The Myth of the South

THEMYTH OF THE SOUTH J. Lasley Dameron and James W. Mathews, eds. No FairerLand: Studies in Southern Literature Before 1900. Troy,N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1986. ix + 245pp. RichardGray. Writing the South: Ideas of an American Reg um. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. \IV + 333 pp. Illus. JimFaulkner. Across the Creek: Faulkner Fwnilv Stories. Jack~on:University Press of Mississippi, 1986. xiv + 103pp. Kathryn Chittick These are all books designed to make the Snopeses keep off. No Fairer Land excludes Southern life after 1900, Writing the South bristles with, references to high structuralism, and Across the Creek stays behind doors with the Faulkner familycircle - Sartorises and blacks allowed but no white trash. These circles, whetheracademic or social, are all strictly genteel. The first book is a Festschrift presented in honour of Richard Beale Davis and bears the epigraph "No fairer land hath fired a poet's lays/ Or given a home to man." The home offered by Dameron and Mathews' collection of essays by Davis's students is an intellectual one. The lifetime work of Professor Davis, who 1etiredfrom the University of Tennessee in 1972, was to write a cultural history of theColonial South. His first book was Francis Walker Gilmer: L(fe and Learning inJefferson's Virginia, published in 1939, which also happens to be the same year asFaulkner's Wild Palms appeared and one year before Flem Snopes came on the ~cenein The Hamlet. Faulkner himself had by that time spent a decade or more doing' 'half the laughing'' with Phil Stone over Snopeses stories and was to go on chuckling at Flem's defeat of the old South in his famous trilogy for another twentyyears. Meanwhile, Professor Davis worked on his own tripartite project of documenting intellectual life in the South. At his death, he was at work on the secondphase, which covered the end of the eighteenth century. The major burden ofthis work and of his students' contributions to No Fairer Land is to prove that "contrary to earlier biases, the culture of the early South was as varied, complex, andpervasive as that of early New England"(2), and that there can be a national literarylife without a London or a Boston. 430 Kathryn Chittick In such a history, we discover that George Washington was a theatregoer.The first recorded American play was performed in Virginia in 1665, and duringthe eighteenth century, the College of William and Mary seems to have beena theatrical centre of sorts, with companies coming to visit from Englandand Bermuda. Hundreds of plays survive from the Colonial period, and there wasan active touring repe11orynetwork too. During the first years of the nineteenth century, Edgar Allan Poe's actress mother performed not only in BostonandNew York but also in Newport, Norfolk, Alexandria, Richmond and Charleston. Charleston, in particular, was one of the centres of literary life in America at that tI1ne. From .therecame the Southern Quarterly Review, edited by the novelt,t and poet William Gilmore Simms; it also published the poetry of Henry Ttmrod, Paul Hamilton Hayne, and the work of Samuel Gilman. Gilman had beensent from Boston to preside over the Unitarian congregation in Charleston from 1819 to 1858, and he is typical of many of the figures named in this volume. Gilmanhad hi.<,profession to think of, as well as his poetry, and this fact underlme~the es~ential nature of a colonial literature. As in the life of the lawyer and statesman Sir John Randolph ( 1693-1737), one of the first figures singled out in this chronologically-organized volume, the South's early writing was mostly little more than a favourite recreation of itsprofessional men. Their ability to writewa, important for practical reasons at a time when men who could write were relatively few and in demand; in fact, ·'it made these men ... more effecti\e political and civil leaders than they otherwise might have been" (46). The historian's argument in such cases has to be that the literary skill is no less Siignificantfor its being put to use or appearing outside the usual literary genre~. Sir John Randolph was fortunate in being able to reconcile his writing talentwith hi~ practical duty, though after his early death, satirical sketches of his colleague~ were found among his private papers. Gilman, on the other hand, seems to ha\e re~ented the divergences between his sermon- and poetry-writing, and th1~ presented itself as a split between his duty as a minister and his fame as Harvard class poet of 1811.One of his tales is about an imaginary trip to meet Hawthorne; Gilman was a Yankee who called Harvard "the nurse of our souls" and who found the South oppressive. Richard Gray's Writing the Sou.th confirms that this generalized feeling ofexile was a predominant one inthe early southern colonies. William Byrd, for example. "never ceased to think of England as the proper place for him - a centreof culture, ente11ainment, and conversation as opposed to what he called 'this ~ilent country"' ( I5). His people read London journals, wore English clothes andsent their children across the Atlantic to be educated, rather like upper-class Canadian, in Halifax and Montreal. The myth by which they lived sighed for a culture that had been lost to them. In Gray's account, William Gilmore Simms, the editor of the Southern Quarterly Review, was no blithe genius of literary Charleston but a man who ultimately gave up the struggle to earn his living by his pen, to yield him~elf TheMythof the South 431 entirely to life as a country gentleman. Rural life won out over the attempt to see Charleston as a southern Boston. The producer of eighty books was to declare that··TheSouth don't care a d-n for literature and art .... there never will be a literatureworth the name in the Southern States, so long as their aristocracy remains based on so many heads of negroes and so many bales of cotton" (46). TheCivil War changed all this. As the actual economy of cotton and slaves pas~ed on into history, the economy of the imagination flourished. As usual, wartimeperegrinations had brought people out of isolation and forced them to Jefinetheir commonality. The Southern Historical Society was formed in 1869. Thenostalgia for a society left behind now focussed on agrarianism as the old South,not England, had defined it. Thus came about the South's myth for the twentiethcentury. By Gray's account, there was, in fact, no gradual stage in betweenthe shift from the Colonial to the modern myth of exile, and this emphasizesthe traditional view that the Civil War was a cataclysm in Southern history. Mythmaking, however, is a complicated pastime. The wartime confederacy betweenstates such as Virginia and Missouri comes to seem merely an abstract polit1cal construction, for even the attitude towards the essential deftning feature ofslavery is different, as any reading of Faulkner or Twain would show. Mark Twainis the only Southern writer, Gray finds, to achieve greatness in the late nineteenthcentury, and Twain's depiction of the South is full of contradiction: the Arthuriankingdom of A Connecticut Yankee is at once "barbaric and romantic, a closedsociety and a vanished virgin land" (I I7). Twain, like Quentin Compson, I\ obsessedby a past that he despises. QuentinCompson's anguished denial of his hatred, The Sound and the Fur_v, appearedin 1929. In 1931, the year of Sanctuary, Allen Tate wrote that "[t]he ~1gnificance of the Southern way of life, in my time, is failure" (122). He and the otherNashville Agrarians, as they came to be known, responded to the task of recoveryof the South during the Scopes monkey trial of 1925. /' fl TakeMy Stand, theirmanifesto, was published in 1930 (the year also of As I Lay Dying). Quite as muchas that old Missourian, T. S. Eliot, these writers looked to England and the feudalspirit for their conservative defence. Their implicit acceptance of slavery is ~een by Gray as an acceptance of a disbelief both in human moral progress and the Americanmyth of equality. When eventually the group of those writers who had formulated agrarianism drifted apait, they subsided into other conservative mythologiessuch as Catholicism and aestheticism. While the romantics and intellectuals grouped together in Nashville, it was Faulkner,alone in Mississippi, miles from any literary society, who recreated the Southfor the twentieth century. Yoknapatawpha has been the most compelling po~twar reconstruction of Southern society, and in a sense, all the books reviewed herework backward from the need to explain Faulkner's achievement. One might saythat Faulkner's work gave mythologies to both the traditionalists and the modernists, although most nostalgic Southerners were hardly grateful for the 432 Kathryn Chittick image he presented to the world of Horace Benbow fondling women's underwear and Temple Drake submitting to Popeye's corncob. It was Faulkner who shared the early Eliot's capacity to express the dilemma of his generation, in other words, the modernist situation: "I had not thought death had undone so many." Like Eliot, he was never easy in the society he had been born into ("I don't hate it''); unlike Eliot, he stayed out of England and out of the Church, while continuingto talk to the Snopeses on a daily basis. What Faulkner recorded was not so muchthe language of the old plantation South intact as that of those who had to live withthe New Memphis. He gave us the sense that the battle was no longer being foughtin any geographical place but in the terrain of self-consciousness and its language. Still, Faulkner avoided most of the modernists he knew. Even in Paris in 1925, he seems never to have dropped in on Joyce. In Oxford, he walked on the other side of the street from the literary set. Indeed, according to the account givenby his nephew in Across the Creek, he seems to have spent most of his time rescuing the small boys of the neighbourhood as they fell into ponds and briar patchesand off horses and roofs. He lived in a family where sophistication was measuredout in guns: an air-rifle at age six, a .22-caliber rifle at eight, a .4I0-gauge at ten, anda 12-gauge shotgun at twelve. As children, they were taken once a year to Memphis, seventy-five miles away on a mud road, to see the Santa Claus parade and to do Christmas shopping. The car would be loaded with jacks, spare tires, pumps, ropes, and axes, and bricks that had been heated all night in the fire-place and then wrapped in blankets. There wouldbe at least two flat tires in the courseof the journey, two mud holes to get stuck in, and a stop at the state line to reheatthe bricks in a stove. For all that, the Faulkners were still considered town people. They had a lawn to cut. Farm people, who lived twenty miles outside Oxford,had little use for cars, because they only went into town three or four times a year: once in the spring to get supplies and credit from the bank manager, again inlate summer while waiting for the harvest, and finally at Christmas to settle accounts and buy presents. Given these purposes, a car was of little point. Most of their entertainments were to be found at home. One realizes, in fact, from reading Jim Faulkner's stories of the Faulkner family, just how much the chronicler of Yoknapatawpha must have left out. The volume is a slim 103 pages of large type and a few photographs. The rather disquieting thing to realize is that it tells us at least as much about the Southa\ Gray's 322 pages of close reading. Gray is indisputably tireless, even to the point of demonstrating his proficiency in French criticism, whereas Jim Faulkner isonly a good ol' boy - but unmediated memory still turns out to be more vivid than academic analysis. Where Jim Faulkner, making the effort to remember, vef) nearly '"transforms history into nature"' what Gray himself, quoting Barthe~, defines as myth-making-Gray translates nature all back into weary history.Hi~ professional self-consciousness is only heightened by the references to Barthe\ that make clear the book's thesis about the South as a mythical, that is to say. linguistic construction. Gray 1s good on demonstrating this idea througha TheMyth of the South 433 densely-packed fabric of facts and texts, and in showmg, finally, that with Eudora Welty and Walker Percy, the important task of writing the South, of having a mythical critique of twentieth-century life, is for the moment exhausted and perhaps no longer needed. Richard Beale Davis spent his career showing that the South was as good as, as ]iterate as, the North, even while writers after the Civil War spent their time, e~pecially between the two world wars, showing the value of having a nonYankee culture. However, the South now seems intent once again on demonstratingits progressiveness. Even the rednecks are supposedly becoming extinct, as Sunbelt industry and liberalism, desegregation and shopping plazas, Japanese television and female accountants make the South more buoyantly bourge01s than therusting North. The Southern myth may have stood in the past for a sense of honour cultivated amid the difficulties of believing that human nature never rises above original sin. Postmodern prosperity genially throws sawbucks at these difficulties:· can Flem Snopes be far behind? ...