Broken Frontier

He Done Her Wrong - The Great American Novel.  Milt Gross.  Introduction by Craig Yoe.  Appreciation by Paul Karasik.  Fantagraphics Books, 2005.

What is "The Great American Novel"?  Presumably, it would be the greatest American book ever written.  It would flawlessly capture the American spirit, whether the spirit of its times, or the permanent intangibles of the American character.  Several novels have been nominated for this privileged status.  From the 19th century, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, are considered to be decisive depictions of American life and character.  In the 20th century, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby are all considered definitive contributions in the ongoing search for understanding just what it means to be an American.

Melville's Moby-Dick was originally promoted as "The Great American Novel" after World War I.  The United States was a newly minted world leader, and Americans experienced some insecurity about the merits of their culture.  Academics were anxious to show that American culture had produced important literary works.  Twain's Huck Finn had perhaps a greater claim to the honor, with its frontier perspective, accomplished use of dialects, and confrontation with issues of race, prejudice and morality.  Ernest Hemingway said in The Green Hills of Africa (1935) that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huck Finn…There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

In 1930, with the hubris typical of the comics, Milt Gross not only helpfully pointed out that the Great American Novel had been written -- by him -- but that he had accomplished the feat in pictures to boot.  There's "not a word in it -- no music, too."  Even though we know this is a joke, and a good one, Gross's exaggeration might be true.  This novel should appear on all the lists of Great American Novels.  He Done Her Wrong flawlessly captures the American spirit by lampooning American innocence, a kind of audacity that Gross deflates with his own special brand of shtick.  Moreover, it captures the American dream, with incomparable hilarity.

He Done Her Wrong is a melodrama about a beefy young rube and a dreamy young woman who meet and fall in love in a rowdy lumber town somewhere in the great white north.  A villain, always twirling his mustache, lures the young rube into a remote location, with promises of spectacular riches to be earned by fur trapping.  But the villain steals all the earnings from the rube's hard work, fakes the young man's death, and marries the dreamy young woman, whisking her off to a fabulous penthouse life in the big city.  What happens when the rube learns what the villain has done?  He goes in search of his lady-love. 

The rube's arrival on the streets of New York City launches a series of hilarious gags that takes perfect aim at his inexperience and pulls the trigger.  Standing on the street, the rube sees the skyscrapers and announces himself proudly, puffing out his chest and opening his arms wide in greeting.  A paint can falls on his head.  A 2 x 4 on a passing truck smacks him in the face.  A horse stomps on his foot, and a turn signal clocks him on the head.  In a sudden rush of traffic, this conqueror of the north is left reeling, and another truck throws him into a policeman, who kicks him in the behind.  Welcome to the Great American City, kiddo!  Try to keep up.

For all his lampooning of American innocence, Gross also fondly documents the American dream.  In this dream, boy meets girl, boy marries girl, and the two live happily ever after, with lots of children and a sudden stroke of good fortune that leaves them wanting for nothing.  Furthermore, the villain pays for his evil deeds.  Yet, none of these outcomes appear to be in the hands of the protagonists.  Instead, every forward movement of the plot is a result of coincidence, or fateful encounters.  Even an act of nature, in the form of a devious moose, saves the day for the young lovers.  Gross announces the role of Fate as the invisible hand of human destiny in Chapter 3. The young rube and the dreamy young woman are already reeling from their disastrous encounters with the big city, when Fate intervenes.  Their individual needs and dreams are squelched by a world whose wheels are already in motion.

In his essay, "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American," James Baldwin wrote that Americans, born of a frontier culture, have an abiding belief that anything is possible.  Europeans, with a much longer history and the painful memory of multiple devastating wars, tend to understand that life includes inevitability, forces and outcomes that cannot be escaped. 

Born in the Bronx in 1895, Milt Gross seems to have brought some of that Old World resignation to Fate to his friendly ribbing of the New World's naïve assumptions about life's limitless possibilities.  Gross grabs the contradictions that define us, between Old World and New, frontier and city, innocence and Fate.  But unlike other Great American Novels, He Done Her Wrong jumbles these contradictions together into scenes so funny that none of it matters.  Fate may be in charge, but we've got the last laff.