Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  National magazines such as Mencken’s American Mercury, Scribner’s, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, Life, Look, Collier’s, Time, Newsweek, and The Saturday Evening Post would gradually show an awakening interest in the South, and in time those periodicals would include a significant number of Southern-born writers and editors on their staffs. The two major black journals, the Crisis and Opportunity, were heavily manned from the start with native Southerners.

  Inside the region, the most substantial twentieth-century magazines were literary quarterlies, beginning with the Sewanee Review and the South Atlantic Quarterly around the turn of the century. A rash of new magazines broke into print in the 1920s, among them Howard Odum’s Social Forces, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Southwest Review (successor to Stark Young’s Texas Review and heir to the well-traveled Reviewer of Richmond and Chapel Hill), and the short-lived publications of the Nashville and New Orleans literati, the Fugitive and the Double Dealer. Another journal of note, the Southern Review, got its start at Louisiana State University in 1935.

  The magazines were, by Southern standards, stylishly avant-garde, but in no sense radical; Odum’s journal and the Virginia Quarterly were probably nearest to the national mainstream of New Deal progressivism. The VQR, edited through the thirties by Stringfellow Barr and Lambert Davis, kept abreast of the writings and public pronouncements of liberal whites, but rarely reviewed books by or about blacks and almost never invited black authors or reviewers to contribute to its pages; Social Forces, like the UNC Press, showed more of an inclination toward race-class issues.

  At the movies, social realism was all but invisible in the steady flow of escapist entertainment that continued unabated throughout the thirties. Hollywood had bolted out of the silent era, but not out of the mentality that fed on Old South stereotypes. From Hearts in Dixie in 1929 to Gone With the Wind a decade later, motion pictures seldom looked at the South with anything approaching historical accuracy. In one film after another, colonels and cavaliers and assorted other aristocratic white knights bestowed honor and courtesy upon their delicate ladies and spirited belles while banjo-plunking darkies sang and danced in the background. This mythic South was a pastoral land of harmony and contentment, a nostalgic and sentimental throwback to a time of innocence that never was.

  And, on the rare occasions when filmmakers did have in mind a social message, not just idle entertainment, the result was often heavy-handed and sensationalized (as with I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang in 1932) or thinly disguised New Deal propaganda (as with Our Daily Bread, a subsistence farm melodrama produced by King Vidor, a native of Galveston, Texas, in 1934). The first of Erskine Caldwell’s “poor white trash” novels, Tobacco Road, went from the printed page in 1932 to a long run of over seven years on Broadway and finally to the silver screen in 1941—and all the way to the bank, Caldwell was hounded by irate critics who accused him of cynically exploiting the degenerate underclass he had grown up with in rural Georgia. Whether or not that was his intent, it was certainly true that America’s moviegoers and book buyers (by far the most of whom lived outside the South) were willing to spend their money for Southern mythology, be it romantic or grotesque—and filmmakers and publishers, observing how easy it was to collect on the formula, continued to pander to that gullible public.

  The pattern in fiction was a lot more complicated than that. Scores of novels in the thirties explored the themes of race and class in the South, and they ranged across the spectrum from romantic and patronizing to crudely comic to serious and penetrating. Whatever it was that brought the South to the magnetic center of American literary creativity in the 1920s and kept it there at least until the fifties, the fact is that those were years of extraordinary fruitfulness for many writers with Southern roots—and unlike most of their predecessors prior to World War I, they wrote about a South that was much closer to the hard-edged truth than to the Dixie fable.

  Earlier Southern winners of Pulitzer Prizes for fiction or drama—Julia Peterkin, T. S. Stribling, Paul Green—were joined before the thirties ended by Georgia novelist Caroline Miller (Lamb in His Bosom); Arkansas-born poet John Gould Fletcher (one of the Agrarians); Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta; and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings of Florida, who wrote The Yearling. South Carolinian DuBose Heyward’s earlier novel, Porgy, found new life on the stage and then, in 1935, was transformed by George and Ira Gershwin into a classic American folk opera, Porgy and Bess.

  Not celebrated by the prize-givers until much later was William Faulkner, who quietly continued writing in Mississippi—and, periodically, in Hollywood, where his screenplays were much more generously compensated than his light-selling novels. Writing obsessively, he produced ten books in the 1930s (seven novels, two collections of stories, and a volume of poems), and though he was by no means thought of as a “social protest” novelist, his stories were certainly not sentimental fairy tales, and his motley troop of rural Mississippi characters were anything but romantic props. By the late 1940s, Faulkner would be filling the minds of those characters with thoughts and insights and questions that the South was only beginning to articulate.

  During his brief bohemian sojourn in New Orleans in the 1920s, Faulkner had fraternized with a little clique of writers that included Lyle Saxon and Roark Bradford—like him, about thirty years old and just beginning their literary careers—and fifty-year-old Sherwood Anderson, famed for his bittersweet Winesburg, Ohio stories. Anderson, having drifted south from Chicago, befriended Faulkner and helped steer his first novel to a publisher. Despite his Midwestern identity, Anderson had Southern roots, and he had gone to New Orleans hoping to settle there. The close kinship he felt with the South came through his father, a North Carolinian who had left the region in his youth and ended up in the Union Army. But the Louisiana summers were too oppressively humid for Anderson, and soon he was on the lookout for a cooler place to work. One of his Georgia friends, newspaper editor Julian Harris, told him about a country place in the mountains of southwest Virginia where his father had sometimes gone to write and fish. And so it was that Sherwood Anderson finally found a home in the South; he ended up running a weekly newspaper in Marion, Virginia, and spending the last fifteen years of his life there.

  It was from Marion that Anderson went to Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1931 with a group of leftists, the Communist-backed League of American Writers, to investigate labor-management problems in the coal mines. His sympathies were clearly with the working class, and he was an outspoken critic of lynching, poll taxes, anti-labor laws, and other denials of due process and democratic opportunity. His novels reflected his social consciousness, and so, especially, did Puzzled America, a 1935 collection of character sketches; in it, Anderson combined his skill as a storyteller with the talents of a keen-eyed reporter to portray working-class people struggling for something to believe in and hope for in the drab and cheerless pit of the Great Depression. Most of his stories were from the South—from one-mule farmers, factory workers, coal miners, dispossessed wanderers. Like the Agrarians, Anderson blamed their plight primarily on the mindless and impersonal forces of modern Yankee industrialism; unlike his conservative brethren, though, he saw federal action as the only hope for their rescue. Approvingly, he quoted a mill worker as saying that with the government’s help, “we might be able to make the South into something gorgeous.”

  Native Southerners with a burning desire to write fiction on the central themes of social conflict in the thirties were not numerous, but there were more of them than you might expect. Harry Harrison Kroll, son of a Tennessee sharecropper, wrote books of unblinking realism (Cabin in the Cotton and I Was a Sharecropper) based on his own experiences; Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread probed the exploitation of mill workers in the big textile strike at Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929, and so did books by some other Southern novelists, including Olive Tilford Dargan (using the pen name Fielding Burke) and Myra Page. Hamilton Basso, a young protégé of t
he New Orleans literary set, wrote several novels, including Court House Square, a story about race relations in a small Southern town; James Saxon Childers called his 1936 book A Novel About a White Man and a Black Man in the Deep South, and that’s exactly what it was. Arna Bontemps, a Louisiana native and one of the promising young writers of the Harlem Renaissance, expressed his social views through poetry and historical novels such as God Sends Sunday and Black Thunder.

  Other black authors came to the fore in those years, many of them through the Federal Writers’ Project. Langston Hughes, best known as a poet, scored with a collection of stories, The Ways of White Folks, in 1934 and a play, Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South, the following year. Zora Neale Hurston of Florida created characters of depth and complexity in her books—particularly her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God—and though she would die penniless and forgotten in a Florida welfare home in 1960, the distinctiveness of her work would eventually bring her belated but well-deserved recognition. Sterling Brown and Frank Marshall Davis, two more poets of the thirties, proclaimed in starkly different styles the enduring strength and will to survive of African-Americans. Brown’s primary tool was dialect; Davis, a key figure in the early 1930s at the Atlanta Daily World, the nation’s only black daily newspaper, fired bullets of hot anger in such poems as “Snapshots of the Cotton South” and “My Christ Is a Dixie Nigger” (the latter reminiscent of Langston Hughes’s “Christ in Alabama”).

  Richard Wright’s main impact on the literary and social consciousness of the South would be felt in the 1940s, but he sent up a signal of things to come with a story, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch,” published in a 1937 Federal Writers’ Project book called American Stuff. A first-person remembrance of his early life in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Memphis, the story was later combined with other stark descriptions of Southern racism in Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright’s first book.

  Critics have often disagreed in their assessment of the social and literary motivations of three well-known white Southern writers from this era—Thomas Wolfe, James Agee, and Erskine Caldwell—and their divergent careers do present some absorbing similarities and contrasts. They came up in the new post–Civil War middle class; all three left the South as young men and never returned to live there (though Wolfe tried, briefly, shortly before his death). Further, they all became famous by writing about the people and places they had left behind. Beyond that, they had little else in common.

  Thomas Wolfe went from his mother’s Asheville boardinghouse to the University of North Carolina, and then to Harvard for graduate study; in the late 1920s, while living in New York City, he wrote Look Homeward, Angel, a long and penetrating autobiographical novel that won the praise of literary critics and the condemnation of Ashevillians stung by his unflattering depiction of them. (Jonathan Daniels, a classmate of his at UNC, charged in the Raleigh News & Observer that Wolfe had “spat upon” North Carolina and the South.) At the age of twenty-nine, the expatriate author was, without realizing it, at the apex of his career; though he wrote voluminously, his remaining years were an unending struggle to exceed the critical acclaim and personal satisfaction he had gotten from his first success.

  Wolfe’s private life (his professional life too) was clouded with conflict and brooding self-absorption; he never outgrew the narrow provincialism of his upbringing, never escaped the feeling of inferiority he got from being a white Southerner in Manhattan, or the sense of superiority he felt toward Americans of African descent. (One of the few times he was able to identify positively with a black person’s achievement was at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, when he stood and cheered as Alabama-born Jesse Owens triumphed spectacularly over Adolph Hitler’s “master race” athletes.) On the face of it, you might think that Wolfe would have been a compatible ally of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, critical as he was of Yankee “progress” in the South—but he had no time for the Nashville clique, and they could not forgive his desertion of the South for New York or abide the magnitude of his celebrity there. After he died of a rare tubercular infection in 1938, his editors got several more books out of the vast body of his unpublished work. One of them, brought out in 1940, bore a title that seemed to characterize Wolfe’s eternal dilemma and that of many a self-exiled Southerner: You Can’t Go Home Again.

  James Agee envied Wolfe’s literary success. He too was born and raised in a Southern mountain city (Knoxville), studied at Harvard, and went on to a writing career in New York before his death at an early age (forty-five). The two books for which he is best known, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death in the Family, were both about the South. The latter, a novel published two years after his own death in 1955, was set in the Knoxville of his youth, and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize; the former, a documentary book about tenant farmers, was written on assignment for Fortune magazine in 1936, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941 (with photographs by Walker Evans, one of the Farm Security Administration lensmen), and ignored by all but a handful of readers and critics until Agee’s posthumous fame resurrected it.

  Unlike Wolfe, who was nine years his senior—but very much like so many other writers of the time—Agee was caught up in the political and social currents of the thirties. He was intellectually attracted to Marxism (though never a member of the Communist Party), and when he went to Alabama with Evans to work on the story that would become his belatedly celebrated book, he was motivated by the impulses of a liberal activist, a reformer. The result was a document that is as much about Agee’s grappling with his own heritage as it is about the three white tenant-farming families with whom he and Evans spent a total of six weeks in the summer of 1936. A certain nobility of purpose and a hint of paternalistic protectiveness—common flaws among reformers—are not hard to discern in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Although those qualities may not diminish it as a work of art, they do limit it as a political and social documentary. “Agee isn’t really imaginatively concerned with [the families] in their own right,” concluded the critic Louis D. Rubin, Jr., forty years after the book was published. “It is his experience there that fascinates him.” (The judgment may be too harsh; there is no denying the force and power of Agee’s descriptive language.)

  At the time all this happened, Agee certainly felt deeply committed to the people about whom he had written, and he had no patience with anyone who failed to appreciate that. In 1937, after Fortune had rejected their story and a famous writer from the South, Erskine Caldwell, had upstaged them with a polemic on farm tenancy, Agee and Evans reacted with outrage, accusing Caldwell and his collaborator, Margaret Bourke-White (the star photographer of Fortune’s flashy new sister magazine, Life), of exploiting the hapless and downtrodden sharecropper for propaganda and profit. It didn’t help at all that the photo-documentary by Caldwell and Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces, was a hit with critics and book buyers alike.

  In just five years of public exposure, Erskine Caldwell had acquired a multiplicity of detractors. He was best known for two ribald, low-comedy novels of Deep South degeneracy, Tobacco Road in 1932 and God’s Little Acre the following year. The first soon became a Broadway hit, making Caldwell rich as well as famous and giving both books the exposure to soar into the stratosphere of multimillion-copy sales. There was embedded in the novels a strand of social criticism, but the grotesque absurdity of his mindless and amoral characters left many people convinced that his cynical objective was to make money at the expense of the South’s poor whites.

  Caldwell at first did little to correct that notion. Ever since his boyhood days as a Presbyterian minister’s son in rural Georgia, he had been a rebel, bouncing from school to school, taking with him some of his father’s social gospel liberalism and playing it back as left-wing radicalism. The first of his four marriages, in the mid-1920s, brought him a quiet place to write (in Maine) but also three children, and he was not one to take up the domestic role cheerfully. With the Broadway success of Tobacco Road and the subsequent popularity o
f both of his early novels came heavier complaints that he had no serious purpose at all, but only an unprincipled willingness to shock and titillate his readers. The charge may have troubled Caldwell; in any case, he responded with two 1934 articles in the New Masses, a magazine of the Communist Party, exposing a wave of unreported lynchings in Jefferson County, Georgia, his former home and still the home of his parents.

  The following year, Caldwell attacked the evils of sharecropping and tenant farming in two four-part clusters of articles published by the New York Post. White and black families alike were being victimized by a dehumanizing system of economic slavery, he declared, and government at every level was guilty of helping to perpetuate the system. The stories stirred controversy in the national press, in Congress, and throughout the South. Then, in the summer of 1936, Caldwell and Bourke-White met in Wrens, Georgia, where his parents lived, and began the first of two trips through the rural South to gather the material for You Have Seen Their Faces.

  Their book received widespread and generally favorable comment when it was published in November 1937. Time magazine, the New York Times, The Nation, and other Northern publications credited Caldwell for the “force and conviction” of his essay, and for his documentation of conditions in the Cotton Belt. Southern reviewers, including W. T. Couch in the Virginia Quarterly Review and Donald Davidson in the Southern Review, were much more critical. (“He does not want a solution,” fumed Davidson. “He wants a fight. He wants an uprising. He is a Marxian.”) Almost all the reviewers, including the Southerners, were highly complimentary of Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs, calling them “superb” and “nearly perfect”; even Davidson was moved to judge them “excellent” and “far more romantic than realistic”—an assessment he intended as favorable.