A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition

Preface

Preface I wrote this book to solve a mystery. Why had the award-winning author Josephine Pinckney fallen into oblivion after a lifetime of achievement? The story of the Charleston woman who wrote essays, short stories, reviews, a noted book of evocative poetry, and five beautifully crafted novels drew me in while I was doing research for a new introduction to her most celebrated novel, Three O’Clock Dinner (1945), for the Southern Classics series of the University of South Carolina Press. Although I knew little about Pinckney when I set out, as a historian I was well acquainted with the heroes and heroines of her legendary family. Pinckney belonged to the sixth American generation of a family boasting jurists, war heroes, statesmen, governors, diplomats, and presidential candidates. The family’s imprint on the politics, culture, and economics of the Low Country was so profound that Charleston’s golden era during the years between 1730 and 1830 has been dubbed the “Age of the Pinckneys.”1 My first clue about Pinckney came from accounts of the Poetry Society of South Carolina, a seminal organization started in 1920 that promoted the cultural revival often called the Charleston Renaissance. At twenty-five years of age, the “brilliant” Pinckney was the youngest among the founders. When I started this project in 1999, Pinckney’s role (as well as that of other women) in the society had been neglected. All of the existing literature on the group accepts author John Bennett’s claim that he and poets DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen were the engines behind its inception and, by implication, the Charleston Literary Movement . As I dug around in the primary sources, a variety of founding narratives emerged, including one suggesting that the society actually first coalesced under the Lady Banksia roses bedecking the piazza of Josephine Pinckney’s family mansion at 21 King Street.2 I have to confess that I had hoped to find Pinckney involved with something more exciting during the Roaring Twenties than the founding of a poetry society. I wanted fast cars, fast living, and bootleg liquor in hip flasks. Actually I was not entirely disappointed, for Pinckney blossomed into a young woman intensely alive to the excitement of the modern era. Although Charleston always remained her spiritual home, as an adult she came to know Rome and Paris as well as she knew Boston and New York. And, in its early days, the Poetry Society possessed a certain drama of its own. Pinckney joined Allen and Heyward in their attempted plot to hijack the slow-moving train of sentimental southern literature. In their most ambitious dreams, they had also hoped to soften racial attitudes and to “re-set the switch” directing the literary trends away from the region’s postwar “perfervid bunk” and toward writing that reflected the true heart of the South.3 I found Josephine Pinckney’s papers in the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston. After a cursory survey of the collection, I surmised, with the innocence that precedes every writing project, that I could finish the research in a few months. Of course, I was wrong. Years have passed as I tracked down her letters and correspondence in libraries and archives from Charleston to Boston. But it has been a pleasurable search. I still agree with one of Pinckney’s eulogists that “no one was ever bored in her presence.”4 The range of Pinckney’s correspondence hints at the many dimensions of her life, especially her interest in music, art, literature, historic preservation, local politics, and international events. She had both men and women among her close friends. Letters from DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen were expected. So were those from other southern authors, such as Donald Davidson and Ellen Glasgow. Wall Street lawyer and presidential hopeful Wendell Willkie was a surprise. So was Lincoln Kirstein, founder of the American Ballet Company. After further probing, I realized that Pinckney had skillfully parlayed the connections made through the Poetry Society with professors, publishers, and poets into a web of influential friends, contacts, and advisers. Although she took the Carolina Low Country as a subject in her poetry, and as the setting in most of her novels, Pinckney was clearly determined from the beginning of her career to find fame in a much larger world. The perimeters of the peninsula city could not contain Pinckney’s curiosity to know, to experience, to feel. Pinckney honed her talent for living, long a hallmark...