Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature

A Personal Note

A Personal Note We take what we need from the books we read, and what we need changes. Our culture continually changes its mind about what counts in—and as—literature as well. This book records the reading experience of a man of sixty who began the formal study of American literature over forty years ago, in the mid1960s . I am amazed to see where a career as a student and teacher has brought me, from the all-male lecture halls at Yale where I never heard a word about AfricanAmerican literature to the more modestly appointed spaces at the University of Maryland, where, in my classes, women and people of color sit next to white men, and where writers like Toni Morrison and Chang-rae Lee anchor the syllabi in my lectures and graduate seminars. The exclusive lists of the Great Tradition have given way to the universe of the Expanding Canon. All this has been for the good, and I am glad to have been a part of it. Of course, over the years I have had to continually reeducate myself. When I first offered a course in “Twentieth-Century American Literature,” in 1975, my ignorance of the advertised subject distracted me from the presumption of its scope. I typed up a reading list of five poets: Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Pound, and Williams. Twenty of the enrolled students, after inspecting the syllabus, stood up and walked out of the room. Not in protest against the story having been reduced to five dead, white males. No, what they wanted was fiction. I continued teaching the course, eventually dropping Pound and adding Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Warren. It was all I knew, and good things came out of it, like Jahan Ramazani, a would-be government major who switched to English after taking my course in 1977 and who, twenty years later, would replace Richard Ellmann as the editor of the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. My pedagogical moment came when, in 1979, my friend Angela Davis turned around in a faculty meeting and complained to my face that my syllabus contained no African-American writers. The comment rankled; I was embarrassed at being called out, and not quite sure how to respond, since I had read very few of the authors she thought I should teach. This was still standard at the time at Virginia, although things had begun to change rapidly in other departments. But the English Department then had no full-time black faculty, and none of its senior members ever put any pressure on me, or even handed me a book, that might have suggested a change of course. Not getting tenure—in 1980—knocked me off of the academic ladder and into working for the state humanities council in Charlottesville. Our job was to hand out small grants to libraries, schools, museums, and community groups in all the far corners of Virginia. We had black officers on the board, like Jessie Brown from Hampton Institute, and black people walking in the door, like Stanley Johnson, an ex-con looking to start a reading program in the Lynchburg jail. Suddenly I had a new constituency—not just the mostly white faces staring back at me in a UVA classroom. Here we were, in the heart of the old Confederacy, trying to get people to read and think about their collective past, and there was no way to avoid seeing that slavery was the heart of it. I read John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom , and I began to realize that I knew next to nothing about Virginia, or America. I sent out a call for proposals on “Black History in Virginia,” teamed up with historian Armstead Robinson and a local high school teacher, and sat in that summer while ten teachers from around the state began to learn about the story behind the official story. Trying as well to keep my writing self alive, I began thinking about my home state of California. At first I thought I wanted to write a novel about growing up in San Bernardino. Being a researcher by nature, I began some background reading and discovered the work of John Muir. Muir had a great story—he discovered the first living glacier in the high country above Yosemite and founded the Sierra Club in 1892—and also turned out to have written a number of books. They were pretty good books, but they did not meet the...