Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women's Writing,1920-1945

3. A CERTAIN MENTAL ABERRATION: Gwen Bristow

Nigger pick de cotton, nigger tote de load, / Nigger build de levee for de ribber to smash, / Nigger nebber walk up de handsome road, / But I radder be a nigger dan po’ white trash! —Gwen Bristow, The Handsome Road The Handsome Road, the second novel of Gwen Bristow’s Plantation Trilogy, from which the lyrics above are taken, was released after Gone with the Wind (1936) and addressed the same period in southern history as Margaret Mitchell’s widely celebrated book. The reception forecast for the novel, thus, initially appeared rather grim.1 Advance sales of The Handsome Road, which exceeded ten thousand copies, quickly laid to rest any concerns over its long-term prosperity (Crowell). Less than two weeks after Publishers’ Weekly announced its candidacy in May 1938, The Handsome Road reached number eight on the journal’s National Best Sellers list (June 11, p. 2310). It later made the bestseller lists of the New York Herald Tribune , the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Evening Transcript before being serialized by the Atlanta Journal and favorably reviewed by the New York Times, the Saturday Review, the Boston Evening Transcript, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Times Picayune. Albert Goldstein of the Times Picayune concluded his review of the novel by yoking The Handsome Road with the “superior novels” of its day; and if sales are any indication of a book’s value, then the connection was appropriate. By the time This Side of Glory, the last novel in the trilogy, was completed, the combined national distribution of Deep Summer and The Handsome Road had reached such a large number that, as one critic puts it, Bristow and her novels were virtual “household names” (Theriot 2, Crowell 1158). Though This Side of Glory was published to mixed reviews, Bristow had, by 1940, secured the mass appeal, financial security, and critical reA CERTAIN MENTAL ABERRATION Gwen Bristow 3 J j 55 j 56 | A Certain Mental Aberration spect that enabled her to prosper as a professional writer. Indeed, Bristow was clearly poised to position herself as a writer of enduring significance. Most of Bristow’s novels published after This Side of Glory met with enthusiastic or favorable support.2 Each renewed her critical success and popularity such that she did, indeed, remain a reputable writer until her death in 1980. It is somewhat of a mystery, therefore, that despite her nearly constant distinction as a literary writer during her lifetime, Bristow’s place in American literary history has been all but ignored, particularly in scholarship on the 1930s and 1940s, the decades of her greatest critical and popular success . A series of related developments distinguishes these decades as crucial periods in modern American history: the devastation and recovery of the nation after the stock market crash of 1929; the social and economic upheaval in the South from cotton overproduction and the failures of sharecropping and tenant farming systems; southern agitation over industrial reform; the exacerbation of race and class-related violence throughout the nation, but especially in the South; and the zenith of the southern literary Renaissance, marked by the emergence of a number of nationally acclaimed southern writers. It is, perhaps, the last of these phenomena that accounts for Bristow’s current academic neglect, for her novels lack the technical polish of fiction by her more celebrated contemporaries, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Ellen Glasgow, and Richard Wright. But the need to reevaluate Bristow’s merit for the contemporary study of modern American literature and history stems less from her accomplishments in literary fiction than from her contributions as a cultural critic. The goal of this chapter is to recover those contributions. I-ing the Past Over the course of her writing career, which began in 1915 with a feature article in the State (Columbia, South Carolina) and culminated in 1980 with Golden Dreams, Bristow had a large and varied productivity. In 1925, after studying a year at the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York, Bristow moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, to work as a reporter for the Times Picayune. From 1925 to 1934, she covered a variety of stories, including high-profile court cases and investigations and lo- Gwen Bristow | 57 J cal jailbreaks, murders, and sports events. In 1926 she debuted as a literary writer, publishing her only volume of poetry, The Alien and Other Poems. In...