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4. Inventing a Southern Literature
- Louisiana State University Press
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4 Inventing a Southern Literature In mid-January 1923, Josephine Pinckney awakened “much talk” in Charleston. She and DuBose Heyward had hopped the train to New York (unchaperoned) for a “huge lark” at the annual Poetry Society of America dinner. Hervey Allen discreetly followed on a later run, not wanting to appear to “tag” along with them. For Pinckney, waltzing into the festivities at the Roof Garden of Manhattan’s Hotel Astor with Hervey on one arm and DuBose on the other was every bit as thrilling as if she, like the Langhorne sisters of an earlier generation, had been asked to take her bow before the Four Hundred of New York society. Attending the gala event was indeed a debut for her into the world of literature. She beamed when she was recognized from the podium as a founder of the Poetry Society of South Carolina.1 Professor John Erskine of Columbia University welcomed the Charleston contingent and praised the Poetry Society for preserving “the spirit of the South.” Erskine paid tribute to the city of Charleston for remaining “so individual, so patrician, so pervaded with a feeling of having achieved inward peace.” After Erskine spoke, Heyward rose to make the case for southern literature as a unique genre in American letters. Pinckney, never reconciled to Heyward’s monopoly of the spotlight, had earlier wisecracked to Amy Lowell that in preparation for his big moment, “DuBose is sitting up nights preparing to tell them all about poetry, with particular reference to that certain member of the PS of SC.”2 Southern poets sing a different song from T. S. Eliot and the modernists, Heyward proclaimed. “The people of the South love their soil. They are not submerged in huge cities bewailing their fate; they are not preoccupied with psychoanalysis. They love the old homes where they have lived for generations. They love the old landscapes . . . They have traveled. They have read, but they will not write foreign poetry in the English language and they will probably prefer to use the old classic forms of verse. They have nature, history, folklore, legend, tradition; they will express their old homeland about them with its long roots reaching into the past.”3 In Heyward and Pinckney, leaders of the nation’s poetry establishment glimpsed the faces of the Charleston Literary Movement: men and women, aristocratic and attractive, forward thinking yet dubious about modernism. They liked what they saw. 58 | A Talent for Living The conservative mood of the nation after the costly idealism of World War I created a receptive environment for southern writers. Only a month before the New York gala, Charles Stork, poet and New York-based editor of Contemporary Verse, had warned, “Traditional culture has its back up against the wall.” Commercial publishers pandered to “mob taste” for “cheap excitement,” and foreign-born writers corrupted American literature with their sexually deviant, proletarian, and coarse urban themes. But all was not lost, Stork believed, as long as “the old English stock” remained “well to the fore.” Seeking to promote the aspects of American literature that conveyed the nation’s “aristocratic spirit” and “close to the earth” qualities, Stork was willing to publish unknown southern writers. In fact, he claimed considerable personal credit for the Charleston Renaissance, boasting that he had “discovered” DuBose Heyward, “introduced” Hervey Allen, and published the first cycle of poems by Beatrice Ravenel and the first lyric of Josephine L. S. Pinckney (“Nuptial” in 1919). Stork proclaimed Charleston, “the Literary Capital of the South.”4 Still, many northern critics viewed the idea of southern literature with skepticism. Even southern writers feared that promoting a regional literature would only open the sluice gates for local color and treacly sentiment. Sectional antagonism also lingered, north and south. As late as 1938, a Massachusetts newspaper ran an article on Pinckney, Bennett, and Heyward as founders of Charleston Literary Movement under the headline, “Charleston, Which Started Civil War, Also Started Southern Literary Renaissance.”5 In the decades before the Civil War, southern literature had served as the hand maiden of pro-slavery ideologues. Immediately after Appomattox, much southern writing festered into an angry, self-exculpatory defense of the Lost Cause. During the 1880s, southern apologists (mostly Virginians, such as Thomas Nelson Page, a writer much admired in the Pinckney household) denied ever supporting slavery. At the same time that they claimed to be the heart and soul of the Confederacy, they disavowed secession and blamed South Carolina hotspurs for igniting the...