The Fable of the Southern Writer

II: A Fable of White and Black: Jefferson, Madison, Tate

II A Fable of White and Black Jefferson, Madison, Tate ames M. Cox has said that since the "very idea of autobiography '' grew "out of the political necessities and discoveries of the American and French revolutions," it is "no mere accident that an astonishingly large proportion of the slender shelf of so-called American classics" is claimed by autobiographies: Franklin 's Autobiography, Thoreau's Walden, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Adams' The Education of Henry Adams, and Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans.l In spite of his brilliant insight into the origin of self-biography as a mode of American writing, Cox must give us pause. My own immediate response to his list of classic American autobiographies is to ask: Not one by a southerner, past or present, white or black? Not even Thomas Jefferson's Autobiography? Has not the judgment of a leading student of American autobiography—who is, incidentally , a committed Jeffersonian and deep-dyed Virginian—somehow gone seriously awry when he excludes from his list of classic American autobiographies a work that is not only the authorial account of the writing and ratification of the American doctrine of the self but the singular source of the original text of the Declaration of Independence? Yet in terms of his own argument, Cox bears no culpability for his failure to recognize the document that uniquely describes the i. James M. Cox, Recovering Literature's Lost Ground: Essays in American Autobiography (Baton Rouge, 1989), 11-12, 31. For significant suggestions concerning southern autobiography that differ somewhat from those advanced either in Cox's essay or in the present one, see James Olney, "Autobiographical Tradition Black and White," in Located Lives:Place and Idea in Southern Autobiography, ed. J. Bill Berry (Athens, Ga., 1990), 66-77. J 25 A Fable of White and Black composition of the Declaration. Begun in 1821 but never finished, what has come to be called Jefferson's autobiography, he explains, was referred to by its author simply as "memoranda." When the fragmentary narrative was first published in 1830, Jefferson's grandson and literary executor upgraded the Jeffersonian label to Memoir. Twentieth-century editors would seem simply to have taken thefinal step in recognizing its singular importance by giving it a magisterial title: The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson. "But hold!," Cox exclaims , "Jefferson's text is neither history nor revelation of personality . It is memoir. As students of literature we might want to reveal Jefferson's ego; as students of history, we might want it to provide a myth of the American self. But it is autobiography as memoir, which means that it will relate itself to the external world of the author in history, not to the inner world of self-reflection."2 If we accept Cox's distinction between "memoir"—a personal narrative "that relates itself to the external world of the author"—and "autobiography "—a personal narrative that relates itself to the "inner world of self-reflection"—the rationale of his list of classic autobiographies becomes clear, and the omission of Jefferson's Autobiography plausible. It was excluded from consideration by definition. But again, hold! In the subsequent course of his essay on Jefferson , Cox reveals that his definition of autobiography is less than absolute . If he seems at first to say that Jefferson's grandson made the right editorial judgment about the title for his grandfather's personal narrative, Cox seems finally in his essay to allow, even to approve of, the transformation by editorial fiat of Jefferson's casual designation memoranda into the full-blown designation autobiography. Indeed, citing this change as one example of the present-day "imperial" interpretation of the term autobiography, Cox indicates his fascination with the possibility of reading novels, poems, essays—indeed almost any kind of text, as, for example, Henry James's prefaces to the New York Edition of his work and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams—as autobiographical expression. Taken in its full range, Cox's provocative discussion of the distinction between memoir and autobiography offers us alternate perspectives on the subject of autobiography in the South. On the one 2. Cox, Recovering Literature's Lost Ground, 52. 26 The Fable of the S o u t h e r n W r i t e r hand, acceptingJefferson as a representative southerner, we may take the distinction between memoir and autobiography quite literally; and in doing so accept what the...