Twentieth-Century Southern Literature

J. A. BryantJr.

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813187402
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Authors discussed include: Wendell Berry, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, Zora Neal Hurston, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, and many more.

By World War II, the Southern Renaissance had established itself as one of the most significant literary events of the century, and today much of the best American fiction is southern fiction. Though the flowering of realistic and local-color writing during the first two decades of the century was a sign of things to come, the period between the two world wars was the crucial one for the South's literary development: a literary revival in Richmond came to fruition; at Vanderbilt University a group of young men produced The Fugitive, a remarkable, controversial magazine that published some of the century's best verse in its brief run; and the publication and widespread recognition of Faulkner (among others) inaugurated the great flood of southern writing that was to follow in novels, short stories, poetry, and plays.

With more than forty years of experience writing and reading about the subject, and friendships with many of the figures discussed, J. A. Bryant is uniquely qualified to provide the first comprehensive account of southern American literature since 1900. Bryant pays attention to both the cultural and the historical context of the works and authors discussed, and presents the information in an enjoyable, accessible style. No lover of great American literature can afford to be without this book.

PART ONE

The Making of a
Southern Literature

1
The Development of
Modern Southern Fiction

In the difficult years following the Civil War, literature produced in the South continued, as before, to be mainly fiction. Much of that followed the pattern that had been established, or at least anticipated, by John Pendleton Kennedy in his ambivalent celebration of Virginia plantation life, Swallow Barn (1832). Kennedy, writing three decades before the outbreak of war, had portrayed the Virginia planter as the heir to such cavalier virtues as pride in family and land, love of honor, respect for bravery, and courtesy toward women, but Kennedy was also prepared to acknowledge that the planter’s pastoral existence rested upon the indefensible evil of chattel slavery, for which, he believed, some permanent remedy should be sought. His postwar successors felt less free to be so openly ambivalent.

A notable example was the Atlanta journalist Joel Chandler Harris (18481908), who limited his observations about the disparity between the races to symbolic representation in a series of folk tales told by an aging black narrator to the child of his widowed mistress. Harris had found a model for his character in the plantation darkie of poet Irwin Russell’s “Christmas Night in the Quarters” (1878), and he began his own variation on that figure by creating a stereotyped black street character to enliven his series of newspaper sketches. When these proved locally popular, he gave his creation a young child for an audience, moved both to a plantation, and through the old man’s mouth delivered in convincing dialect the now familiar tales of Brer Rabbit and his animal friends. The result was Harris’s first book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1880), the immense popularity of which led him to produce a number of others centered on black characters, including three more collections of Uncle Remus’s stories (1883, 1892, and 1905). Historians have since debated whether Harris himself realized fully what he had done in elevating his early conventional portrait of the black man to a position of dignity, especially whether he sensed the iconoclasm implicit in making a slave character the narrator of stories in which a normally defenseless rabbit managed repeatedly to subvert the authority of the bear, the fox, and the wolf, all of whom regarded themselves as his superior by virtue of position and natural endowment; readers at the time seem not to have given the matter much thought.

If Harris led the way, however, credit for establishing the conventions of plantation fiction that would provide succeeding generations of chauvinistic southern writers with an easy model must go to Thomas Nelson Page (18531922), who used the form to give popular currency to the now familiar romantic myth of an Edenic South in which the young men were invariably gallant, the young women beautiful, and their black retainers happy darkies, content in their service to benevolent masters. This same myth provided the context for his first short story, “Marse Chan” (1884), which was an immediate success in both the North and the South and subsequently became the first story in his most popular book, In Ole Virginia (1887). The narrator in the story was an ancient black man, Sam, who told a passing traveler the sad story of his beloved master’s unhappy courtship and subsequent death in the war just as the young lady was at last prepared to grant his suit. Page embellished his sentimental tale with all the trappings of the southern myth and provided in his black man’s melancholy pronouncement, “Dem wuz good ole times, marster—de bes’ Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac’!” a theme for plantation fiction as a whole. After this initial success Page wrote prolifically—essays, sketches, short stories, and novels—always promulgating the theme in which he himself seems to have believed, that “befo’ de war” an idyllic South had existed which the northern invader had neither appreciated nor understood. Several generations of southern readers were more than ready to believe with him; and apparently many northern readers also took pleasure in doing so, as witnessed by the widespread popularity of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind in 1936, which, though with qualifications scarcely noted at the time, perpetuated the same myth.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, however, the taste that had fostered the sentimental romanticism of antebellum fiction began to give way, slowly at first and never completely, to a preference for realism that would prevail throughout much of the twentieth century. An interesting development in the use of the black narrator came near the turn of the century with Charles W. Chesnutt’s collection of realistic tales, The Conjure Woman (1899). Chesnutt (1858–1932) was born in Cleveland, the son of slaves who had sought refuge from oppression they had endured in North Carolina. He returned to North Carolina shortly after the end of the war, grew up in Fayetteville, and taught school there and in other towns in the area for several years before he returned north in 1883 to begin what became a long and successful career as a court reporter, lawyer, and advocate of better race relations. Chesnutt began his career as a serious writer in 1885 with a story published by the McClure newspaper syndicate and wrote prolifically for twenty years thereafter. In The Conjure Woman, his first and best book, he allowed a black narrator to present honestly and dramatically the insensitivity of antebellum white overseers and the sadness of black slaves driven to emulate the strategies of Brer Rabbit as a means of preserving their dignity and ensuring their survival. Within the space of six years, Chesnutt produced a second collection of stories, this time without the use of a black narrator, and after that three novels, but none of the later works achieved the success of his first collection. After 1905 he ceased to write, and the public forgot him. It was more than two decades after his death, in 1922, before he again became a factor in the development of southern literature.

A more serious challenge to the authenticity of the southern myth had appeared before Chesnutt, and even before Page with his “Marse Chan” began to elevate it to a position of orthodoxy. This challenge came from George Washington Cable (1844–1925), a native of New Orleans, whose early fiction, especially Old Creole Days (1879) and The Grandissimes (1880), skillfully portrayed a doomed Creole community incapable of reconciling its proud patrimony with the evils of slavery and racism which that patrimony had generated and fostered. Thereafter Cable’s work, as Chesnutt’s last novels were to do, became increasingly polemical. His outspoken criticism of southern attitudes and practices so disenchanted southern readers that in 1885 he felt compelled to leave the region and settle in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he continued to write about New Orleans and Louisiana until a few years before his death. Unfortunately, in his northern exile Cable as a writer became increasingly romantic and sentimental, and his later work, though popular nationally at the time, failed to fulfill the promise of his first short stories and his one distinguished novel.

Another native of New Orleans, Grace Elizabeth King (1852–1932), incensed by what she considered Cable’s disparagement of his region, at age thirty-three took up writing and produced a short story, “Monsieur Motte,” which three years later she expanded into a book. For some years thereafter, King continued her writing. She traveled widely, both in the North and in Europe, and achieved a measure of distinction for perceptive portrayals of the difficulties encountered by Creole families during the period of Reconstruction. Her best work, The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard (1916), drew upon the experiences of her own family during that time, but it appeared well after the popular taste for regional fiction had declined and added little to her reputation. At her death King was all but forgotten and like her contemporary Kate Chopin was destined to find her most receptive readers among later generations.

Chopin (1851–1904), whose reputation in the latter half of the twentieth century has exceeded that of all the foregoing, was born Kate O’Flaherty in St. Louis, offspring of an Irish father and a French Creole mother. She moved south as a newlywed in 1870 and lived there comfortably for thirteen years, first in New Orleans and later at Cloutierville in Nachitoches Parish, near her husband’s family plantation. For two years after her husband’s death in 1883, she continued in the role of plantation manager; then in 1885 she returned with her six children to St. Louis, where she remained for the last nineteen years of her life. Her entire career as a writer took place within the first fourteen of these years.

Chopin’s initial attempt at a novel, At Fault (1890), was undistinguished, but it contained a treatment, controversial for the time, of alcoholism and divorce as well as some remarkable sketches of plantation life. Favorable reception of the latter, however, led to further sketches and stories, which, when published in 1894 as Bayou Folk, established her reputation as a local colorist. Several of the stories in Chopin’s second collection the following year, A Night in Arcadie, with its sympathetic portrayals of a nineteenth-century woman ill at ease with the restraints society had imposed upon her, disturbed conventionally minded readers. Her second published novel, The Awakening in 1899, with its skillfully written story of a woman who for a time actually breaks through those restraints, created a scandal. The admirable sketches of life in New Orleans which graced that work went all but unnoticed in the furor that completely eclipsed her brief popularity. Chopin died five years later, still attempting to write but virtually forgotten by her contemporaries. Ironically, her reputation, now reestablished, rests on an aspect of her work that once condemned her to obscurity.

Several local colorists flourishing in Tennessee and Kentucky fared better. One of these was Mary Noailles Murfree (1850–1922), better known (for a time even to her publisher) by the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock. During her youth Murfree had spent summer months at a resort on the Cumberland Plateau, where she came to know the Tennessee mountain people at first hand, and the stories about them that she later published in the Atlantic Monthly ensured the success of her first collection, In the Tennessee Mountains (1884). Murfree continued to publish prolifically throughout most of her life, but her best works came early, when the public’s appetite for her brand of realism was at its peak. Among these were two volumes, a novel, The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885), and In the “Stranger People’s” Country (1891). As fashions changed, she changed with them and during her later years wrote historical novels and romances; but her posthumous reputation, mainly among literary historians, rests upon her first works in which she displayed a talent for the delineation of character and an ability to portray the speech and mores of an isolated group of southerners, untouched by the Edenic myth, who might otherwise have been ignored.

Murfree’s Kentucky counterpart was John William Fox, Jr. (1863?-1919), whose involvement in his father’s mining and timber enterprises brought him into intimate contact with the mountain people of eastern Kentucky and western Virginia. The result was a series of collections, among them A Cumberland Vendetta and Other Stories (1896), “Hell fer Sartin” and Other Stories (1897), and Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories (1904). Fox’s skill in portraying these mountain people would have been sufficient to guarantee him a place in the story of southern literature; but like Murfree he also had a talent for constructing longer works, though not her talent for character delineation. Half a century after his death Fox is best remembered for two of his sentimental novels, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908).

These were some of the southern writers whose view of their region diverted and to some extent edified readers at the turn of the century. All these, together with a score of others scarcely remembered at all, each in his or her way, helped to prepare the ground for the major southern fiction of twentieth-century writers such as Stark Young, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Andrew Lytle. For the most part they were primarily regionalists, but one or two—notably Cable and Chopin—continue to command respect for talents and insights unnoted or unappreciated in their own time.

One writer, older than any of these and vastly more gifted, could by virtue of derivation alone justly claim a place in the story of southern literature. His best work belongs to the nineteenth century, but without it twentieth-century southern literature, to say nothing of the rest of American literature, would be unthinkable. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), universally known as Mark Twain, although born in Missouri when it was still western frontier, derived substance and style from antebellum southern humorists and wrote masterpieces about life on the Mississippi. The first of Clemens’s southern works began as a memoir in seven installments, “Old Times on the Mississippi,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875. Later he expanded these into a book, which he published in 1883 as Life on the Mississippi. The finished work was still a memoir, ostensibly in the manner of his Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872), but as the historian Louis Rubin has noted, it is the memoir of a mature novelist of genius and presents a coherent narrative suggestive of the maturation of a literary artist who has learned to look beneath the kinds of surface that local colorists were depicting and beyond to the timeless realities that can make the picturesque meaningful.

Two other narratives of life along the river followed, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), both widely recognized as classics of American literature. The first of these, which Clemens called “a hymn to boyhood,” was a hymn replete with discords, realistic images of the darker aspects of the Edenic world that other accounts had discreetly omitted. The second was a masterwork symbolizing in the inexorable course of the river and Huck’s encounters along its way paradoxes that have manifested themselves throughout Western humanity’s long progress toward domination of the globe. Clemens’s use of Huck as narrator also enabled him to focus the story on all mankind’s perilous advance toward self-realization and made of the innocent boy’s account, whether he realized it or not, a universal paradigm. Huckleberry Finn remains, beyond doubt, the greatest single achievement in southern fiction. Still, Clemens by choice was only incidentally southern, and he made his contribution as an American author, without reference to regional provenance. Like Hawthorne and Melville before him and his contemporary Henry James, he opened doors for all the American novelists who should come after; his work, like theirs, belongs in the end to no region but stands on its own unique ground.

RICHMOND: THE FIRST MAJOR SOUTHERN NOVELS

As the old century came to an end, an outside observer might have said that if a renaissance was to happen in the South, it most likely would take place in Virginia, and if there, in Richmond. Long before the Civil War Richmond had served as the cultural center of the southern states. William Byrd, a scholar and author as well as a landowner, had established the city in 1737 and given it its name. It had been the site of the Virginia Convention in 1775, the roster of which included such names as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, Peyton Randolph, and Patrick Henry. In 1779 it became the state capital and in 1861 the capital of the Confederacy. Throughout the nineteenth century Richmond, with its industries, book firms, and newspapers, competed with New Orleans for the right to be called the most cosmopolitan city in the South. Even the devastation that followed the evacuation of the city by Confederate troops in 1864 failed to dim its luster or diminish the vigor of its people. By 1900 several writers either born in Richmond or closely associated with it were beginning to attract national attention. Among these were three women, all novelists.

The oldest was Amelie Louise Rives (1863–1945), who in 1886 began writing a series of romantic tales, some told in dialect, which she collected in a volume entitled Brother to Dragons and Other Old-Time Tales and published with considerable success in 1888. Over the next forty years Rives was to write and publish some twenty-three novels, now largely forgotten; but with her third, The Quick or the Dead?, also published in 1888, she introduced an element of psychological realism into her work that marked a departure from the popular romances and local-color stories of the day and earned for her a small but secure place in southern literary history.

The historical novels of her younger contemporary, Mary Johnston (18701936), born in Buchanan, just west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, were more memorable. Johnston’s second novel, To Have and to Hold (1900), a skillfully written tale of early Jamestown, has continued to be read and, in recent years, applauded by critics. In 1905 she moved to Richmond and remained there for seven years. Afterward she lived with her sisters in the mountainous setting of Warm Springs but maintained the friendship she had formed in Richmond with another novelist, Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945), and participated with Glasgow in the suffragist movement and other feminist causes. Two Civil War novels, The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912), marked the beginning of Johnston’s maturation as a novelist. The first volume deals with the war as Virginia knew it and presents authentic portraits of persons—Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, A.P. Hill, and Jefferson Davis—who figured prominently in the events there. The most striking of these figures, and central to the development of the novel, is the enigmatic genius who still dominates southern memory of the war, Stonewall Jackson. The second deals with the last days of the war in Richmond, when events took on a life of their own and proceeded to an inexorable conclusion in devastation and temporary despair. Both exhibit a neat blend of fiction and documentable history which, as the novelist-critic George Garrett has observed, made a breach in the wall that had long separated fiction from nonfiction, through which such later practitioners as Shelby Foote, Mary Lee Settle, and Norman Mailer would pass with relative ease. They also initiated a series of works, some sixteen novels in all, in which Johnston’s own intellectual questing gave new substance to explorations of the southern past. In this respect at least, her fiction resembles that of Ellen Glasgow, who replaced her, at least in her own time, in the eyes of northern critics.

The work of Ellen Glasgow has continued to hold its position as the most significant body of fiction produced in the South before the advent of Wolfe and Faulkner. Glasgow, like Rives, was born in Richmond and with the exception of some five years in New York maintained a home there until she died in 1945. Almost from the first, however, she manifested many of the characteristics of the independent women she would write about in her novels. By choice she had little formal education, preferring to read widely on her own. She early rejected her father’s Presbyterianism and, at the suggestion of a friend, immersed herself instead in a variety of philosophical works, those of Herbert Spencer, J.S. Mill, and Charles Darwin, especially the last of these, whose emphasis on the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: The Making of a Southern Literature
• Part Two: A Renaissance in Full Swing
• Part Three: Postwar Development and Diversification
• Bibliographical Note
• Index