The Most American of All American Festivals - 26 November 1999

As I talk I'm mightily relieved that I flew back from San Francisco days ago, and that here I sit in my study watching a pale mist drift through the fading golds and russets of Central Park and all seems calm and bright on the eve of the great American festival which is intended, once a year, to bring peace and affection, serenity and joy to every American family.

And which, in fact, entails about 40m Americans in hustling hectic traffic-jammed hassle, the like of which has only been pictured in those doom-laden movies depicting the aftermath of the final nuclear explosion and the end of the world.

It is the week of Thanksgiving and to be truthful I'm recording these words on Wednesday because deliberately to do work, outside butchering a turkey and stuffing it, on the fourth Thursday in November would be a desecration of the most American of all American festivals - Thanksgiving Day.

A thanksgiving, in retrospect, for the success of the first harvest of the settlers of the Massachusetts colony.

It's always celebrated with a special feast. There's a good deal of doubt about the composition of the meal with which those pilgrims celebrated the harvest.

Calvin Trillin, the American revisionist historian, maintains turkey had nothing to do with it - that the Indians, who had their fill of Puritan cuisine, brought along and shared their own favourite dish - spaghetti carbonara - the recipe picked up long, long ago from Christopher Columbus - the invading pioneer they called the Big Italian Fella.

However, most people don't go along with Trillin anymore than they go along with Karl Marx about the proper way to run a national economy, to have it run by the bureau for the bureaucrats in the name of the people - whoever they are.

Most Americans prefer to believe the legend - which constant practice has turned into the truth - that the original Thanksgiving dinner consisted of turkey with cranberry sauce, candied yams (sweet potatoes), pumpkin pie and various regional additions, mainly in the South, which preserves its own secret reason for loving hominy grits, black-eyed peas and chitlings or chitterlings - the small intestines of pigs - which were given up in Britain as a delicacy in the Middle Ages, I believe, in favour of more delicate dishes like trotters and haggis.

There's such an inter-state and intra-family squabble about the absolutely correct composition of a Thanksgiving meal that I got caught up in it and apologise.

To get any sort of meal, of course, you have to arrive at the place it's being prepared and it is the increasing turmoil and chaos of Thanksgiving Day that I'm talking about.

It has long been established that of all American festivals Thanksgiving is the family occasion and as you've heard we're very hot and bothered these days about the need to bind the family together. Once we've decided what constitutes the family - that is now as much a topic of national strive as the rumpus over abortion. We've just had a rash of defrockings of bishops and other clerics for marrying homosexuals and now for having homosexuals adopt children.

But the legend of Thanksgiving is so fixed and hallowed that there's something almost blasphemous about spending it just with friends - family is the thing and America wouldn't be America if families, perhaps most, weren't far-flung.

Even in colonial times young people who'd made the push West - the West being, say, a few hundred miles inland, not even what we'd call the Midwest - would make an effort at Thanksgiving to ride or bounce back home in a coach.

Now it can take a day or two to get from one part of the continent to another. Perhaps flying from coast to coast is the easiest trip of all - five to six hours and no stops. Otherwise by short flight or by automobile - even the statistical surveys don't mention trains these days, they don't like passengers - about 34m Americans will have travelled at least 100 miles, half of them far enough away to have to stay over a night or two with intermediate friends before arriving at Mom's or Aunt Maria's or poor old widowered Uncle Fred who hates to be alone on Thanksgiving Thursday (he doesn't mind it at all the other 364 nights of the year).

There once was a shipping - a cruise - line whose advertising slogan was "Getting there is half the fun". Don't let anybody tell you this applies to Thanksgiving - getting there is all the piled up agonies of 20th Century technology.

Early rising, 1,000 miles at the wheel, delayed or cancelled planes, a simple 100 mile drive perhaps which however includes a compulsory one hour crawl over a necessary bridge over the damn Pocahontas River.

Need to warn Mom that you'll be three hours late - no way of reaching a human being on the new "upgraded telephone system" which has Mom's number alright but is suffocating with calls from other Moms and assures you it's working night and day for your convenience and cherishes your patronage before introducing a little bit of Mozart or rock.

Exhaustion, bad temper, howling children.

"Mother!" - gulp - "What a joy to see you." And the other 16 members of the family - four of whom you're definitely fond of, three of whom you haven't seen in years and wish it had been longer.

To make things worse, or to hallow the occasion, the President of the United States always puts out a proclamation - so-called - full of whereases and therefores. Always the same reverential solemn tone, always the same artful spin on the historical truth, as when Mr Clinton says - "Well over three and a half centuries ago a small band of pilgrims sought out a place in the New World where they could worship according to their own beliefs."

That is strictly, literally, true but it usually implies that those pilgrims - those settlers of Massachusetts - were fervent believers in freedom of religion. Not a bit of it, they expected everybody else to worship according to the pilgrims' beliefs.

They were no more tolerant of other beliefs or dissenters than the Church of England had been of them. If you practised any other sect of faith you couldn't vote, you couldn't own property, you couldn't take part in government.

And if you belonged to a suspect sect - look out. The Baptists, the Quakers - the Quakers were the worst, they were called meditative men and physically thrown out of the state.

Those first pilgrims, in fact, ran things very much as another religion three centuries later came to run things - one religion, one political system, harsh punishment for dissenters, whose names were ferreted out and published by informers. That religion was Communism.

The legend of Thanksgiving, as you can guess, is very different from the religious dictatorship the pilgrims set up.

It was brilliantly caught, pictured and symbolised for all time by a popular artist who through all the vagaries of American taste and all the whimsical changing loyalties of the middlebrows and the highbrows, has remained the nation's most popular artist. He is the late Norman Rockwell.

To the intelligentsia he was the perfect non-artist, the supreme photographic colour painter of homely, usually rural scenes - "Ordinary people doing ordinary things," Rockwell himself said.

A little boy agog before the skill of the blacksmith or a doctor gravely examining a little girl's doll, Main Street and the flag, a family's first ride in the new wonder - an automobile.

And this weekend there will be many prints of one picture unwrapped and hung - a family of three generations - simple, charming folk - looking up the table to Grandpa cutting the turkey, the table groaning with all the traditional ingredients steaming or glittering in perfect colour.

Before you make a face I think I ought to warn you that Norman Rockwell has just been discovered by the highbrows. A piece in the most chic of New York magazines declared him to be a genius whose legend of the simple, honest, attractive, brave, American small middle-class family actually created it in life and gave body and stamina to American society.

Before he died Rockwell himself grew sick of it because the beautiful legend had been betrayed by the facts of life - by kids forming gangs, coke snorting even in villages, the appalling rise in teenage pregnancy, the prevailing violence in schools.

Rockwell was an uncomplicated, decent, middle-class man and he'd come so to believe in his carefully painted America he felt America itself had betrayed him.

Perhaps because of that feeling of betrayal thousands and thousands of the betrayed flock to a town up in the beautiful Berkshire mountains in Massachusetts which has been more or less incorporated as a Norman Rockwell museum and they, of all people, are cheered by the news that Norman Rockwell is about to be proclaimed a true American artist by the people who usually find art only in a face with three eyes and two noses.

So time to stop ridiculing Rockwell as a photographic, sentimental illustrator. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is going to put on a retrospective. I expect the Tate and the Louvre will follow.

Norman Rockwell had a son - Peter - who has just added the lustre of the Rockwell name to an exhibition of his father's work in the South.

Presumably son Peter will have returned this weekend to preside over the Thanksgiving horde that gathers in his father's town in Massachusetts.

Of course that would mean flying from Atlanta - a tower of Babel of an airport - hiring a car at Kennedy, crawling through the so-called express ways up into the mountains. The whole hassle which 34m have just faced.

Correction - the word is just in that Mr Peter Rockwell decided that an easier way to spend Thanksgiving was simply to fly the Atlantic and take it easy at his home - in Rome.

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