Man, Economy, and Liberty

22

A Utopia for Liberty:
Individual Freedom in
Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia

Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

Islandia is that rarity among literary Utopias—a novel that does not rest on the hope of establishing a socialist society. Instead Austin Tappan Wright’s ingenious book describes a country dedicated to an individualist, humanist philosophy. Although Islandia has never received the wide attention that it deserves, it has not been completely ignored or forgotten. Now, more than forty years since its original publication in 1942, the book’s message remains gentle but clear. Like all Utopias, it offers criticism as well as commentary.

The story of how Islandia came to be written is in itself both interesting and tragic. During the 1920s its author was a law professor, first at Berkeley and then at the University of Pennsylvania. Suddenly, in 1931, an unfortunate fatal accident at the age of 48 cut short a distinguished professional career. It was only later, when his widow showed his manuscripts to a former colleague, that Wright’s amazing other life came to light. Like many before him, he had dreamed of a new and different kind of world—a unique Utopia. Youthful visions gradually became a literary reality as he sketched out in enormous detail the history, laws, and customs of his imaginary Karain continent which he located in the South Pacific. On the southern tip of this continent, behind a mountain barrier, was the country of Islandia with its three million people. From reams of factual material, which he had already set down in his notes, Wright distilled his novel. Later, a decade after his death, his daughter reduced Islandia to publishable size, being careful, however, to preserve the framework of Wright’s manuscript and its striking contrast between the Islandian and American ways of life.

Contemporary reviews of lslandia, with a few exceptions, were favorable. Harold Strauss in the New York Times called it a “superb novel … a unique, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed book.” Norman Cousins in the Saturday Review of Literature noted that “Austin Wright wanted lslandia to sound real and convincing; and this book is a monument to the success of that ambition.” For the New Yorker, Clifton Fadiman wrote: “The book is assuredly one of the most remarkable examples of ingenuity in the history of literary invention. The detail is fabulous yet logical. …” Vernon Louis Parrington, Jr., from his study of American Utopias, concluded that “lslandia is the most carefully written and literary…. Had it been published at the end of World War II rather than at the beginning,” he suggested, “the sale might have been far greater.” Although briefly on the best seller lists, lslandia seemed out of step. Hostile to industrialism and technology, and isolationist in the foreign policy which it urged for lslandia, the book offered an image which the wartime New Deal era found difficult to accept.

Despite Islandia’s size, some one thousand pages, the plan of the book is relatively simple. John Lang, Wright’s hero or protagonist, goes to lslandia as its first American consul. This is possible only because the Islandians decide to open their country for a limited time to foreign visitors and possible trade. Lang, through a prior acquaintance at Harvard with Dorn, a visiting student from lslandia, is well qualified for the appointment to his unusual mission. Once arrived, after a long ocean voyage of three weeks, Lang with Dorn’s help becomes familiar with Islandia’s way of life. He also is able to win the confidence of its leading families. In this he is aided by his personal heroism in an Islandian military crisis, and by his love affairs with several rather stilted young Islandian women. Lang in his own emotions seems extraordinarily reserved. His restraint, however, may be in part a result of his equivocal role in a country hostile to any foreign intrusion. Although in the end he comes home to marry an American girl, they return to lslandia to live. Lang meanwhile has been singularly honored by the grant of Islandian citizenship which allows him to buy property and have a family in his adopted nation.

Unlike so many Utopian novels, lslandia is not dull. Lang’s adventures give pace to the narrative, while Wright in his descriptive passages makes the Islandian environment realistic and appealing to his readers. But it is, of course, the interplay of the two cultures which gives the book its major interest and significance. Through Lang’s conversations with his hosts, one comes to understand the Islandians’ isolationist foreign policy and to appreciate their suspicion of Western progress and technology. Reverence for the land, as well as a free and sensible code of personal morality, are among the exemplary qualities of the Islandian people. Islandia seems, indeed, a model humanist society.

While they are at Harvard, in the beginning of the tale, Lang learns from Dorn that Islandia throughout its history “had been menaced and occasionally overrun by the peoples of the north.” Primitive and savage, this vast Negro population was mixed with Arabic settlers who inhabited the immediate border area close to the mountains which isolate and protect Islandia. Recently trouble had been created by English, French, and German influence, seeking to organize the native population and penetrate Islandia’s isolation. “Islandia’s policy had been one of defensive self-protection. At times her borders had been extended beyond the natural lines, but afterwards she had always withdrawn behind her rampart of mountains. That she should remain there was Dorn’s view.”

But the Mora family, political opponents of Dorn’s family, succeed in persuading the Islandian parliament to wage an aggressive war against its northern enemies. In this conflict, Lord Mora’s governing faction is achieving success and, at the same time, proposing to open Islandia to European trade and commerce. “I am not afraid of war,” young Dorn tells Lang, “but I am afraid that Mora and his followers will change us from what we now are, and that we cannot help it because of all the political contracts.”

John Lang as a part of his consul’s duties is an interested observer and reporter of the domestic struggle between the Lord Dorn and Lord Mora parties. And he also becomes involved in the border warfare to the north as he accompanies his friend Dorn on a dangerous intelligence mission across the mountains. Drawn more and more into the Dorn social and familial circle, Lang finds himself in growing sympathy with its anti-foreign political position. This, of course, conflicts with his responsibility as the American consul to seek out opportunities for trade and investment. At first he tries to defend industrial civilization. As the two friends travel north some ninety miles on horseback from the coast to the mountains through “scenery unsurpassed,” Dorn tells Lang that a railroad route has been surveyed.

“It would save time,” Lang observes.

“Speed, is that progress?” Dorn asks. “Anyway, why progress? Why not enjoy what one has? Men have never exhausted present pleasures…. Decide on an indispensable minimum. See that everyone has it, don’t let anyone have any more.”

“Dorn, you sounds like a socialist,” Lang replies.

“Oh no,” Dorn rejoins, “not with us. We grew that way, because we enjoyed so much what we had that we never really wanted more. It is individualism—that is, the individual enjoys so much what he has that he does not crave other things from the community.”

Although Lang suffers some private social humiliation, he is able to persuade the Islandian girls to dance with him. But to them the American waltz is embarrassing. In the Islandian hedonistic culture it is a strange custom indeed “that makes a man and woman embrace without feeling anything!”

As Lang later tells his American fiancée, in Islandia ania, or romantic love, and alia, or friendship, are interlocking emotions, closely tied to “family feeling.”

“They have no word for ‘wife,’ “ he explains, “except one which literally means: alia-sharing lover.”

But there is another conception: “apia, desire for a woman or man not as an alia sharer.”

Although he enjoys the unfruitfulness of apia relationships with several Islandian young women, Lang dreams of ania, or the American conception of marriage, only with Dorn’s sister, Dorna. In their rather intellectual courtship, sailing blissfully together along the coast on the March Duck, he tells Dorna of his reasons for coming to Islandia, and of the United States’s hope of developing trade. American agricultural machinery, he explains, will save time and money. “There would be greater power to enjoy life.”

“Do you think so?” she asks seriously. “There is no lack in that power now, John Lang. But I don’t want to seem prejudiced. You said these machines would save time. That’s worthwhile. If ever your countrymen try to sell us agricultural implements let them sell those that save time.”

But Lang overstates his case when he argues the advantages of specialization from mass production. “You can accomplish more doing one thing. You become more skillful.”

“But you touch life in fewer ways,” Dorna says, as she defends the quiet, yet varied, Islandian hedonistic, agrarian, non-industrial way of life:

If we go on here as we have been, and are let alone, life hundreds of years from now will be as it is now; and life now, with growing things all about us and changing weather and lovely places kept beautiful and new people growing up, is too rich for us already, too rich to endure sometimes. We haven’t half exhausted it, and we cannot—we cannot so long as young people are born and grown up and learn new things and have new ideas. All that is to us the vital thing, John, and the changes foreigners propose—railroads to carry us about, new machines to till the soil, electric lights, and all that—are just superficial things, and not worth the price we have to pay for them in changing our whole way of living, in threatening our children with the chance of ruin!

Despite their great attraction for each other, Dorna must reject Lang because she has been selected by Tor, the young Islandian King, to be his bride. Lang also knows that a victory for Lord Dorn and his party in the coming parliamentary debate and elections will result in Islandia’s resumption of its traditional isolationism, and in his own enforced return to the United States. To help resolve the dilemma of his growing attachment to Islandia, Lang resigns his job as consul.

“Suppose a man remained in your country a long time and lived exactly the same sort of life you live?” he asks Dorn, who explains:

That would be only the beginning. He would have to do more … He must enjoy our way of life for its own sake…. And he would have to be stirred to the depths of his nature by something that was Islandian through and through.

“You are like Dorna,” Dorn tells Lang. “You believe in mere feelings. They are untrustworthy things when they can’t be expressed.”

Americans, however, are Puritans who are afraid to express their feelings, and who ignore realities. The real Islandian philosophy has not yet been expounded for the rest of the world by a trained philosopher, but to Dorn it is “hedonism with a kind heart.” Perhaps, he ventures, Lang will be the man to explain Islandia and its culture to Europe and America. Meanwhile Dorn complains:

It is not true that the world is interested in Islandia. A group of businessmen is interested, and their governments, who are behind them, send these foreign diplomats. Their demands are not the demands of the world upon Islandia. The voice of foreign government is not the voice of its people, for the people are too diverse in their lives and aims to have a single voice. “Government” abroad is merely a mask with a terrible face put on by different groups at different times.

In parliament Lord Dorn overcomes the adversary party under Lord Mora who had negotiated the temporary break in Islandia’s historic isolationism. “The majority of the people of Islandia wish the situation to be what it was before Lord Mora made his treaty,” Lord Dorn announces.

All foreign diplomats are given three months to arrange their affairs and depart. Lang alone enjoys an exception; he has been granted citizenship by King Tor and Queen Dorna. From Lord Dorn’s extensive holdings, he purchases a farm to which he brings Gladys, his American bride. In Islandia, he explains to her, their children

will succeed us at the farm. They will know it better than we ever can, and it will therefore be for them a larger and richer world in itself. It will give them shelter, food, and it will be their greatest pleasure. It will lie back of all their dreams…. The farm will lie beneath these hopes and wishes of theirs, a reality they know. Their ambitions will be just as broad and deep and all-absorbing as ambitions can be in the United States, but because of the farm they will be solid and such as can be realized. They won’t have fretting ambitions as the result of discontent and a wish to escape confusion. And what we must be careful to do is not to infect them with the restlessness that is our heritage and which we have brought from our former homes.

Thus, Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia stands strong as a Utopia for liberty and individual freedom.