One Part of the South
SNELLING, PAULA
One Part of the South A Southern Reader. By Willard Thorp. Knopf. 760 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Paula Snelling Contributor to "Saturday Review," "Progressive" and other journals It is reasonable to...
...Thorp's motive in compiling this reader was only that of putting the old South, which he loves, in amber...
...For instance, he chooses from Thomas Jefferson certain pages in which Jefferson alternately transcends his times and sinks deep into the quicksands of prejudice...
...There he tells us of his boyhood love affair with the South—how, in the eighth grade in upstate New York, he stood up for the Confederate cause against his "black abolitionist teacher...
...He thinks he came only to praise the South, not to bury it...
...He is glad, for instance, that more people have change in their pockets than in pre-New Deal days...
...The Case of Eddie Mack" is an honest, intelligent description of some of the irrational quirks of the Southern mind, but Mr...
...He is also downright proud of having taken a stand in advance of Donald Davidson's (as expressed in the 1930 platform of the Southern Agrarians), stating that he "doubts if Mr...
...Faulkner is here, and Thomas Wolfe...
...These are, on the whole, well handled...
...There are also picturesque accounts of folkways and customs, sports and recreation, cooking, feasting, etc...
...Thorp not only gives several pages to an article on jazz, he devotes a section of the book to "The Negro"—which certainly Mr...
...and he is pleased about the successful soil conservation of recent years...
...Erskine Caldwell, Jean Toomer, James Saxon Childers and T. S. Stribling...
...I turned to Mr...
...Another 100 pages are given to authors who should appear here, though the editor does them a disservice now and then in the particular selections he makes...
...Approximately 200 pages out of these 760 rightly belong in any anthology of Southern writing...
...Helper's 1860 protest against slavery (though Mr...
...do you remember The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come...
...Thorp is aware of the anomaly here and himself points out that Helper stated elsewhere that it was his purpose "to write the Negro out of America . . . and out of existence") ; Irwin Russell's atrocious piece in dialect, 1888 vintage, titled "Christmas Night in the Quarters": three fine pages from George Washington Cable in defense of the Negro's freedom, published in 1885: Ben Tillman's inhuman tirades of the early 1900s—and, as sole spokesman for the white mind and conscience of the South as it has developed over the past seventy years, we have Hodding Carter...
...One looks in vain, too, for certain authors, now in critical eclipse, who would also have to be included in any competent collection of Southern writing: Evelyn Scott, James Branch Cabell...
...that some slums have been cleared up...
...Possibly 150 pages consist of description of land and rivers, cities and towns, industry and business...
...Carter seems to consider had pretty well reached the separate-but-equal goal he desiderates] is an example of almost all the Negro wants now or can now attain as a citizen of the South...
...At one level he recognizes that important changes are taking place within the region and its people's minds, and while he finds most of them rather unpleasant to contemplate, he sincerely believes that some of them should take place...
...Now we begin to understand: The book is not intended as an anthology of the best of the region's literature, nor is it seriously concerned with the mind of the South...
...It is the section on modern writing, covering the last 35 years, which makes the book extremely disappointing to this reader...
...Fitzhugh justifying slave trade in 1857...
...which Mr...
...And in some 30 of these pages, Negroes of the past half century or so are given a platform for protesting the denial of their rights...
...And if all that remained of the South's expression were what he preserves within these covers, most of the good as well as the evil of the region would be interred with its bones—leaving only the peripheral virtues and vices, the minor strengths and weaknesses, the endless relics of mediocrity, quaintness and triviality...
...It is when Mr...
...Thorp's preface for a clue to these puzzling omissions...
...No enemy could have maligned us more...
...These two pages constitute the total space allotted to Southern social scientists...
...Thorp selects what he calls representative voices in the section titled "The White Man Speaks" that one sees him pulling the blinders down over his eyes and the reader's...
...Yet, were what he shows here the complete picture, were we as barren of the restless, probing, re-creating spirit and intellect as we are here pictured as being, there should be a first-class funeral tomorrow...
...It is incredible that Lillian Smith should be left out here—not only because of her rich imagination and powerful writing (The Journey), hut because of her profound intellectual and philosophic analysis of the mind and soul of the white South (Killers of the Dream...
...The second he might have achieved, but a glance at the table of contents reveals that he did not even attempt it...
...And yet this is not wholly true...
...The empty place left by the omission of those sensitive, talented writers mentioned in the beginning of this review does dishonor to the real South, which is far too strong to need anyone's help in shielding it from its own children's fresh, new vision—a vision completely left out here...
...Reviewed by Paula Snelling Contributor to "Saturday Review," "Progressive" and other journals It is reasonable to expect that a book with this title will give the reader either a clear picture of the mind of the South, in all its fascinating ambiguities, or the best of the region's literature...
...Davidson, in reckoning up the artistic achievements of the modern South, would count the Negro's contribution to jazz and the blues...
...It is a kind of scrapbook, a bit yellowed, put together rather lovingly out of those fragments of the South's writings which appeal to a romantic, conservative, separate-but-equal Yankee who shares with many others above the Mason and Dixon Line the "lyrical longing to be a Southern Gentleman...
...The Agrarians and their spiritual descendants, the New Critics, tot up 34 pages, and their forebears get similarly disproportionate space in the 18th- and 19th-century selections...
...This book, he hopes, "will convey to its readers the kind of pleasure I have known in exploring its byways, reading its history, and listening to my friends tell stories of their kin to the seventh degree of relationship...
...They do this forcefully, even though ten of those pages are taken up by Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Exposition address of 1901...
...Nor is there a reference to the young, talented Flannery O'Connor or Byron Reece, or any other new writer...
...Surely it cannot be lack of literary quality that caused these important writers to be omitted from an anthology which includes the third-class work of John Fox Jr...
...how, despite later awareness of "the sober realities of Southern life," he still finds it "the most exotic and exciting region in America...
...The first task Mr...
...H. C. Nixon is represented by a few innocuous passages from Possum Trot, but nothing from Forty Acres and a Steel Mule...
...Carter's own limitations are shown when he states at the end of this piece: "I believe that Savannah...
...and James Lane Allen...
...Three of her speeches...
...Thorp is not equipped by temperament or intellectual stature to do...
...Thorp obviously considers himself a friend and admirer...
...Thorp's tastes, he could have quoted from William Faulkner's fine letter dealing with these matters, which appeared in a Jackson...
...These imbalances (there are too many to cite) and omissions would lead one to think that Mr...
...But where are the others...
...About three-fifths of it is given over to the old South, from Colonial times up to World War I. While we are shown too much of the grace and charm and hospitality of the slave-holding minority and the sharecropping landlords who followed, there are also several fine and discerning bits of more recent writing, such as James Agee's "Three Tenant Families," Harnett Kane's story on Huey Long, and that delightful piece on rural religion by Archie Robertson called "Tongues and Snakes...
...One notes, however, that he does not choose to make his home in the South, where he could help deal with the "sober realities" and experience the South's excitement first-hand...
...Where are Rupert Vance and Charles S. Johnson...
...Freedom from Shame...
...Davidson would not do...
...Georgia [i.e., the conditions existing there in 1950...
...Mississippi newspaper some two years ago...
...Arthur Raper and Howard Odum are given one page each...
...For there is no mention here of Ellen Glasgow, Lillian Smith, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wright, DuBose Heyward, Ralph Ellison, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, James Still or Joseph Wood Krutch...
...The sum total of what we find here is as follows: the Hamlet-style passage by Jefferson on the iniquity of slavery and the inferiority of the Negro...
...Mr...
...He does look at the contemporary South, although somewhat warily...
...Now what else is in the book...
...Ten Years from Today," and "A White Child Grows Up," are classic Rut if Lillian Smith's penetration of this theme is too strong a dose for Mr...
...Other authors who belong here appear for a moment and are quickly whisked out of sight...
...James Weldon Johnson...
...Eudora Welty, Katherine Ann Porter and Elizabeth Madox Roberts—as they should be in any respectable anthology of Southern writing...
...how, at 16, he first crossed the Potomac and felt he had seen "an enchanted land...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 3
