Paul Green and the Southern Literary Renaissance

Paul Green and the Southern Literary Renaissance John Herbert Roper What did the Southern Literary Renaissance look like and feel like in the 1920s? There are images from the offices of Paul Green's short-lived "little magazine" the Reviewer, distinctive images that survive the ensuing decades and stretch back to a vanishing point in 1924. There, at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, it looked like a desk with little wooden slots stuffed with vouchers and requests for payment, its writing surface disappearing under letters of complaint from authors and booksellers and official memorandums from colleagues on the faculty and in the administration. It looked, too, like a corner of an office piled with manuscripts and another desk covered with layouts and mock-ups, dozens of blue pencils and no. 2 pencils and rolls of tape and jars of paste. Still that one great manuscript by the one truly significant artist had a way of eluding the editor as he ducked in from a lecture in the hope of pasting up that pièce de résistance during an hour stolen from other duties. The look, then, was chaos: plenty of motion, but much of it sideways and some of it backwards. There was also a smell, the smell of coffee spilled on paper in a humid and musty room, and the smell of cigarettes; after his early years of versifying the evils of tobacco, Green now smoked steadily in the tradition of the Sandhills Carolinian . Above all, there was the smell of sweat, Paul's own sweat and the sweat of others. Sometimes Green's duties were much like the Army clerical work he had done in Paris after World War I. A scholar otherwise sympathetic and even encouraging of Paul's efforts once asked incredulously if Paul actually had to manage the essential minutiae of keeping up with the correspondence and records for the many owed and owing. And there was more. There were hours to spend listening to the visiting poetaster from Raleigh who was proud of owning his car and prouder still to read aloud his verses "after Tennyson and Millay" and more hours to spend with the impecunious journalist from Asheville who had hitchhiked down from the Blue Ridge to scold the insensitive and tasteless editor who did not appreciate real art and had rejected a poem.1 The Southern Literary Renaissance was like this all over the South in simi- 76Southern Cultures The Green family—Paul, Elizabeth, and Paul Jr.—in 1925. Reprinted with permission from the Paul Green Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. lar little college and law offices and rooms in homes and apartments in Nashville, Greensboro, Atlanta, Richmond, and places relatively new to such experiences, such as Oxford, Mississippi, or Dallas, Texas. The year was 1924 and, although no one could explain it clearly then and no one since has explained it well, the regional cultural Renaissance was here, and Paul and his wife, Elizabeth, his coeditor without portfolio, were very much a part of it. Paul, a member of the philosophy department and originally a poet, was evolving into a playwright. He would win the Belasco Cup in 1925 for his one-act folk drama The No 'Count Boy and the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for In Abraham's Bosom, which appeared on Broadway. Elizabeth , also a playwright, consciously placed her career behind Paul's, but she continued to write songs and collect folklore. She also edited much of Paul's work, as well as the writing of other Renaissance figures. The two always were quite a team, and nowhere more so than on the Reviewer, which served as a channel for a number of influential writers of the era, including Frances Newman, Benjamin Brawley, Donald Davidson, Josephine Pinckney, and Julia Peterkin. For Paul and Elizabeth and their version of the Reviewer, the movement involved profound moral commitments and the political activism of the era. In fact, political activism was a big part of the Renaissance everywhere, although its expression varied a great deal by region. It was quite left-wing in Chapel Hill, relatively right-wing in...