The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina

12. Beyond the Bozart

12 beyond the bozart In his biting 1917 essay “The Sahara of the Bozart,” Baltimore satirist H. L. Mencken opened with a couplet from Richland County’s J. Gordon Coogler, whose extensive body of work combined high ambition with limited talent: “Alas for the South; her books have grown fewer. / She never was much given to literature.” Mencken, hardly able to contain his satirical wit, used Coogler’s poetry as an example of what he called the South’s “torpor and doltishness.” He said of the South that “in all that gargantuan paradise of the fourth rate there is not a single picture gallery worth going into,or a single orchestra capable of playing the entire nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera house, or a single theater devoted to decent plays or a single prose writer that can actually write.” He added that no decent scientists or historians bothered to live in the region either.1 Mencken’s hyperbolic attack on the culture of the South drew numerous responses. The Vanderbilt Agrarians, a group that included Robert Penn Warren , John Crowe Ransom, and other early-twentieth-century literary figures, wrote their manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, in 1930 in part as a response to Mencken. Charleston had responded earlier. In a 1921 essay that appeared in the first yearbook of the Poetry Society of South Carolina, Hervey Allen challenged Mencken’s estimation of the “Bozart South.” Allen, and through him other important society members such as Josephine Pinckney and DuBose Heyward , argued that, in fact, the cultural life of the nation would be reborn in southern regionalist writing. This controversy over the South’s artistic failings, despite the hearty defense from the Poetry Society and the Fugitives, does point to a serious lag in the region’s cultural production. In antebellum South Carolina,artistic activity came primarily from the aristocratic classes. The art they produced reflected their values. The sectional controversy had pushed William Gilmore Simms, by far South Carolina’s most important antebellum author,into becoming less an author and more an amateur historian, his novels and nonfiction works defending the significance of the Palmetto State in American history. Charleston native Henry Timrod provides another example. Although he contributed a significant amount of verse to the Southern Literary Messenger and produced in 1860 a small chapbook of his poems, he received almost no attention outside his region. The poetry he produced during the Civil War, verse like“Ethnogenesis,”“A Call to Arms,”and“Carolina,”poems that praised the origin of the Confederacy in almost mystical or religious terms, did garner a great deal of regional attention. He died in poverty, and a posthumous collection of his poems received some critical attention. Alfred Lord Tennyson called Timrod “the poet laureate of the Confederacy.” Whether Tennyson intended it as a compliment remains unclear. Following southern defeat in the Civil War, the poverty-stricken region became even more culturally barren. Economic hard times forced the formerly leisured classes to focus on growing corn and sweet potatoes rather than producing poetry. The few literary journals that had flourished in the antebellum era lost their subscribers. While New Orleans and Richmond produced several important writers in the immediate postbellum period, South Carolina became a cultural wasteland for virtually half a century. The dearth of new ideas caused by the influence of slavery before the Civil War was replaced afterward by the numbing effect of the state’s catastrophic defeat.In A Study of HistoryArnold Toynbee uses South Carolina in the period after the war as an example of “the nemesis of creativity.”He theorized that the memory of catastrophe caused the people to act as if living under a spell.2 The state’s cultural rebirth occurred in early-twentieth-century Charleston . By 1915 tourism already was becoming the new economic engine for the city, which became a model for the historic tourism movement. Entire areas began undergoing renovation and transformation, and new historic districts were created. Many of Charleston’s older families took the lead in the city’s historic preservation movement. Susan Pringle Frost, who had become a successful real estate agent,became the driving force behind the renovation of the Joseph Manigault House and the transformation of large swaths of Tradd and Church streets, which had been filled with tenement dwellings and African American alleyway housing such as found on Catfish Row in the opera Porgy and Bess. The 1917 publication of...