The Characters
The five writers in this Chautauqua will give audience members a chance to
interact with as interesting a group of authors as any that might be put together
to represent the South during the last three decades of the 19th
century and the first seven decades of the 20th century. They will
encourage audiences to think about literature, geography, history, religion,
race, society, economics, gender, human nature and much more. All five characters
will cause listeners to encounter new ideas, new images and metaphors, new ideals
and realities. These figures will show people the South as they saw it and leave
their audiences comparing the writers’ vision to their own.
Mark Twain
Katherine Anne Porter
Thomas Wolfe
William Faulkner
Zora Neale Hurston
Mark Twain
Born in Florida, Missouri and raised in Hannibal,
on the banks of the Mississippi, Samuel Clemens’ childhood gave him the "rich
southern background," to use David Sloane’s phrase, that colored his writings
about childhood and small town life in America. In later life Mark Twain had
arguably the best ear in the country for American English. He wrote: "A
Southerner talks music. At least it is music to me, but then I was born in the
South." He was piloting steamboats on the Mississippi when the Civil War
broke out and he went home to join a band of Confederate irregulars in Marion
County. His interest in the war was exhausted within two weeks. "I withdrew
and crippled the Southern cause," he wrote later. He spent the war years
in the West before going east to become a "Connecticut Yankee by adoption"
though he remained a "frontier ruffian by birth." Mark Twain had already
published his famous story about the jumping frog and Innocents Abroad in
the 1860s, but he broke into the Eastern literary establishment with a "A
True Story" told by "Aunt Rachel" (Mary Ann Cord), a former slave
from Virginia, in the Atlantic Monthly. At William Dean Howells’ request,
he followed it with a series of realistic articles, "Old Times on the Mississippi,"
also published in the Atlantic. Howells found them so realistic that
he wrote Twain, "They made the water in ice pitcher muddy, as I read them."
It was when he turned these Mississippi pieces into Life on the Mississippi
that Twain wrote about Southern literature, saying that it was unfortunately
influenced by Sir Walter Scott and just full of "wordy, windy, flowery
‘eloquence,’ romanticism, sentimentality." Sir Walter’s influence, Twain
thought, was an influence so full of "sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham
chivalries" that he was "in great measure responsible for the war."
His influence was also, in Twain’s view, the cause of Southern literature having
such a restricted market in the America of the 1870s and 80s. He predicted that
things would change only when Southern writers began to write "modern English,"
free of "that old inflated style." He cited George Washington Cable
and Uncle Remus as examples of modern, successful Southern writers. Twain’s
own Southern classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in America1885
and has remained a book to be reckoned with to the present. As Toni Morrison
has written: "The argument that this novel is has been identified,
reidentified, examined, waged and advanced. What it cannot be is dismissed.
It is classic literature, which is to say it heaves, manifests and lasts."
Born in a slave-holding town in Missouri, Twain grew up with "no aversion
to slavery." In his autobiography he wrote that the "local papers
said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught that God approved it, that
it was a holy thing." Yet, in Huckleberry Finn Huck chooses to go
to hell rather than turn Jim in as his trained conscience tells him he must.
In slave times, Huck does what is right; he helps a slave run away. In the "Gilded
Age," Twain’s own term for the years after emancipation, which is represented
in the novel by the Phelps’ farm where Jim, though freed by his mistress, is
still held in bondage for the entertainment of Tom Sawyer--the boy William Faulkner
rightly called "a prig." And Tom represents the post-war nation that
had no idea of what to do with the freeman save recognize his equality and that
it was unwilling to do, Mark Twin’s classic is a telling criticism of the whole
nation for its racism, both northern and southern. Twain’s criticism of Southern
writers was matched by his criticism of Northern and Southern treatment of the
former slaves. Maxwell Geismar has called Twain "an American prophet."
Huckleberry Finn was the most telling of his prophetic sermons.
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Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) was born to very humble
origins in Indian Creek, Texas. From the beginning, her life was filled with
tragedy: her mother died when she was two, and her beloved grandmother when
she was only 11, leaving her with a father she didn't admire or respect. Born
Callie Russell Porter, she took her grandmother's name and became Katherine
Anne Porter. This name alteration is metaphoric of how she would continually
recast her childhood and life, creating out of her own past as polished a fiction
as any of her celebrated works. Porter's long life (1890-1980) provided her
with a large canvas on which to paint her selves: born, as she often said, in
the shadow of the Civil War, she witnessed the Mexican Revolution, two World
Wars, and the Vietnam War. She was married at least four times and had many
affairs. She was friends with many of the century's most interesting writers,
among them Hart Crane, Josephine Herbst, Marianne Moore, and Glenway Wescott.
Porter herself declared near the end of her life: "My life has been incredible, I don't believe a word of it." A master of artifice in her dress and presentation,
a terrific storyteller and letter-writer, Porter embellished her childhood and
upbringing with a southern grandeur that was culturally and socially far from
her Texas origins in Indian Creek and Kyle. Porter was truer in fiction than
she was in life, and some of her most powerful fiction, like "Old Mortality,"
stories from "The Old Order," and "Noon Wine," evoked her rural background.
A seminal event in her life was her trip to Europe in 1931. The S. S. Werra
sailed on August 22, from Veracruz to Bremen, with Porter and her lover Eugene
Pressley on board. Porter's first popular success and only full-length novel,
Ship of Fools, which transmutes her journey to Germany into a metaphor for a
world blindly drifting into World War II, was a long time in the writing and
became a constant theme in her life--was she working on it? what was its title
now? when would she finish it? Porter wrote after the novel's completion, "I
had been so brutally nagged by publishers and others to write a novel I got
in a state of catatonic resistance. I was a short story writer and by God they
were going to acknowledge this or else!"
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Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe
In 2000 we will be celebrating the life and work of Thomas Wolfe. The North
Carolina writer had a short (1900-1938) but intense life. When he died after
a brief illness, the lamentations were profuse. The nation had lost a major
talent, and speculation about what Wolfe might have done had he lived longer
continues to engage readers. Even so, because Wolfe's energy was as huge as
his popular image as a hungry Gulliver, the amount of work he produced is impressive.
Wolfe admired most the "big" writers: Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevski,
Balzac. He captured the reading public in 1929 with Look Homeward, Angel,
which has remained in print ever since and is widely regarded as Wolfe's masterpiece.
Yet Wolfe had struggled greatly to find a publisher for it. Maxwell Perkins,
the legendary editor of Scribner's recognized its power, and worked with Wolfe
to get the vast novel to manageable size. Wolfe struggled even more with his
second novel Of Time and the River (1935), which he had been reluctant
to declare finished. After reviewers attacked the work for formlessness, Wolfe
blamed Perkins and made a dramatic break from Scribner's. He began work on a
new saga, recasting much of the autobiographical material of his first two novels
and produced a mass of material. Following Wolfe's death, Edward Aswell edited
that material for the posthumous novels The Web and the Rock (1939) and
You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). Flora's potrayal will focus on Wolfe's
struggle to define himself as an artist and a man--imagining his competition
with the other giants in the Scribner stable, notably F. Scott Fitzgerald and
Ernest Hemingway and his sense of himself as a Southerner.
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William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Faulkner (1897-1962) is probably the most significant
voice in modern American fiction. Along with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
abroad, Faulkner defined modernism in the novel here in America. Long acclaimed
in France, Faulkner did not achieve full recognition in America until he received
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. His career thus reflects the problematic
role of the artist in defining America. Faulkner is also noteworthy for his
celebration of the South in his fiction, elevating his fictional Yoknapatawpha
county to classical status. His imagination constituted an entire fictive world
out of a "postage stamp" of land inspired by his native Oxford in Lafayette
county, Mississippi. The 1930s is the approximate decade of Faulkner's most
prolific and enduring work. He published The Sound and the Fury in October of
1929 and began writing As I Lay Dying on the day the stock market crashed.
Light in August followed in 1932, Absalom, Absalom! in 1936, and
The Wild Palms in 1939. The decade also marked important milestones in
his personal life. He married Estelle Franklin in 1929, bought his home Rowan
Oak in 1930, and his only child, Jill, was born in 1933. Beginning in 1934,
he worked intermittently as a screenwriter in Hollywood, bringing America's
greatest novelist in contact with the country's greatest popular art form. It
was at that time that Faulkner also had a longstanding affair with Meta Doherty
Carpenter, a script clerk for director Howard Hawks. Although Faulkner was not
a politically engaged writer, during the Great Depression he was confronted
by a rapidly-changing society. According to his biographer Frederick R. Karl,
"He had to develop a literary style which took into account that [the Jeffersonian
pastoral society] he believed in profoundly was no longer viable; that what
he held to be the values of his region during the Great Depression were themselves
self-defeating" (512). Faulkner thus addressed in his fiction some of the profoundly
unsettling changes the Depression forced on American society. He was deeply
concerned with how America defined itself, even though he did not support any
overt political agenda. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1950, he occasionally
acted as an American cultural ambassador abroad, serving to reinforce conservative
formalist literary ideology. At the same time, he frequently and controversially
addressed the issue of race in America, alienating many Southerners with his
denunciations of racism and disappointing liberals by advocating that integration
should be a slow, gradual process. Ultimately, Faulkner’s greatest contribution
to American letters lay in his innovations with literary voice. Faulkner's experiments
with literary voice have served as a major influence on subsequent writers,
both in America and abroad. In his Nobel Prize address, Faulkner stated that
man "alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice" and that "The poet's
voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the
pillars to help him endure and prevail."
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Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist,
and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of African-American
Southern life reveals her love of self and her people. From the 1920's until
her death in 1960, Hurston was the most prolific black woman writer of her times.
She was the author of four novels, two anthropological collections, an autobiography
and an impressive number of short stories, essays and plays. A woman of great
wit, Hurston became known for her funny stories and sometimes irreverent anecdotes.
Arriving in New York in 1925, Hurston joined the "New Voices" of the Harlem
Renaissance. Although dominated by men, Zora was a powerful force in the group
and crowned herself "Queen of the Niggerati". Zora Neale Hurston was a tremendous
writer and an unforgettable character who will bring her indomitable spirit
to the chautauqua. Langston Hughes once described her as a "perfect book of
entertainment in herself". Fannie Hurst wrote that "Zora had the gift of walking
into hearts". And Arna Bontemps once said of her, "I don't know anybody else
just like Zora Neale Hurston".
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