Critical Essays on George W. Cable (review)

Studies in American Fiction127 Turner, Arlin, ed. Critical Essays on George W. Cable. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980. 251 pp. Cloth: $25.00. We are fortunate that the late Arlin Turner got this volume done. Nobody is better qualified; nobody else knows as much about George Washington Cable's life or has pondered his career for so many decades and the historical or intrinsic merit of the writing about him. Turner's sober, comprehensive introduction prepares us for getting full use out of the selections. For all these reasons I pondered over them, frankly hoping to end up thinking more highly of Cable than in the past. I mean Cable as a writer of fiction. Only the staunchest Bourbon can refuse to admire him as a crusader for civil rights. Friends in the North stated a strong esthetic case for Cable during the 1870s and 1880s, but criteria have changed far too much. We are not likely to come back to a delight in local color fiction or even a tolerance for what Randolph Bourne called its "phonetic atrocities" (p. 147). Toughened by realism and ruthless brands of naturalism, we are no more likely to recover Edward Eggleston's taste for Cable's "finely idealized" characters (p. 5). Hindsight proves that he got advice just as harmful as such praise when his admirers urged him to graduate from short stories to the novel. The respectful comparisons with Hawthorne he next seemed to earn did not point him in the best direction either, since his eye for ethical tangles so quickly filled with pitying tears. Still more bewilderingIy , during the 1890s the consensus turned against him for his strongest claim to substance, his gropings for literary and political realism. Then, in fine melodramatic fashion, came the apparent reprieve. After 1910 The Grandissimes (1880) evoked a string of superlatives in memoriam (p. xxiii) with Fred Lewis Pattee leading the last hurrah, though he located the "classic" Cable in Old Creole Days and its "most perfect of American short stories" (p. 140). We have to hope Cable saw that tribute. He may even have enjoyed the obvious good will of Bourne's 1918 essay ominously entitled "From an Older Time," which tried to approve of the novels that Cable had kept writing in the twentieth century. Just as ominously Turner next found nothing worth reprinting before Edmund Wilson welcomed the standard life and letters in 1929. While his review deplored the deepening silence, his taste felt obligated to favor Cable as political essayist. Uneasy about a reductionist effect, Wilson insisted that Cable had developed into an incisive social analyst, the Southern question aside, but nobody has taken up that banner. Turner himself found nothing more of relative consequence until Philip Butcher's persuasive argument in 1948 that Cable's The Creoles of Louisiana (1884) rates enduring attention as both history and sociology. Perhaps Butcher's evident wish to build a more literary monument encouraged Louis D. Rubin, Jr., whose eloquent essay of 1969 was convincing me to try The Grandissimes again until he confirmed my memory that its main linking character is "wooden and lifeless" (p. 206). Soon after that, Elmo Howell professedly set out to argue that some aspects of the novel compete with the "best in American fiction" (p. 222) yet concluded that all the characters in The Grandissimes, "circumscribed " by its thesis, "strictly speaking have no life of their own" (p. 224). This kind of applause will not elicit a new paperback edition. Daniel Aaron, to whom Turner gives the final word, goes back to its documentary value and its humane grasp of the tragedies of caste in the South, but he likewise has to concede Cable's "fits of sentimentality, his tendency to idealize his characters [pace Eggleston], his weakness for silly mystifications" (p. 236). Cable now stands in a precarious situation. Because of the sheer intelligence behind his political commentary, we don't want to let him sink out of sight. However The 128Reviews Grandissimes more and more looks like not a passport to immortality but a visa about ready to expire. The idea that he somehow anticipated William Faulkner will carry him no further than the footnotes...