The Fable of the Southern Writer

Prologue: John Randolph and the Inwardness of History

Prologue John Randolph and the Inwardness of History n his study of John Randolph, Robert Dawidoff suggests that the biography of Randolph by Henry Adams (American Statesmen Series, 1882) displays the author's "unacknowledged yet unmistakable if muted and as yet incomplete aura of identification" with his subject. This became complete, Dawidoff says, in TheEducation of Henry Adams (privately printed, 1907), in which Adams implies that he has himself suffered the fate he had ascribed to the eccentric Virginian: the discrepancy between his education and his actual experience of life being too great, he had become a historical derelict.1 Although his approach to Randolph through Adams is fundamentally revealing, affording us not only the most stimulating study we have yet had of Randolph but a provocative look at Adams as well, Dawidoff's argument is not altogether convincing, particularly in its insistence that Randolph's career provided the model for Adams' conception of his own career as one shaped by "miseducation , helplessness, and eccentricity." For one thing, it is doubtful if Adams' description of himself as "miseducated" and "helpless" may be taken literally. R. P. Blackmur, Ernest Samuels,J. C. Levenson, James M. Cox, and other students of Adams have demonstrated that his celebrated report in the Education on the failure of his education masks a highly self-conscious, deeply ironic autobiographical drama, the subtleties and complexities of which are carefully controlled by an author possessed not only of formidable intellectual powers but of the unusual psychic resources of a gifted literary artist. Able to i. Robert Dawidoff, The Education ofJohn Randolph (New York, 1979), 13, 229-300. I 2 The Fable of the S o u t h e r n W r i t e r distance himself from himself, Adams made a book out of his observation of the complex drama of his own mind that, even in the current misguided game of canon making and canon bashing among American literary scholars, is consistently recognized as one of the most distinguished ever written by an American. But a more fundamental reason why the thesis that Adams identified himself with a miseducated Randolph seems doubtful is simply that Adams thought of Randolph as insufficiently educated rather than as- miseducated. In a "small, struggling, exhausted country, without a government, a nationality, a capital, or even a town of thirty thousand inhabitants," he says, Randolph did not have "the means of supplying such an education as a young man wanted, however earnestly he tried for it." At the same time, Adams recognized that a youth of Randolph's preciosity and sensibility might well in a way have been overeducated in the tensions and anxieties of an age of unprecedented historical change. The boy was born at the moment . . . the country had plunged into a war which in a single moment cut that connection with England on which the old Virginian society depended for its tastes, fashions, theories, and above all for its aristocratic status in politics and law. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that America was no longer to be English, but American; that is to say, democratic and popular in all its parts—a fact equivalent to a sentence of death upon old Virginian society, and foreboding dissolution to the Randolphs and their pride, until they should learn to master the new conditions of American life. For passing through such a maelstrom a century was not too short an allowance of time, yet this small Randolph boy, not a strong creature at best, was born just as the downward plunge began, and every moment made the outlook drearier and more awful.2 A prime value of Dawidoff 's elucidation of Randolph's career is that it exhibits a feel for his life transcending Dawidoff s specific analytical penetration of it. Thus he suggests that the true affinity 2. Henry Adams, John Randolph (New York, 1882), 4. 3 John Randolph and the Inwardness of History Adams felt with Randolph lay in Randolph's dramatization of the modern self's response to history. "Having formed his views in his young manhood, according to the teachings of a world" that he "increasingly understood to be disappearing," Randolph, Dawidoff observes , "developed a habit of declension, of seeing in every change a disintegration." Acutely alert to the nuances of Randolph's personality , to shades of feeling experienced by a fragile self at once appalled and fascinated by its historical role, Dawidoff...