The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature

FOUR: Joel Chandler Harris: Speculating on the Past

FOUR Joel Chandler Harris: Speculating on the Past oel Chandler Harris, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, creator of Uncle Remus, and author of more than thirty books, considered himself to be a simple man. In his lateryears he liked to call himself "the farmer," and from the start to the finish of his remarkableliterary career he insisted that he was only "accidentally" an author. The idea of achieving simplicity in his life seems to have been a goal of religious magnitude for him; he fled from banquets held in his honor, called his home in a fashionable suburb of Atlanta alternately "the Wren's Nest" or "Snap Bean Farm," and wrote, only four months before his death, "We are allextremelyignorant with respect to some of the most important things in this world, and before our knowledge can be deeper we shall have to become as little children; we shall have to drown our egoism in a perfect deluge of simplicity."1 The ideal of the simple life that Harris imposed upon his thinking about both his own life and his region's identity was never to be a reality for him in the post-Civil War South to which he loyallyproclaimed allegiance. His region was far more complex than he cared to admit for factual or fictional purposes, just ashe himself wasnever as simple as he tried to pretend. The reminiscences of Walter Hines Page concerning his first meeting with Harris confirm the discrepancy that is notable between what Harris was to the world and what 1. Julia Collier Harris, Editor and Essayist, 265. 61 j 62 TheDream ofArcady he thought of himself: "It was impossible to believe that the man realized what he had done. I afterwardsdiscovered that his most appreciative friends held the same opinion—that Joe Harris does not appreciate Joel Chandler Harris."2 There is one indication, at least, that Harris recognized the complexities of his personality as well as any of his friends. In a letter to one of his daughters, dated March 19,1898, he remarked, "You know all of us have two entities, or personalities," adding that he himself had an "other fellow" inside him, somewhat contemptuous of plain Joe Harris and "hard to understand." He excused his creative abilities by saying that "when night comes, I take up my pen, surrender unconditionally to my 'other fellow,' and out comes the story."3 Harris' letter represents a rather facile attempt to explain away a problem that was noted often even during his own lifetime; that is, neither the life nor the art of Joel Chandler Harris is simple and both exhibit certain perplexing, even contradictory urges which make it difficult to come to any final analysis of his genius as a writer or his motivations as a man. Biographical studies portray Harrisalternately as a jolly humorist who alwaysappreciated a good joke and asensitive recluse who was often depressed and despised having any attention directed his way.It is somewhat hard to seewhy a man so painfully shy neverconsidered any careerother than that ofnewspaperman, a job in which he wasconstantly facing public exposure. Again, Harris professed to hate politics or controversy of anykind, yet he wrote very strong editorials on some of the hottest political issues of his time and allowed them to appear in the leading publications of the nation . He has been labeled both a white racist and an unusually perceptive interpreter of the Negro and ismentioned in the same breath with both Henry Grady,the New South's most eloquent spokesman, and Thomas Nelson Page, the Old South's most ardent literary defender . The relationship between Harris' personal beliefs about the South and the Negro and what he produced in his fiction presents the most fascinating and crucial problems of all. He wrote editorials on the beautiful relationships that only the plantation system could make possible, but he also wrote stories about forced separations of hus2 . Walter Hines Page, 'The New South" Boston Post, September 28, 1881, quoted in Julia Collier Harris, The Lift and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris (Boston, 1918), 178. 3. Julia Collier Harris, Life and Letters, 384-86. Joel Chandler Harris 63 bands from wives and mothers from children, about cruel overseers and incompetent masters. White southerners could read his books and find justification for the way of life they had gone to war to defend. White northerners could read his books and believe that...