Tales of the South (review)

Tales of the South By William Gilmore Simms Edited by Mary Ann Wimsatt University of South Carolina Press, 1996 xiv, 332 pp. Cloth, $49.85; paper $17.95 Reviewed by Johanna NiCOl Shields, professor emérita of history at the University ofAlabama in Huntsville. She is currendy completing a book-length study ofmen and women writers in the Old Southwest. This new collection of a dozen tales by die Old South's most famous writer, South Carolina's William Gilmore Simms, seeks to broaden Simms's modern audience by making available a selection of his short fiction in an attractive format. Editor Mary Ann Wimsatt has provided a useful chronology ofSimms's life and work and an introduction that places both in historical and critical context. The tales are not annotated, but Simms's skill as a storyteller compensates for unfamiliar terms and allusions. Wimsatt's introduction addresses the volume's intended audience— students and general readers—with an argument that Simms has been badly underrated. Much ofher reasoning hinges on the fact that he was southern. An extraordinarily prolific writer, Simms at first benefitted from the mid-nineteenth-century publishing revolution that spread his fame. Unlike his northern brethren, however , he was too far removed from publishing centers to oversee his interests. His career suffered from the serious depression that followed die panic of 1837, and recovery found him facing sectional conflict. Tragedies in his private life paralleled die public tragedy of Civil War. Before the war, critics had hailed Simms's talent; after it, however, "Northern historians and literary historians, backed by the powerful Northern publishing industry, rewrote American history in a manner fundamentally unsympathetic toward die Soudi and its audiors"(p. 3). Wimsatt asserts that more recendy Simms's racial views have diminished his repute. She asks readers to "rehistoricize" Simms in order to appreciate his fiction. Will the tales collected in this volume enhance Simms's reputation amonglatetwentieth -century readers? Probably so, in part because the short tales—unlike Simms's rambling romances—are easily read. But diere are limits to how far his reputation is likely to ascend. Simms's own judgment that he should rank above Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow may well be right, but Reviews 1 29 these are not his serious competitors. It is unlikely that Simms will beat out Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville for the attention of contemporary readers, including those in universities, who only rarely encounter any nineteenth-century American fiction. Scholars should (and some do) recognize Simms as an important figure in the development ofAmerican letters. Historians of the South should (and some do) use the evidence he offers about the region's intellectual life. But students and general readers may well continue to neglect Simms. Wimsatt correcdy blames regional issues as a source of neglect for Simms and other southern writers, but in Simms's case there are other reasons modern readers may ignore him. Too often, the South Carolinian was a tidy moralist. Although Simms was enormously influenced by the intellectual tenets of romanticism , like many popular writers he was also attracted to its didactic, sentimental side. As these tales strikingly indicate, Simms countered his tendency to preach with a fascination for the supernatural and folkish aspects of romanticism, both ofwhich led him to explore the irrational, unconscious side ofhuman nature. His persistent interest in the frontier and the disorderly period of the American Revolution balanced his preoccupation with social hierarchy. But, generally speaking, Simms contained these darker topics safely within the domesticated morality common to educated Americans ofhis time. Only when he abandoned decorum did Simms make his material come alive. In this volume, we see that Simms could take that risk, but that he commonly chose not to. As Wimsatt observes, Simms employed various framing devices to distance himself (and his readers) from forces that threatened the security of social and moral order. For example, in the opening story, "The Fisherman: A Fact," Simms begins with a short sermon about the miseries engendered by the search for easy money, then recounts a story he once heard about Tommy, a lazy lover of drink who fished the seas for sunken...