Anniversaries and "Whispering Ambitions": American Literature at 75

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now

—T. S. Eliot, "Gerontion"

Anniversaries are ambivalent occasions. They usually offer documented cause for celebration. However, they also call attention to time's passage, finding us older and not necessarily a great deal more adept at discovering our critical blind spots, trespasses, and omissions than those who have gone before us. If there is one thing we have learned in the course of our shared time editing American Literature, it is that time is not, au fond, progressive. Things change. But they do not always change for the best. More distressing yet, time can simply stand still, finding us ironically sounding real and vigorous trumpets for only imaginary gains. Fields of endeavor can sometimes claim remarkable advances based on incomplete data and but marginal alterations in their canons of attention. While we want to exercise caution in our claims for American Literature at seventy-five, we are still patently aware that we edit a journal as diversified in its offerings and as open to developing currents of historical and critical scholarship as any journal in the academy. American Literature offers us a scholarly project and challenge that yields enormous intellectual pleasure and critical satisfaction on a daily basis. Still, we know ourselves as historical actors, and we realize at this anniversary moment what stunning blind spots have marked our past and how much those failed apprehensions have cost us and our friends in time, energy, and psychological quietude.

If we do not remember and summon to view the past, we know from Santayana the consequences. Perhaps, then, one might say that uncritical celebration consists of too many trumpets and not enough stories. Stories from our own past may set American Literature and this seventy-fifth anniversary issue in a useful perspective.

One story commences on a bright day in the western United States on which Houston (hereafter referred to as "I" for narrative felicity) was visiting a friend at his academic home institution. After an absolutely splendid run at sunrise, a brief tour of the territory, and a sumptuously long breakfast, my friend went to pick up his mail and returned to the house. The morning delivery included a large brown envelope. He carefully opened it and pulled out the enclosed pages. I watched his face blanch. He handed the entire package to me and left the room. The contents included a nasty letter of rejection for an essay on a white Southern writer that my friend had submitted to American Literature.

The time frame was the mid-seventies. I had read a draft of the essay and thought its prose was impeccable and its insights keen. In my view it was indisputably careful and original work. However, the rejection letter labeled it "tendentious" in its insistence that "race" and "racialism" were of paramount importance to any just evaluation and enlargement of critical perspectives on the white author in question.

My normally imperturbable and nondemonstrative friend said when he returned to the room: "I now understand my 'place' in this profession. I am black and so the only authors I am supposed to touch are, obviously, black ones. I get it. I will never write on a white author again! I know my place." It was an ineffably sad morning. He had spent so much time in the very best institutions securing magnificently weighty degrees, and he was employed at a prestigious institution. Yet like W. E. B. DuBois's John of The Souls of Black Folk, he had been told he was unequivocally "out of place" in the world he had sought scholastically to make "home."

The second story occurred a few years later, when I had occasion to visit Duke University to offer comments for a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar presented...