Nature is dead, mein kind.

Peter Levi is a tall, awkward, strongly introverted, nineteen-year-old.  He is the son of divorced parents: a college professor and a concert pianist. 

Peter lives within his own head, while yet trying to understand the world in which he lives in 1964 -- his story told against a background of the civil rights movement, increasing homogenization of American daily life, a "junior year abroad" in France and Italy, and the gradually intensifying war in Vietnam. 

Throughout, he endeavors to live his life according to Kant's "categorical imperative" -- "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." 

Peter can be obstinate, frustratingly single-minded, painfully self-conscious, strangely innocent, and often irritating.  He is also eminently loveable, a boy you'd be pleased to have as a son or nephew.

He is the creation of Mary McCarthy in her 1965 novel, Birds of America -- a book I read soon after it was first published, and just finished re-reading today.  My acquaintance with Ms. McCarthy goes back to undergraduate days, when her essays on Florence, published over time in the New Yorker, were assigned reading in a class on Renaissance history.¹  I later read her memoirs of her childhood in Seattle.²  But by 1971, McCarthy was best known as the author of The Group, a scandalous (at the time) best-seller that followed eight young women after graduation from Vassar.      

From a scholarly painting of Renaissance life to a controversial sex novel -- Mary McCarthy's interests and talents were diverse.  In Birds of America, she contemplates -- through her hero's bewildered adolescent eyes -- the tension between democracy and elitism, between mass culture and the life of the individual, between the conflicting demands of humanity and nature.

The book has no plot, as such.  In the early chapters, Peter and his mother move back to Rocky Port, a coastal village in Massachusetts, as a sort of closing chapter of their unusually close, almost Oedipal relationship. Peter eagerly awaits his return to Rocky Port, and has flashbacks to his earlier stay in the village, back in "the old days" (when he was 15!), a time when life was recalled as wonderful -- especially the birdlife and other natural aspects of the coast. 

Now, however, four years later, everything seems degraded.  A beloved owl has disappeared, as have some favorite cormorants.  A highway has been cut through.  His mother, a prototype of today's amateur cooks, finds everyone eating canned and frozen food.

Except in the field of civil rights, he was opposed to progress in any direction, including backwards, ... and wanted everything in the sensuous world to be the same as it had been when he was younger.

The later chapters examine Peter's experiences while a student in Paris at the Sorbonne.  Anyone who visited France in the 1960s will recognize Peter's problems with the peculiarities of French bourgeois culture, food, and customs.

He sat hunched in his corner -- Peter Levi, noted misanthrope.

Peter, at least, is able to speak fluent French. 

Like many of us back then, he finds the French almost impossible to meet, and falls back on American expatriate life -- and finds his fellow Americans appalling.  (His Thanksgiving, as the guest of a NATO-based American general, is wickedly funny -- especially the host's belligerent insistence that one of his wife's guests -- a vegetarian student -- dig into a plate heaped high with a real American turkey dinner, with all the fixin's. And her passive-aggressive efforts to withstand his bullying.)

I recall once telling a fellow undergraduate that I was fascinated by Europe during the Middle Ages, when only the rare adventurer ventured much beyond his own village -- when no one knew quite what you'd find only a few miles down a winding road.  He was appalled at my "romanticism."  But Peter would have understood.

So arriving in a strange town by yourself with just your guidebook for a compass is the nearest equivalent we can find to being alone with Nature, the way travelers used to be in the Age of Discovery.

"Nature" is thus conflated with aloneness, with discovery, with thinking and feeling, and is contrasted with mobs of people, with mass civilization.  Peter later attempts to explain to an unsympathetic academic adviser he unfortuately ran into in the Sistine Chapel that art can only be understood and loved in solitude -- not while being led about by a group guide.  He suggests limiting admission to overcrowded museums by a combination of competitive art examinations and lottery.  His adviser denounces his opinions as undemocratic and elitist.

When I say that the novel has no real plot, I'm also suggesting that Peter's interior thoughts, a lengthy letter to his mother, his discussions with peers and adults, all present at some length what I assume to be Mary McCarthy's own thoughts on a number of subjects.  This in no way indicates that the book presents an ideological diatribe, however.  Mary McCarthy is not a liberal Ayn Rand.  Peter's personality would not permit him to be made use of in that manner.  Although he is stubborn and persistent, he is also subject to continual self-doubt.  He not only encounters well-presented arguments against his positions from others, his own mind is in constant ferment as it develops and presents its own counter-arguments to Peter's own deepest and most cherished beliefs.

Birds of America is a novel of ideas discussed less with an intent to persuade than with a love of playing with them for the sake of playing.  It is also a humorous study of a boy who's an unusual young "bird" himself and -- for us today -- it's a nostalgic reminder of what life was like in the simpler and more innocent mid-twentieth century.

Peter Levi -- boy philosopher -- receives his most profound and devastating insight not from his teachers, his friends, or his own conscious reasoning.  At the novel's conclusion, while delirious from an infection, Peter receives a visitor.   His hero, Immanuel Kant, appears at his bedside, bearing an unsettling message for Peter:  "Listen carefully and remember.  ...  Perhaps you have guessed it.  Nature is dead, mein kind."
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¹Collected in book form and published as The Stones of Florence (1956)
²Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)