The MLA Session on American Literature Anthologies, 1990

Christmas Day 1990
AMERICAN LITERATURE AS NATIONAL SCRIPTURES AESTHETIC VALUE vs. POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
HERSHEL PARKER
When I sent Jim Justus my title, I did not know Martha Banta and Paul Lauter were to be on the program, and I intended to talk about some frustrations I had encountered with my section of the NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. In the essay "Contingencies of Value" (1983) Barbara Herrnstein Smith said: "Those who are in positions to edit anthologies and prepare reading lists are obviously those who occupy positions of some cultural power; and their acts of evaluation--represented in what they exclude as well as in what they include--constitute not merely recommendations of value, but also determinants of value." Later the same year Paul Lauter boldly asked how "we decide what to include in a course or an anthology" and decided that the answer "is not foreordained by God, the curriculum committee, or even the Norton anthology." I liked the climactic order of that, but for a job that confers great cultural power, anthology-making affords some severe lessons in powerlessness. You can put something in an anthology, Professor Smith, but you can't make anyone teach the whole of Margaret Fuller's THE GREAT LAWSUIT or the more radical Thoreau pieces, or thirty pages from my darling candidate for canonicity, CLAREL.


After knowing that Martha Banta and Paul Lauter were the other speakers, I can't talk just about my own aspirations and brushes with powerlessness, but I still want to concentrate on my period, the "American Renaissance." The death of John Benedict this year at 57 (an infuriating, absolutely preventable death from cigarette smoking) was the end of an era in the anthologizing of literature, not just American literature, and some historical sidelights on the creation of the NAAL are in order now. NAAL began in February of one of the more painful years in our recent history, 1969, with a letter from me to John Benedict analyzing the faults of the then-current Norton anthology, THE AMERICAN TRADITION IN LITERATURE, and continuing in a letter of April 1990 analyzing the faults of the Heath anthology--not Paul's but the old AMERICAN LITERATURE: TRADITION AND INNOVATION. The most urgent problem, in 1969, was to free up some of the space uncritically devoted to the Bearded poets. The second edition of the Norton American Tradition in Literature gave 90 pages in the first volume to James Russell Lowell and eight in the second volume to Robert Lowell.


The 1969 letters led, in all deliberate speed, to the 1979 NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, a companion anthology to the NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. Its aims and assumptions seemed noncontroversial at the time. Believing that some literature was more valuable than other literature, we wanted to present good texts of much of the greatest American literature along with a large sampling of lesser works of special literary interest or else of high historical interest. The problem of conveying a sense of a general continuity of American literature (even if some voices are heard by one generation then apparently forgotten for decades) was acute at the time the anthology appeared, when the once-standard eleventh grade course in American literature was yielding to innovative, diverse courses. We tried to achieve a coherence missing in previous anthologies, so that interrelations of writers could be taught, and at least we did not print Mourt's Relation and then omit Hawthorne's "Maypole." The Bearded Poets were still there, tightened, but so was Harriet Beecher Stowe and the entire first version of Frederick Douglass's Narrative—both of them (like Dickinson) edited by Ronald Gottesman, although placed in the first volume. What I most regret is that we did not find an adequate way of showing the relation of our literature to British literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No anthology has yet done so. At a time when many of us feel increasingly isolated from much of the rest of the world, it strikes me that an upcoming MLA American Literature Sections might review the historical circumstances under which American Literature was separated from British Literature in American colleges and address the question of how we can teach American Literature in relation to other literatures, especially British.

I was excited when I saw the Harper anthology announced, since I assumed Helen Vendler would do the Whitman section and have something wonderful to say, so I was disappointed that Justin Kaplan did the period. Later I was disappointed with the way he did it. How can I say this discreetly? I hope Kaplan was as humbly grateful to me for my footnotes to “The Great Lawsuit” as I was to Walter Harding for his footnotes to WALDEN. The Harper anthology had stellar contributors, but its aims were pretty familiar, so I won't be saying much about it. The Heath anthology demands attention. Paul always demands attention.

Just before MLA in 1983 I received the Feminist Press flyer for RECONSTRUCTING AMERICAN LITERATURE, the forthcoming collection of revisionist syllabi from American literature courses. At the Hilton in 1983 (feeling like a character from THE CONFIDENCE-MAN) I carried the flyer around the hallways until I found a man passing out copies of it. Now, I don't hang out with strangers very much, but my interest in expanding the canon is intense, and has been since 1961, when I read through dozens of books (around 200, really) cited in different literary histories as unjustly neglected works of American literature. From the time I began teaching I found I could not avoid and reading from them in carrying into class out-of-print books order to show literary influences and cultural continuities and discontinuities, so I wanted to know the man who wrote that flyer, and I hung out with Paul. On December 29 we burrowed far beneath the Sheraton, down where the signs still said “Americana.” At the end of the tunnel were the bound copies of Reconstructing American Literature, and Paul gave me the first signed copy, "to continue & develop the debate." I promptly required it in an undergraduate class and in two graduate classes, and later talked about it in several others.

As part Choctaw and Cherokee I felt condescended to by some of the contributors. I thought some of the syllabi were sexist--biased against men (the delightful Caroline Kirkland could be rediscovered but not the marvelous Joseph Kirkland). I thought the syllabi were biased against regions of the country, particularly the South, but also the West and the Midwest, including Chicago (Joseph Kirkland had two strikes against him). I thought they were biased against even women regional writers unless they happened to be from New England, biased against stories about fundamental Protestantism, biased against any writer who did not have leftist leanings, or leanings that could be construed as leftist. I made these points at the 1984 MLA on a panel Paul and I organized with Coral Lansbury. The weaknesses I pointed to in Reconstructing American Literature are present also in the Heath anthology.

I missed in the syllabi in Reconstructing American Literature evidence that the contributors had embarked on a grand promiscuous reading of all the American literature the contributors could lay hands on, open to finding merit anywhere, the way David Shields was then reading every Colonial poem he could find. It now seems to me that Paul's contributors to the Heath anthology went ahunting with the specific intention of locating voices of minority writers who had not been heard from in previous anthologies. In so far as they did original research, established the biographies of their writers, authenticated texts, identified their places in literary history, they deserve thanks and will hold a place in the history of American literary history. But what I miss in the innovative selections of the Heath anthology is, of all things, diversity--a wide representation of American humorous literature, of sporting literature, of literature dealing with religious customs, of early international novels, of the writings of historians (after the colonial period, where they are well enough represented), of the literature of local color and regionalism--literature of the South, West, Midwest, of literature which depicts American customs and mores (including sexual mores), and any attempt to demonstrate the literary traditions out of which American literature developed, especially its debts to British literature.

Paul's contributors try to represent a range of minority voices, particular voices of blacks and American Indians. In the anthology, as in Reconstructing, I felt condescended to, patronizing, at the inclusion of inferior and textually dubious material purely on the grounds that it was by reds or blacks or yellow-skinned writers. In my experience people of mixed blood are usually aware of shades of darkness and lightness and don't think of themselves as simply black or red or whatever, although white anthology-makers may find it convenient to disregard percentages. That's a visceral reaction. More rational is my anger at being presented Indian chants or Indian stories as translated by white men--or as reconstructed and substantially or written or rewritten by whites. How come white men hold copyright to some of the so-called Indian songs and stories? Give my surviving dark aunts their tribal rights, clean up some of the horrors sheltered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, do something about alcoholism and the prevalence of fetal-alcoholism syndrome on the reservations, but don't placate me with a translation of dubious authenticity, not when my tribes so lost their identity that their languages play no role at all in American Literature.

My literary heritage is English. In the eighth grade (in what had been, when my father was born there, the Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory), I found an old copy of an anthology of American Literature and read (among other works) Thoreau's "The Bean Field" and Whitman 's "I Saw in Louisiana a Live (Oak Growing" and a dozen or so poems by Dickinson and a batch of poems from Spoon River Anthology. I was twice damned as a Depression Okie and part Indian, but from the time I found that anthology I inherited American literature in the English language. When I left high school after the 11th grade and became a railroad telegrapher in southwestern Louisiana, I read my way through a one volume Shakespeare I bought in New Orleans. This is what Americans have done throughout our history--make the best of our English heritage. Millions of European immigrants sacrificed their languages so their children would be Americanized. Yes, there was terrible loss of cultural heritage, but immigrant parents usually made that sacrifice willingly. In their eagerness to represent minority writers who actually wrote in English the contributors to the Heath anthology sometimes lose sight both of aesthetic value and historical significance, so that Frederick Douglass hardly seems to be a more important writer than Harriet Jacobs. Jacobs’ book is a moving human document. Anytime a victim of memorable suffering looks in his or her heart and writes, the result is apt to be a moving human document--but not necessarily a great literary document. Douglass's terse 1845 Narrative is one of the greatest human documents in all of American literature, and one of the greatest American stories in the Franklin tradition of self-education and rise from humble beginnings to national prestige. But Douglass did not simply look in his heart and write. As a slave-boy in Baltimore he learned to comprehend the dialogues and forensic disputes in his copy of the Columbian Orator. We've got a copy in Special Collections at the University of Delaware. I hadn't realized until I read our copy that "Columbian" (it's obvious if you think about it) meant "American"; even in slavery Douglass was training himself with a textbook for would-be national orators. With greater advantages Melville's brother Gansevoort was doing exactly the same thing at the same time. And before he wrote down his Narrative Douglass tried parts of it out, night after night, before live audiences, getting the story right before putting it into print--just as, at the same time, Herman Melville was trying out the sexier episodes of TYPEE upon his fellow sailors. Taste has changed, and we have to remind ourselves that Douglass's purple passages, such as the set piece on the sails on the Chesapeake Bay which Garrison praises in the preface, were not only proof that Douglass could write the sort of bravura display which the times admired: such passages were profoundly functional, because "fine writing" in prose is like poetry—quotable, memorable, and even memorizable, and therefore powerful in the crusade to awaken the consciences of the North. Even in slavery Douglass was struggling with something very few freeborn people ever conquer--style, and by the time he wrote the NARRATIVE (although a white man in Maryland held title to him) he was his own literary master. Anyone can produce a memorable narrative if it is based on a memorable life, but to lump Douglass with Jacobs is to ignore his triumphant struggle to become not just the author of a book but an American writer.

From the time of the first white settlements children have grown up more poorly educated than their fathers—take Melville (with his cosmopolitan father), Douglass (with a white father), or the Pike County migrants Clarence King observed. Now in Washington, D. C. and elsewhere many young black men are less well educated than their grandmothers and grandfathers. At Delaware and elsewhere the blacks who get through college are more and more likely to be female, not male. Thoreau is a threat to anyone who wants to bring literature down to the lowest common denominator, to offer "Little Reading" in the classroom rather than to offer literature that students have to stand on tiptoe to read.

NEWSWEEK last week had a cover story on the "thought police" in American universities. An aesthetic squad of that police force was at work in the 1940's and 1950's telling us it was unseemly to talk about the creative process. No wonder many professors have renounced the idea that there is such a thing as a great literary work which deserves (after whatever vicissitudes) to be known as a classic. A few years ago I called the creative process the Outcast of the MLA. She is banned because if we talk about the creative process we not only admit the existence of the author but also have to admit the authority of the author. You haven't heard much mention at MLA, this last decade, of a monumental study of the creative process, Albert Rothenberg's The Emerging Goddess (Chicago, 1979). Hopkins, of all places, just published Rothenberg's new book Creativity and Madness, a popularization and an extension of the earlier book. Here he defines creativity as "the production of something that is both new and truly valuable." To many people in this room the idea that some art is more valuable than other art (outside of the auction room) is something that emerges profanely from the mouth of Senator Helms. I am still committed to the idea that some works of art are better than others. Worse, I still believe that the better the work of art the more apt it is to be of enduring cultural and political value.

The Heath anthology of course needs to be seen in the wider context of the writings of the New Historicists or more broadly those Frederick Crews calls the New Americanists. I would include some of Emory Elliott's contributors to the Columbia Literary History of the United States and some of the people who will be in Sacvan Bercovitch's Cambridge literary history. On the basis of the initial evidence I have been complaining that the New Americanists are producing, for the most part, literary history without the bother of historical research. Elliott says his contributors are storytellers, not truthtellers. When he says that, he is telling the truth. Robert Milder, the author of the Melville chapter, for instance, does not even refer to the great trove of biographical material available at the NYPL since 1983. Bercovitch has been extoling a particular history of the literary marketplace in the American Renaissance for which the author did absolutely no archival research into contracts and promotion tactics and distribution systems and sales figures, as if William Charvat had done all the research ever to be done. It is possible to feel that the New Americanists are taking the Celestial Railway to literary history, literary history without research, but with intense political correctness. Running through much writing and editing by the New Americanists is a wish that American society had been fairer all along, and a winsome notion that we can rewrite the past to make it right. In an "Extra" in American Literature Annette Kolodny put the case most strongly. We were to acquire somehow "an integrity of memory"--an integrity of national memory in which buried voices were heard as loud as Emerson's voice or Hawthorne's voice. Once, at the beginning of the 19th century, propagandists had envisioned the American National Literature that was yet to be written; in the middle of the century Melville complained that critics were still looking to the future instead of seeing that American literature was already being created; now at the end of the 20th century we are told to rewrite history so as to imagine that the oppressed, the forgotten, were always vivid, alive, and triumphant in the American collective memory. Close your eyes, and wish, wish, oh wish.

I must not be the only teacher who feels pressured to let other people vote my conscience. We all just got a flyer from SUNY Press on a book edited by Henry A. Giroux, Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics: Redrawing Educational Boundaries. The flyer itself struck me as an effort to intimidate anyone who did not want to teach according to a prescribed political agenda. I have taught Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Thoreau's "Life without Principle" in every survey class for a quarter century because there has never been a time when someone didn't want my proxy for one issue or another. In the Heath anthology some of the contributors seem to push on users a notion of political correctness at the cost of misusing the writers and distorting history. Melville is presented as a proletarian, writing books out of a bleeding social conscience, an enemy of "capitalism and slavery." I don't recognize this Melville. The Melville I know thought that the intrusion of contemporary issues into a literary work was always a mistake, as when he criticized the section of "Lycidas" on the corruption of the English church: "Mark the deforming effect of the intrusion of partizan topics & feelings of the day, however serious in import, into a poem otherwise of the first order of merit." I think what we see in the Heath Melville is what Barbara Herrnstein Smith might call adaptive misuse--misuse of Melville as--what? a nineteenth-century Jack Abbott? We know that Thoreau lost sleep--literally lost sleep--over the remanding of fugitive slaves to the South. As far as we know Melville never did: "Who aint a slave? Tell me that." Great writers do not always respond in the same ways to the same momentous political issues of their times, and I feel no compulsion to grade Hawthorne and Emerson and George Washington Harris on a chart of political correctness as established by me or anyone else. I think some members of this audience need to be reminded that American Literature professors can be decent, responsible people even if they didn't give their moral proxies away during the Nixon presidency and even if they refuse today to give their moral proxies to J. Hillis Miller, Stanley Fish, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Annette Kolodny, to H. Bruce Franklin, to Phyllis Franklin, to Paul's contributors, to Winnie Mandela, to George F. Will, to Dan Quayle, to William Bennett, to Mike Royko, or even to Studs Turkel.

I want to talk more about the costs of political correctness. In the Heath anthology Carolyn Karcher says that Melville's father-in-law Lemuel Shaw was "a staunch defender of racial segregation and of the infamous Fugitive Slave Law." How is the student reading that supposed to feel? In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Bill could not have been adopted as part of the Compromise if in fact it had been infamous. Most Americans, even most of those who opposed slavery, accepted the bill as a necessity because their strongest commitment was to the preservation of the Union, not to a redress of a wrong built into the Constitution and plaguing every subsequent generation. Students need to know how profound the love of the union was, a decade before the Civil War began. In 1962 at the Boston Public Library I read through the coverage of the fugitive slave cases and learned that during the Sims case, in the spring of 1851, all the respectable newspapers of both parties, Democratic and Whig, were united in wanting Sims to be promptly and peacefully remanded. Put it another way: almost all respectable citizens thought the Law should be enforced in order to preserve the union. Only a couple of papers on the lunatic fringe advocated rescuing a fugitive slave or otherwise actively resisting the law--the Liberator and the Commonwealth. Yet only four years after the Sims case the Massachusetts legislature passed, over the veto of the governor, the Personal Liberty Act--the purpose of which was to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law. In those few years public opinion in Massachusetts had been reversed--by activists like Garrison and Parker and Phillips and Whittier. Thoreau helped. Such idealists achieved one of the most dramatic reversals of public opinion in American history. In the late 1960s, fresh from reading the thunderous denunciations of the Boston papers of the lunatic and incendiary "higher law" advocates, I was able, in class after class, to put into historical perspective the changes in public attitudes toward the war in Viet Nam. Here, in American history, was proof that a handful of people following their consciences could sway a majority to their side. When you tell a student only that the Fugitive Slave Law was infamous you distort history, and you close off any chance of using the past in order to illuminate wise changes in the present.

I confess to some wishful thinking of my own, a lingering hope that there can be an eleventh-grade high school class and a sophomore college class in which all students will have a chance to read works of American literature which have entered most deeply into the collective American consciousness--American scriptures. This is infinitely problematical. Franklin's autobiography became one of the American scriptures as soon as it was published. "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" became American scriptures as soon as they were published (and became a British scripture too--look at Dickens's early use of Irving). Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" {a.k.a. "Civil Disobedience"), Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," Melville's "Bartleby," became American scriptures much later. The canon, plainly, is shifting, and someday "Life without Principle" may be one of the great American scriptures. Maybe there never was a time when Americans were united by exposure to a common body of literature. Yet when I read Hart Crane' s "The Bridge" I sometimes think that some sort of national awareness of common literary classics may have emerged in 1910's and 1920's, when textbooks were pretty much of a piece, when the canon of American literature seemed more or less stable, when immigrant parents were determined that their children would be Americans, would speak only English. Voices were excluded from the textbooks which "everyone" read. Melville was excluded, most of the time Dickinson was excluded, and Whitman some of the time. But I wonder if there was not something powerful, healing, and uniting about a generation or two of youngsters all exposed to "Rip Van Winkle" and "Self-Reliance" and "Evangeline" and "The Barefoot Boy," no matter how removed such literature was from urban life or rural life as it had become. Whitman said: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." Where I live Whitman is a bridge, and every time I hear the Philadelphia Shadow Traffic report I rejoice. You can't read the New York Times in the summer without encountering a reference to Melville, even if only for his Berkshire County house or even if, as in this last Sunday's Travel section, the journalist puts him in Indonesian waters he only dreamed of sailing. Whatever good there is in an ideal of a national literature, that good will be subverted by any anthology of doctrinaire voices of the politically correct.

I still hope that in later revisions the Norton Anthology of American Literature can represent still more diverse American voices than it does now--while at the same time acknowledging and perhaps enlarging the canon of works which are of enduring national importance, the nearest we can get to a body of national scriptures.

[Notes at end: “probably not use” . . . . Maybe I meant to put the latter part of this up with the part about the Heath contributors not being quite serious about diversity]

My criteria for greatness are of course debatable, but based on the consensus of many decades of lovers of American literature. In teaching I act on an elitist assumption--that there is at least a remote possibility that documents which afford rich, complex aesthetic experiences might also be the very documents most likely to work transforming enlightenment--social, cultural, political enlightenment--in earnest young students. Could Thoreau's "Life without Principle" possibly achieve Thoreau's aim--to encourage any hearer or reader to stand for principles against the pressures of the times, to resist the short cuts to wealth of any kind, to resist the pollution of the mind from the media? Paul Lauter says his students find Thoreau irrelevant; that's worse than the late 60's, when some students carried Walden around long after they were too zonked out to read any passage in it.

The best lessons come from the classics. During the Viet Nam war journalists and politicians beat their breasts lamenting that America had lost its national innocence, that for the first time in our history we were fighting an unjust war. Any historian and any teacher of American literature could point to the Whig outcries over Polk's invasion of Mexico and McKinley's invasion of the Philippines. Every two generations or so America had lost her virginity (as the commentators said) then magically had regained it as national memory faded. During the remanding of slaves to the South Thoreau had cast about to define what he had lost and had realized that what he had lost was a country. For years I carried about a Thermofax of Bill Gibson's 1940s article on Howells' and Mark Twain's opposition to the Spanish-American war, where he quoted Howells' lament at the loss of a national idealism and innocence. Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer have been making old discoveries. Teachers who saw a recurrent pattern could use writings by classic American authors to teach something immeasurably significant about the American national character--a pattern of slow arousal of conscience, of action on the basis of that conscience, and afterwards the pall of a collective amnesia.
When I wished the Reconstructing syllabi had included more establishment authors like Thomas Bailey Aldrich I wasn't asking for equal time for bigots. Then, in the depths of the first Reagan administration, I thought we might as well know how some of the kindly people who had voted for Reagan had learned to fear and hate some people less fortunate than themselves. It seemed to me that we could not learn that from reading the writings of labor agitators but we might get it from reading John Hay, Henry Adams, and even some of the xenophobic passages of the later Stowe. If we want to understand one of the dark sides of the American Psyche, I thought, we ought to be willing to go to any lengths--even to the extreme of reading some minor literature by representatives of the Establishment at different periods in our history. Now, when many teachers will want to say, and perhaps even do, something about homelessness in America it might be very good to teach Stephen Crane's "Experiment in Misery" and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, but it might do even better to teach some of the conservative voices of the 1870's and 1880's when unemployed people (many of them not native born) began wandering out of cities into small towns and rural areas looking for work and food, and creating what became known as the Tramp Menace. In December 1990 we are told of a shift in public opinion, a hardening of sensibility about the unemployed and the homeless. To teach practical compassion and well as idealism and sentimentality, we could do worse than to listen to some frightened and angry conservative voices that helped mold American public opinion--the voices of Harriet Beecher Stowe or John Hay, for example, or the ambivalent voice of Mary Wilkins in The Portion of Labor.

Style and Sex in G. W. Harris's Sheriff Doltin Sequence

Hershel Parker
On academic visits South I used to claim to be a Faulkner critic, according to my self-servingly stringent definition--anyone who had published at least three pages in an issue of Mississippi Quarterly edited by James B. Meriwether then had been argued with in print by Cleanth Brooks. My record as a George Washington Harris critic may look still more meager (the editing of a few Harris tales for the Norton Anthology of American Literature), but I have qualifications for writing on Harris shared by few. My mother learned to talk in a part of Mississippi where one of the pronouns is "hit," and my father learned to talk in the part of Oklahoma where people get frogs in their "froat" in bad weather. When I was in the eighth grade, I discovered that the pronunciation charts for vowels in Webster's Third Collegiate Dictionary were all wrong--the start of my career as a textual scholar. If you pronounced according to those charts, you couldn't eat aigs for breakfast or run away on your laigs, much less drive a tin pinny nail straight. On the other hand, I have some disqualifications. Harris helped to do in a lot of my Cherokee kinfolks, and I do not enjoy hearing Sut Lovengood on "Injuns," "niggers," or the "Israelite" who "vash not Levi Shacobs." (l use "Lovengood" because that was the way the name appeared in early newspaper printings.)

But anyone with a sense of history must deal with such passages In Harris as they do with similar passages in Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, without roiling in self-righteousness, Moral superiority to great artists is not one of our more admirable stances. And in the face of political correctness, I take Harris to be one of the greatest American artists. In saying this, I assume that men and women become professors of American and British literature because they love to read literature and love most of all to read that literature which most challenges and offers the most intense rewards--usually, the literature that generations of readers, or at least some fine readers in different generations, have identified as extraordinary, great, in one way or another. I assume also that professors of American and British literature as a matter of course try to surmount their own limitations of background and experience so as to comprehend attitudes relating to race, class, gender, genre, and style as they vary over decades and centuries, determined to understand as fully as possible before judging. Those assumptions, I acknowledge, are not universally shared among professors, many of whom in recent years have repudiated the very idea of literary greatness. Such professors, and those professors who have transformed some English departments into cultural studies departments, have not yet shown much interest in reading George Washington Harris sympathetically, however significant the role he played in forming mass American culture. Even undoctrinaire readers, those who try to listen sympathetically to diverse voices of the past, will have to overcome moral obstacles before enjoying the Sut Lovengood stories, as I do when I deal with Harris's behavior toward Cherokees in real life and Sut's attitude toward Injuns in Harris's fiction. I knew, in my youth, one Indian ancestor born to survivors of the Trail of Tears, and in 1994 I have a living half-Indian aunt, as old as the century, born in Indian Territory, whose mother was deprived of her tribal rights by white chicanery. [2011: She lived in three centuries, it turned out, but not very long in two of them.] Were I interested in feeling victimized, I could find grounds for not reading George Washington Harris. But by politically correct standards, no one in nineteenth-century American literature can escape whipping--not the sexist Hawthorne, sure that women should not try to think; not the bigoted Stowe, appalled at the immigration of Europeans who did not speak English; not anyone. If we decide to avoid reading and teaching once-popular or once-respected writers because we are morally superior to them, we quickly run out of people to read and teach. As we get older, most of us begin to accept our benighted parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents (as long as their behavior stops shy of criminality) rather than shunning them because their social views are less enlightened than ours at any given moment. Any best-selling therapy book tells us that if we write off our families we cut ourselves off from our own histories and go through life as less than whole human beings. In similar ways, writing off our great writers diminishes us personally and very quickly diminishes us as teachers.

Of course even very competent writers can be so driven by bigotry, by sheer hatred, that any reader would want to avoid them, most of the time, the way a decent person may avoid any slasher movie, on principle, however cunning a reviewer says the camera angles are. Some of Harris's attacks on Lincoln, written in wartime (amid sufferings we cannot imagine), may be too rabid for us to read now with any aesthetic pleasure. Yet the pleasures of reading most of Harris are great indeed, and I deprive myself if I avoid Harris because of things he did to or said about some of my tribespeople. I reserve my outrage, just now, for anthologists who think they can enhance my self-esteem as a quarter-Indian by having me read a white man's homily packaged as if it were a speech delivered by "Chief Seattle," or a white racist's best-selling fake autobiography The Education of Little Tree, or a poem on "The Atlantic Cable" by John Rollin Ridge, an earnest Cherokee kinsman of mine who was just well-educated enough to write conventional English verse. I would rather enhance my self-esteem, the Cherokee and Choctaw parts included, by reading something better, even if it is by a white man or white woman. As a son of a halfbreed [less than half Indian, I know in 2011], I resented being excluded from good things when I was young, and I am not about to exclude myself from them now. Forty years ago [make that 60 and more, now], when I read Walt Whitman's announcement that his "Song of Myself" was the meal equally set, I knew he meant it, and I knew that my invitation was irrevocable, whoever I was. The Sut Lovengood stories are also a meal set for anyone to come to on equal terms, even-or especially-e-cultural materialists.

A problem beyond political correctness is that some people cannot easily decipher the invitation to read the Sut stories: the dialect looms as an intimidating barrier. Yet there is no need to feel left out. Even if you were not lucky enough to learn to talk from a mother who learned to talk in Mississippi (or, still better, Tennessee), all you have to do is read the stories aloud, learning pronunciation patterns as you go and pretending you are reading them the way William Faulkner or Eudora Welty would, on an uninhibited evening in a circle of friends. The effort it takes to enter into Sut's world is repaid by bounteous rewards, heaped-up delights. In all of nineteenth-century American literature, there is no politically correct meal that remotely compares to the riches of Harris's banquet, and, to tell the truth, even a lot of the passages we all teach in Mark Twain look a little watery when judged against the bald-face whiskey of Harris's prose.

Having held forth on political and linguistic hurdles to reading Sut, I will focus my loving tribute to his creator George Washington Harris on three Sut Lovengood stories, "Rare Ripe Garden-Seed." "Contempt of Court--Almost," and "Trapping a Sheriff"--what I call for convenience the "Sheriff Doltin sequence." I will lead into my discussion by looking at some of the preliminary biographical-bibliographical problems any reader of Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a "Nat'ral Born Dum'd Fool" (1867) confronts, then by talking generally about author and audience in Harris's tales, a tricky subject, and unusually tricky because of the state of scholarship.

Despite the work of Franklin J. Meine, J. Cleveland Harris, John J. Hellin.jr., Donald Day, Ben Harris McClary, M. Thomas lnge, my student Janet Casey, and others, we do not have all the Sut stories that Harris published, some of which probably are no longer extant. Some stories that were printed are known only by references to them in surviving stories and some stories are known only by quotations from them or references to them by early admirers. We do not know in any detail the sequence in which the known Sut stories in Yarns were composed, because we have to rely on only a little external evidence--the knowledge of when a handful of stories were printed in newspapers--and some internal evidence, such as cross-references to earlier stories in later-written ones (though some of these references could have been planted as Harris put together the book). We assume that the stories in the newspapers were written in something like the order of their publication, but we do not know for sure. Some of us assume that many, if not most, or even almost all, the stories in the 1867 volume were first printed in newspapers, but we do not know for sure. (We do not know, for instance, of any previous publication of the Sheriff Doltin sequence.) We know not to assume that either the order of the first printings in newspapers or the order of the stories in the book will necessarily correspond with the order of composition. "Blown up with Soda" starts off as if it should follow the starched shirt story more closely than it does in the book, yet Milton Rickels lists the first surviving text of "Sut Levengood's Shirt" (Yankee Notions, October 1857) not earlier at all but later than the first known text of "Sut Lovengood Blown Up" (that of the Nashville Daily Gazette, 21 July 1857, reprinted from the Savannah Morning News of some unknown date). Janet Casey, one of the succession of students I sent down to the Library of Congress to solve such mysteries, found just what you would hope to find, an earlier printing of "Sut Lovengood's Shirt," in the Nashville Union and American (1 May 1857), as well as a reprint in the Louisville Democrat (7 May 1857). (I have been planning for years to make a systematic sweep for unknown Sut stories, as a gift for Nathalia Wright, and in the meantime have taken comfort from several reprintings of known stories that Janet Casey, and also Robin Gaither, have discovered.)

Many other matters that look anomalous to us may yet be explained, such as possible clues to the time of composition of the Sheriff Doltin sequence in relation to other stories. The Sheriff Doltin sequence in the 1867 book follows well after the story of "Bart Davis's Dance," which like the Doltin stories is not known prior to book publication. There is one clue to the date of the Bart Davis story, Sut's allusion to the famous wartime phrase "all quiet on the Potomac," which does not particularly help, because it could have been added in 1867 or before and because there is no such datable reference in the Doltin sequence. However, in "Contempt of Court--Almost" Harris has Sut use the word "horspitable" without playing upon it in any way, an odd lapse unless this story was written before "Bart Davis's Dance," where Sut creates chaos by persuading Davis that "ole Sock" the "hard-shell preacher" had insulted him by saying" 'Yu is hosspitabil.'" There is, in short, a lot we do not know (even whether or not Harris wrote the Sheriff Doltin stories sequentially).

Ignorance, however, is not going to stop me from making some more guesses now. I would guess, for starters, that Harris was a remarkably privileged writer. That may sound like an odd thing to say about a man who was long frustrated in his efforts to publish a collection of the Sut stories, who faced censorship in the Spirit of the Times at least once, who made arrangements for a series of Sut stories to appear in the New York Atlas only to have the project fizzle out, who died on the way home after arranging to publish his second book, the manuscript of which disappeared (left on the train when Harris was carried off unconscious at Knoxville, as Professor Meriwether thinks possible, or kept and suppressed by his new second wife and her family, as some of Harris's children thought). Privileged indeed! But as far as we know there was a ready market for his stories in the newspapers once Harris had published "Sut Lovengood's Daddy, Acting Horse" in the Spirit (4 November 1854). In a backhanded way, it is a great privilege not to have to get paid for your stories but to publish them to the delight of your friends in Tennessee and strangers around the country. [You could say something of the same sort about the privilege of blogging in 2011.] I would guess that the references in the stories to earlier Sut stories are not at all evidence of self-promotion for Harris or even a calculated attempt to establish a richly storied background for Sut. Knowing that his stories were reprinted enthusiastically all around the country--knowing of printings in some papers we have not yet searched--knowing of printings in many other papers no longer extant--Harris made these references as a convivial way of recalling and celebrating pleasures he and his readers had already shared.

And I would guess that once the "Acting Horse" story was published and widely reprinted and talked about, Harris did not have to worry about holding an audience. After a while, in any newspaper story (certainly in any story first printed in the Yarns), Harris could trust the reader to have confidence in Sut as a narrator, to know that Sut's self-deprecation of his ability as a storyteller was a surefire way of entrapping any unwary auditor around the camp or outside the doggery. In "Mrs. Yardley's Quilting," for instance, Sut claims to ladle out his words at random, "like a calf kicking at yaller-jackids" (135), but he turns that mock apology into a put-down of the man with a wen over his eye. In "Frustrating a Funeral," Sut says he thinks at random, just as he talks and does. He knows better, and we had better know better. In "Eaves-dropping a Lodge of Free-masons" Sut taunts George into trying to tell the story, but when George starts off in pompous formal style, Sut breaks in and decides to tell it his way, to "talk hit all off in English" (I 16). No contemporary reader could have doubted that Sut was in control in the narration. The modern reader, coming without preparation to one story or another, may have more trouble. A reader of the Cohen and Dillingham Humor of the Old Southwest, for instance, might well be confused about Harris's skill as a storyteller, inasmuch as that collection includes the first two stories in the Doltin sequence but not the final one, which resolves the plot lines.

Sure, Sut's way of telling a story may seem random enough to any new reader. In "Rare Ripe Garden-Seed" Sut bombards the reader, rapid-fire, with an anecdote about his "fust big skeer" from the sheriff who took away the bed and chairs when Sut was the baby of the family; a philosophical digression on the pecking order of the universe (better than anything in Dreiser); a little essay on sheriffs and their uneasy consciences; a mention of old John Doltin, a "'spectabil sheriff" (a new one, we have to figure out, not the one who gave Sut his first scare); the introduction of Wat Mastin and the splendid evocation of what it is to be young, healthy, and in bad need of sex; an interruption by an officious encyclopedia salesman; the obscene but delicately euphemistic account of the devastating effects marriage has on War's health; and the rest of the wonderful fabliau about Wat, his wife Mary, her mother Mrs. McKildrin, and Little Rar Ripe, Mary's baby by Sheriff Doltin; and a final interruption by the salesman. In "Contempt of Court-Almost" Sut starts with an essay (better than Poe's) on human perversity, a subject suggested by the encyclopedia salesman (whom Sut, feigning to confuse the man's product with his name, refers to as Onsightly Peter), and leading into the illustrative anecdote of Sut and the dandy (which you think will have to do with Doltin but does not, and which itself is interrupted by a little disquisition on mustaches), followed by a one-sentence shift to Judge Smarty and a new shift to Wirt Staples (smoothed by Sut's promise to make it relevant to the Doltin story). Then comes Wirt's magnificent tall talk and Sut's tribute to Wirt as champion man, fit to be displayed at a fair, then the rampaging scene in which Wirt comes close to committing contempt of court by slamming the sheriff with his ham of venison then flinging it at the judge. In the concluding story, "Trapping a Sheriff," Sut has fun indulging in high Victorian sentimentality in describing Doltin's wife, then sabotages that style and moves on to a speculation on "hereafters," especially the part of hell where sheriffs go. After Sut's conversation with Doltin (who is nursing his head after Wirt's onslaught), there comes the conspiracy of Sut, Wirt, and Witt's wife Susan that is broken by an enthusiastic, digressive tribute to Susan's cooking (capped by the great bit of deflected sexuality: "I gets dorg hongry every time I sees Witt's wife, ur even her side-saddil, ur her frocks a-hangin on the close-line" [262]). Then comes more of the ironic sentimentalizing, a self-conscious "word-portrait" of Susan pouring coffee (the sort of portrait the grown-up Huck might have given of Mary Jane Wilks, if Mark Twain had been as good as Harris), then the story of the trapping of Doltin and his punishment--pages about as good as the best trickery in Twelfth Night mixed up with the most rambunctious pages of Tom Jones.

All this may seem to be a run-amok narrative extravaganza. Characters come in without being part of the present story, other characters come in looking as if they are part of another story but turn out to belong to this one, times shift without transition, from Sut's boyhood to the present, sheriff replaces sheriff, and literary styles change abruptly. But everything is in the control of one of the greatest characters in American literature, Sut--always peering (or peeping), absorbing, philosophizing on human nature and animal nature (making it clear they are the same), drinking, bullying, eating, inventing outrageous pranks, rampaging (by proxy), escaping serious punishment, and loving good (or well), entertaining us in his way, in his own good time, in words that are Shakespearean in plentitude and precision and felicitous combinations. The narration is not at all aimless, never like Mark Twain's Jim Blaine and the story of the old ram, where the point is not to get to the point. There is a character in Harris like Blaine, but it is not Sut--it is the late Mrs. Yardley, who in her prime talked in free association, nonstop. Sut's narration is headlong, pell-mell, but always controlled, always delighting us.

Sometimes our delight arises directly from our pride in following Sut's fancy turns, ambushes, leaps, shifts, digressions, and seeming irrelevancies. We know Sut, and we are up to the challenge. Sometimes Sut even cheats a little so as to set us up for special surprise, as in the great fabliau section of "Rare Ripe Garden-Seed," where he makes it look as if Mrs. McKildrin is going to persuade Wat Mastin, the April Fool bridegroom, that her daughter Mary conceived promptly after the wedding and bore his baby before the middle of August, all because of the "rar ripe garden-seed" Wat had bought from a Yankee peddler. Mrs. McKildrin serves Wat whiskey after he revives from his faint at the sight of Little Rar Ripe, and Sut reminds us of the power of alcohol: "Wun ho'n allers saftens a man, the yeath over" (234). Wat counts the months, and recounts, and says, "Haint enuf, is hit mammy?" (236), But she sweetly reminds him how active he had been about the place: "yu planted hit waseful , , ." (237). And Sut comments on her strategy of patient waiting: "Widders allers wait, an' alters win" (237). Then Sut gives us a marvelous turn: obtuse Wat Mastin rises to the occasion at last with a retentive memory and a quite unexpected capacity for irony when he throws up to Mary her mother's description of her as a "pow'ful interprizin gal" (239): she ought to be good for twenty-six or maybe thirty children as opposed to the thirteen her mother had "the ole way." After this turn of events we have the delight of Sut's sudden, unaccounted-for presence, just in time to step on Doltin's note to Mary and pick it up when no one is looking so he can get Jim Dunkin to read it to him. You do not want to know why Sut is suddenly there, any more than you want to know why he is suddenly peeping out of the old doggery door at Wirt in "Contempt of Court--Almost." He is always around at just the right time.

In "Contempt of Court--Almost" the reader delighting in Sut's dazzling turns may well be thrown by two textual errors. In the 1867 edition Sut says that Wirt Staples "tuck a skeer in what's tu cum" of his "narashun about the consekinses ave foolin wif uther men's wives" (249), but that is a slip brought about, probably, by a compositor's memory of Sut's "furst big skeer"; the word has to be "sheer," the usual spelling of "share" in Sut's dialect. The first edition also contains a garbled passage describing how fast the spirits from the new doggery were working on Wirt: "So when cort sot at nine o'clock, Wirt wer 'bout es fur ahead es cleaving, ur half pas' that." As a native speaker of this dialect as well as a textual scholar, I figured out that what Harris wrote was '''bout es fur ahead es eleving, ur half pas' that" (249). The word has to be an hour of the day, and in Sut's dialect "seven" comes out "seving," so eleven should come out "eleving"--a form mysterious enough to baffle a compositor. What Harris meant was that when court went into session at nine in the morning, Wirt was as drunk as he would normally have been at eleven or eleven-thirty.

Quite aside from these unintended pitfalls, Harris set loose in his narrative a series of questions any good reader will have to hold suspended. What does all the opening of "Contempt of Court--Almost" have to do with Wat Mastin? Does the dandy, a new character, fit somehow into Doltin's punishment? Who is Judge Smarty? Who, for that matter, is Wirt Staples?--though Sut assures us that Wirt "tuck a sheer in what's tu cum" about Doltin. In listening to Wirt's tall talk we forget about Doltin, for it is not the sheriff but Judge Smarty he is insulting so magnificently. After the heroic challenge has been followed by the wreck of the watch tinker's shop, Wirt gets a little more liquid kindling wood from Sut. That is when Doltin comes waddling out of the courthouse and when Sut says, "Now Wirt were Wat Mastin's cuzzin, an' know'd all about the rar ripe bisness, an tuck sides wif Wat strong" (253). Wonderful surprise, wonderful fun to have Wirt quote back to the sheriff his love note to Mary. It is even better--more coherent and more satisfying than we thought it would be, for Wirt is on the rampage not only against Judge Smarty but also against Sheriff Doltin, as well as the assorted deputies who get laid low by the "buck's hine laig."

Here the reader holds a question in suspension until things turn out better than anything that could have been expected. Such rewards are joyous to encounter, but I think Harris gets stronger effects by having Sut leave us at times in a state of unresolved curiosity, or even uneasiness, which colors our response as we proceed through the tale. Sut does not acknowledge that he knows the cause of our uneasiness--a technique akin to his use of euphemism in order to be more suggestive than if he were direct; for euphemisms of this sort implicate the reader in the obscenity. The best example in the Sheriff Doltin sequence is at the start, the time the former sheriff traumatizes little Sut. Things were going along fine because Sut was getting fed: "Mam hed me a-standin atwixt her knees. I kin feel the knobs ove her jints a-rattlin a-pas' my ribs yet. She didn't hev much petticoats tu speak ove, an' I hed but one, an' hit were calliker slit frum the nap ove my naik tu the tail, hilt tugether at the top wif a draw-string, an' at the bottom by the hem" (227). When the sheriff comes, Sut darts "on all fours onder mam's petticoatails" (229). Naturally, if you are solemncoly, you do not want to think about what little Sut might have seen there, especially if you remember how sharp-eyed he always is and if you recall a later story in which Sut watches his mother lose most of her clothes while fighting with Sall Simmons in the creek (after the fight is over; Sut says he "never seed a frock fit an 'oman as clost as hern did"--so close he could count her ribs through it). But naturally, if you are scholarly, you want to know when Sut gets out from under there. He does not. Well, he must have gotten out sometime, but you are not told when, and you worry about it, a little, in the back of your mind. If you are just a little prurient, you are bothered enough about it to be in a heightened state of awareness when you read about the manifestations of Wat Mastin's interest in Mary McKildrin (his bellowing and pawing up the dust around Mrs. Mckildrin, and so on). You might even worry about it through the whole Sheriff Doltin sequence, for you may be reminded by contrast when Doltin shows up with all that excessive yardage for Mary. For sure, you are reminded by the way the ferryman's wife exposes herself during Doltin's flight in "Trapping a Sheriff." She bounces out of bed and comes to the door in her "shif-tail." Then at the great spectacle of Doltin and the tomcats and the lighted, turpentine-soaked ball of tow, she forgets what she is wearing. As Sut says, she "pulled up what she tuck tu be her aprun, an' kivered her face, an' shet the door wif a snap, an' lef hersef on the outside. I holler'd 'Higher---yer forrid ain't kivered yet.' She run roun the chimley outen sight, still holdin up her aprun" (272).

Well, most of the narrative threads in the Sheriff Doltin sequence are tied up well enough. We know the "consekinses ave foolin wif uther men's wives," for instance. But maybe some of the best questions are left unresolved. Does Mrs. McKildrin ever return after she flees the accusing ghost of her husband? Mary comes back after her own flight, but does Wat keep her--and her and Doltin's Little Rar Ripe? When does Sut get out from under his mam's petticoats?--a question the more urgent because we know she was standing, the sheriff having taken away the chairs. These matters are not only un resolved but unresolvable; Sut is too far away to ask, working his long laigs, his flask glinting in the sun, leaving us a little uneasy, and a little in awe. He would not have told us anyhow, and in the present academic climate it will be a long time before many professors ask such serious questions about either Sut or the man who created him, George Washington Harris, a man who could write about as good as anybody in our country.



I read "Style and Sex in G. W. Harris's Sheriff Doltin Sequence" at the American Literature Section at the Louisville South Atlantic MLA, November 1981. The talk was much later printed as “A Tribute to Harris’s Sheriff Doltin Sequence” in James E. Caron and M. Thomas Inge’s SUT LOVINGOOD’S NAT’RAL BORN YARNSPINNER: ESSAYS ON GEORGE WASHINGTON HARRIS (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1996).