In an earlier generation, an anthology of Southern literature might have pictured on its cover a decaying antebellum mansion, its avenue of rusty cedars overgrown with wild honeysuckle, slave cabins falling into ruin in the background. On the cover of the new Norton anthology called The Literature of the American South, we see Nell Choate Jones’s attractive 1946 painting “Georgia Red Clay.”[1] Two large trees tower over a modest bungalow, past the front gate of which curves a red-dirt road. Plowed fields stretch to the horizon. Down the road, in the distance, one can just make out the back or side of a larger residence, probably the “big house.”

Someone has chosen the cover art carefully, because this anthology sets out to efface the classic literature written—largely in this century—by white Southerners, and to replace it with a new, “revisionary” version whose underlying assumption seems to be that our interest in the South begins and ends with slavery and race relations. The results are unfortunate for readers with an interest in literature, since the white South —spurred by the defeat of its armies in 1865, and challenged by the subsequent destruction of its economy and culture—has produced in the twentieth century one of the world’s most distinctive literatures, giving us America’s greatest novelist, William Faulkner, and America’s greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams, as well as other writers of genius, and many others of note.

The revisionist distortion of this remarkable literature is addressed cheerfully and with admirable candor in the preface by the general editor, Professor William L. Andrews of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who outlines his thinking about undertaking the assembling and publication of the current volume:  

By the time of its invitation to me, W. W. Norton had launched several new anthologies designed to reconstruct literary history and appeal to emerging reading audiences and emerging areas of literary study in new ways. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985) had done so well that it was headed into a second edition. An anthology of American postmodern poetry was about to come out. Anthologies devoted to African-American and American Indian literatures were in the works. W. W. Norton was indeed connecting its destiny as a publisher to traditions and literatures that, until the mid-1980s, its anthologies’ preoccupation with national cultures and overarching canons had for the most part neglected to explore.

How, then, to follow what sounds like a directive from Norton to fit the South’s peculiar, largely backward-looking literature—by turns tragic, noble, colorfully vulgar, eccentric, and weirdly comic—into the publisher’s increasing preoccupation with a sociological approach and its desperate desire to be in on the new and “postmodern”? Andrews asks: “Could an anthology of southern literature … add new impetus and value to the reconstruction of American literary history and its literary canons that anthologists all over the United States had been engaged in during the last decade?” You bet!

Is literature about “dialogue”? I don’t think so. “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” Yeats famously wrote. The editors of this anthology think otherwise:

We see southern literature as constituted by a diverse constituency [note the political term] of writers and traditions in dialogue (and sometimes in active dispute) with each other. For many years attention to the dialogue between black and white southern writers over race was muted to the point of silence by readers and critics who, when they spoke of ‘southern literature,’ tacitly agreed to confine their purview primarily to the writing of white men.

When Flannery O’Connor wrote “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” was it her intention to posit an argument in the centuries-long debate on human nature? I think not. Her story may be used to bolster the arguments of those who take evil seriously, but she was, in my view, creating a lasting object to leave behind, made of words—a testament about human nature, artfully wrenched out of her own life. And when William Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury, he was making something, not debating about something. His history of a Mississippi family affects us in the same way Greek tragedy does. Criticism may be a debating society; literature is not.

Andrews’s ritual characterization of “white men,” those devils of the academic establishment, is not in any case very accurate; twentieth-century Southern literature has notably been distinguished by the contributions of women writers. They have tended to go in for fiction rather than poetry. It is good to see Ellen Glasgow, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Elizabeth Spencer, from the generation born before 1930, represented here. While I am glad to see Doris Betts, Bobbie Ann Mason, Maya Angelou, and Lee Smith included among more contemporary fiction writers, the omissions in this area—most of them white authors—make the anthology useless as a guide to contemporary Southern fiction. Where are, to name only a few glaring omissions among women writers, Mary Lou Settle, Harper Lee, Elizabeth Cox, Jill McCorkle, Alison Hagy? Among male fiction writers, where are Barry Hannah, Madison Jones, Madison Smartt Bell, George Garrett (author of what I consider to be the greatest novel by any living American, The Death of the Fox)?

Every reader, by his or her own lights, makes the distinction between a good book and a bad book. One would presume that compilers of anthologies make the same distinctions. But on this issue as well, William L. Andrews, addressing “the so-called expansion of the canon of southern literature,” is admirably frank about his anthology’s watering-down of aesthetic criteria: “We consider race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, locality, and socioeconomic condition among those factors that require serious attention when assessing the literary contribution or the critical reception of many southern writers.” If the issue really were an expansion of the canon—to the extent that anyone still regards the Norton anthologies as canonical, i.e., authoritative —there would be less of a problem. One could browse the entries that are interesting only on extraliterary grounds, and still read and appreciate the great literature the American South has produced.

This, unfortunately, leads us to the dirty little secret of affirmative action (and a more aggressively affirmative action anthology than this can hardly be imagined). To wit: the number of pages in an anthology is limited—in this case, to just under twelve hundred. To include certain writers, certain others must be excluded. These exclusions are what make The Literature of the American South not only unsatisfactory but also an insult to the many talented writers who have been left out—an insult because writers live or die by their connections with readers. Several generations of gifted poets and fiction writers are being left out, on demographic grounds, of a book that many, perhaps naïve, readers—primarily students--will regard as the last word on Southern literature.

Among authors from earlier generations not represented here, it is hard even to know where to start. Where are William Alexander Percy’s 1941 memoir, Lanterns on the Levee—a copy of which was at one time to be found on the shelves of practically every educated Southern family; Donald Davidson’s long poem, “Lee in the Mountains”; Andrew Lytle’s novel, The Velvet Horn, Shelby Foote’s Civil War? That’s right, Shelby Foote is omitted entirely from this anthology! Perhaps the editors of the anthology encountered difficulties obtaining copyright clearance from Random House, but were that the case, no mention is made of it anywhere.

Perhaps Mr. Foote’s powerful and truly popular work was excluded on the grounds that it was history rather than literature. But if distinctions like that were being made, what would be the logic then of including selections from W. J. Cash’s Mind of the South? (Not that I would argue for leaving out that fine book.) Omitting selections from Shelby Foote’s monumental narrative history of the Civil War from an anthology of Southern literature is the equivalent of leaving Gibbon out of an anthology of eighteenth-century English literature. Perhaps a few pages might have been shaved from the fifty-one allotted to the autobiography of Frederick Douglass to provide room for one or two excluded authors of genius.

And yet the logic behind these omissions is all too clear. In its revisionist thrust, the Literature of the American South aims to eviscerate the central mythos that has underpinned white Southern culture since 1865: the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. Today you will find little support among decent people in the South for racial discrimination; you would have to hunt high and low before dredging up apologists for slavery and segregation. The South has made its penance, done its soul-searching. Arguably it is the one section of our country that has come to terms with the legacy of slavery and racial injustice. Today it provides the most relaxed and harmonious racial climate to be found in the United States. If this were not the case, why would so many African-Americans be moving back to the South, back “home”?

Abraham Lincoln’s most brilliant public relations achievement was that he succeeded in defining the Civil War as a war against slavery. The white South did not and does not on the whole see it that way. While acknowledging the evils of slavery, white Southerners justly take pride in the way their forebears fought a brave war against terrifying odds in defense of their impoverished and embattled homeland. Growing up in Memphis in the 1940s, I remember the cheap tintype print of Robert E. Lee mounted on Traveler that hung in our dining room, as it did in many Southern homes. What we and millions of other Southerners saw in Lee was not a slave owner but an exemplary Christian gentleman, a military commander of courage and panache who gave us something to feel proud about during the decades of economic ruin and loss of status that followed the war.

No decent purpose is served by the bullying, triumphalist approach of this Norton anthology. The reasoning seems to be that black pride and self-assertion can only be served by ruthlessly crushing the white South’s understanding of its own history. This book exemplifies perfectly why the term “political correctness” should more accurately be called “political correction,” its aim being to correct, shame, and punish those who do not adhere to its orthodoxies. No wonder that Professor Andrews describes W. W. Norton’s purpose in its new anthologies as to “reconstruct literary history” (italics mine). The punitive impulse of political Reconstruction following the Civil War is echoed in the cultural reconstruction of a project like this.

When one turns to the authors who are included, other questions arise. William Styron is, predictably, represented only by selections from his controversial novel Nat Turner. Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, apart from being classics, should have recommended themselves to the editors by virtue of their status as West African folk tales transplanted to America. One and one-third pages are given to Uncle Remus’s story of the Tar-Baby. Then we have Harris’s affecting but rather bathetic short story called “Free Joe and the Rest of the World,” a story which could have been written by dozens of modestly talented fiction writers. This story gives a sympathetic insight into the plight of the newly freed slave. But why not give Joel Chandler Harris the space to do what he does better than any other writer?

Mary Boykin Chesnut of South Carolina was a diarist of genius on a par with the eighteenth-century English writer Lady Mary Wortley Montague. She has much to tell us about upper-class Southern life during the war. Predictably, she comes to us in the current book solely as a feminist and critic of slavery. Observations like the following are chilling: “Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.” Again, social insights like these are important, but her rich tapestry is cut by the Norton editors to illustrate the only points they deem worth making. Whenever possible— even when dealing with major figures like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty—the editors pick stories dealing with race.

The introductions to sections of the anthology and to individual authors have been written, on the whole, in a spirited and informed fashion. Still, is Thomas Jefferson’s having been a slave owner the most important aspect of his life? This is what we are led to believe in the introduction to his segment of this book, which closes with the following sentences: “‘Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate,’ he asserted in his Autobiography (published posthumously in 1830), ‘than that these [enslaved] people are to be free.’ But at his death on July 4, 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson still owned more than one hundred slaves.” Every writer knows the importance of closing remarks; what I have quoted above is how thousands if not millions of students of Southern literature will be asked to remember the author of the Declaration of Independence, arguably America’s greatest architect, vice-president and then president of the United States.

Perhaps the gravest harm inflicted by this ill-conceived anthology is the distorted picture it gives of contemporary Southern poetry. A sign of the hard times that poetry has fallen on in a society that is fast losing its ability to read anything at all challenging is that poetry has become fair game for critics with various extraliterary axes to grind. The selections in poetry present a glaring distortion of the achievements of Southern poets and as such represent a grave injustice to writers whose work should by rights become known to the students and teachers who use the Norton anthologies.

Why is James Dickey, the contemporary South’s most considerable poet, accorded only seven pages—the same number given over to the works of Sonia Sanchez, Laura H. Cornell Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia? For readers unfamiliar with Ms. Sanchez’s work, it is represented here by such gems as “we a baddDDD people,” the ending of which runs as follows:

git em with yo bad self. gon. rat now.
go on & do it. dudley. rat now. yeah.
run it on down. gwen. rat now. yeah. yeah.
aaa-e-ooooooo. wah——wah——.
aaa-e-ooooooo. wah—— wah——.
we a BAAAADDD people

& we be gitting
BAAAADDER

every day.

“Sonia Sanchez,” the introduction to her work informs us, “has been a voice of advocacy for black creativity and change over the past three decades… . Consistently popular with audiences who appreciate her messages as well as her energy, Sanchez is now one of the griots [a word familiar to readers of the twenty-page selection from Alex Haley’s Roots] from the 1960s, a seasoned and mature person of wisdom and insight who continues to write, publish, and delight her audiences with poetry that always carries a message.”

The space given Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934 in Alabama) was space not made available for the magnificent work of Charles Wright (b. 1935 in Tennessee), the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize, the contemporary heir in this country to Ezra Pound, and arguably the outstanding American poet of his generation. Several important contemporary poets, one of them African-American, are to be found in these ill-starred pages: Fred Chappell, Dave Smith, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Yusef Komunyakaa, R. T. Smith, and Andrew Hudgins. But why include the dismal poetry of Alice Walker? Here is a stanza from her “We Have a Beautiful Mother”:

We have a beautiful
mother
Her oceans
are wombs
Her wombs
oceans.

Because many Americans now get their one and only introduction to literature in college, students who will be assigned to read second-rate authors like Sanchez and Walker will perhaps never have the chance to read poets like Alvin Aubert (who happens to be black), James Applewhite, Diann Blakely, David Bottoms, Edgar Bowers, Turner Cassity, R. H. W. Dillard, R. S. Gwynn, T. R. Hummer, Rodney Jones, Donald Justice, Susan Ludvigson, Everette Maddox, Robert Morgan, Naomi Shihab Nye, Wyatt Prunty, Patiann Rogers, Gibbons Ruark, James Seay, Leon Stokesbury, Dabney Stuart, Henry Taylor (winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1985), James Whitehead, Miller Williams, John Wood, C. D. Wright (who happen to be white), and other contemporary Southern poets too numerous to mention. Fortunately there is The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary South- ern Poetry, edited by Leon Stokesbury (1987, and soon to be reissued). But it appeared under the imprint of the University of Arkansas Press and will not reach the thousands who will be required to buy the Norton Anthology.

There are bright spots amidst the gloom. It is a treat to see many of one’s old favorites gathered under one cover: A Streetcar Named Desire printed in its entirety; a story by the incomparable Reynolds Price; selections from The Last Gentleman, by Walker Percy; a masterly, enigmatic short story by Peter Taylor, “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time”; Faulkner, of course; chapter 2 of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man with its devastating sketch of the white Northern benefactor who visits the black Southern college to which he has contributed money (“upon you depends the outcome of the years I have spent in helping your school. That has been my real life’s work, not my banking or my researches, but my first-hand organizing of human life”). I was glad to be introduced to fiction by Albert Murray, a black writer on jazz whose work I admire. And I enjoyed the selections from Henry Louis Gates’s splendid memoir, Colored People.

What a pity the officious editors of W. W. Norton’s latest disaster, busy deconstructing and reconstructing the achievements of generations of Southern writers, could not have let themselves be guided by the impulse to present college students with a genuine experience of what actually moves, teaches, and delights us in literature, rather than yet another dreary example of what we ought to appreciate.

Notes
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The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, edited by William L. Andrews et al.; Norton, 1,188 pages, $29.95. Go back to the text.

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