languages and customs they don’t understand.
“Scurfs of salts lie on the land in pans, and sparkle in the morning light like snow,” Hall writes poetically about what Lewis sees as he stands on a bluff above the Missouri Valley.
“Now he middleman, lucky Pierre. This for that. That is device of plain.” Charbonneau, the wily French-Canadian, speaks in broken English. “He want tell these stupid captain, Indian say what you want hear.”
Thankfully, Hall gives the Indians their humanity, but without succumbing to the “Dances With Wolves” syndrome and idealizing them (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text):
“Clark wondered if Indians didn’t advance, despite their intelligence, because of this attitude toward mystery. They didn’t try to explain what they failed to understand, instead they fell down before it.”
The voices of Sacagawea, Charbonneau and York are more disjointed than those of Lewis and Clark, which could disgruntle those who thought they’d escape the Anglo perspective. But Hall’s approach is a defensible way of illuminating different points of view, and what’s more important is that he doesn’t elevate Lewis and Clark to infallible status. In fact, more often than not, Lewis seems like a hodgepodge of misjudgment and self-doubt.
Contemplating whether to take Sacagawea and her infant son on the trip, he worries:
” ‘The baby dies, our interpretress declines. Or she dies and . . . you and I, Clark, are up all night squeezing buffalo milk out of a handkerchief.’ “
Fortunately, he decides to bring her, probably saving himself and his crew.
In the novel–which takes readers only from the journey’s start to the Rockies (and leaves us with Lewis, after the trip, mulling over what went wrong)–the synergy between Lewis and Clark has deliberate homoerotic overtones. But their easy camaraderie is less sexual than the pairing of complementary forces, in the spirit of Jung’s anima and animus. The book’s title is a line from Lewis’ letter asking Clark to become the corps’ co-captain. To Clark’s disappointment, the government refuses to give him equal status.
Still, the men are true partners. Clark’s more even disposition is an important foil to Lewis’ recurring bouts of melancholy. Lewis is more physically robust.
History buffs may quibble with some of Hall’s choices. He admits in an author’s note that he went “out on a branch” conjecturing York, and even more so Sacagawea. But, mea culpas aside, “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company” works. It deserves to be a hit.
In “Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness,” Thomas P. Slaughter, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame, traces a vein similar to Hall’s. He argues that past scholarship has made the mistake of taking the written record at face value and proposes a different reading. He examines the journals made during the expedition–which was the most heavily documented exploration up to the 20th Century–in search of the writers’ preconceptions and misrepresentations.
For one thing, he notes, Lewis was about a decade late for claiming to be the first “civilized” man to cross the continent. Canadian Alexander Mackenzie took that prize. What’s more, even though Lewis had orders to keep careful journals, he wasn’t as consistent as he made it appear. And his entries are laden with his bias: Inordinate attention was paid to snakes, the biblical evil that may have represented the fear of the unknown. Meanwhile, tribal mythology was either ignored or dismissed as the notions of ignorant people.
At times, it feels as if Slaughter overstates his case. But his larger point seems valid: “If [the journals] are less reliable guides to external events than we have long believed, they are better guides to the interior wilderness–the minds and hearts of the explorers–than we have appreciated.”
