William Gilmore Simms: Back from Oblivion

William Gilmore Simms: Back From Oblivion by Peter G. Epps I n 1896, Elbert Hubbard, the editor of a small series of Little Journeys to the Homes of American Authors, felt free to comment on the work of William Gilmore Simms as follows: Of course, even in saying this, Hubbard was introducing Simms as one of a series of American Authors whose character sketches were being reprinted in 1896. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, with The Knickerbocker Press, were re-issuing a series that Putnam had first issued in 1853, when Simms had been near the height of his vogue. The list of authors will sound familiar: The list of those who wrote the essays, however, will sound much less familiar—neither Elbert Hubbard nor H. T. Tuckerman seem a lot more familiar, today, than the American Authors named “Bancroft” or “Prescott” who, in 1896, needed no first name to be recognized. It is worth noticing, then, that the article on Simms was written by William Cullen Bryant. Of course, for many of us—and I include myself, here—the name “Simms” is hardly a household word. If my wife had not spent much of her graduate school time at the University of South Carolina working in the Simms Initiatives, sorting through the letters of William Gilmore Simms’s granddaughter, I likely would not be 2 talking to you about him. And if it had not been for a few scholars, and the indefatigable promotional efforts of his granddaughter Mary Simms Oliphant, it is unlikely that we would be talking about Simms today at all. But this is to get ahead of myself, and I will proceed in order. A s of 1896, then, Hubbard felt quite free to consign Simms to “Oblivion.” Yet this 1853 character sketch was to be reprinted as part of a series with the likes of Whitman and Hawthorne—a series oddly not including Poe. And this sketch had been written in 1853 by William Cullen Bryant, himself a poet of no mean repute, who was also the subject of another of these sketches. You may gather, then, that whatever the state of his reputation in 1896, in 1853 William Gilmore Simms had the sort of national reputation that made him the peer of New York publishers like Putnam and Northern writers like Bryant, who had journeyed down to his South Carolina plantation for a visit. In fact, Simms had reason to consider Bryant a friend. As early as 1843, Bryant had lent his prestige to Evert Duyckinck and others, mostly New Yorkers in publishing circles, in forming the American Copyright Club, a group dedicated to promoting American writers over the cheap reprints of foreign writers who enjoyed no copyright protection in the United States (Greenspan 680). This group, part of a loose affiliation of writers, editors, publishers, and printers called the Young Americans, had from the first included Simms as one of its key American authors (681); by 1845 Duyckinck and others had persuaded Wiley & Putnam to publish its Library of American Books (682). Ezra Greenspan argues that the collection “marked nothing less than the coming of age of American literary culture” (678). For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse was assembled for this series (684); in this same series Edgar Allan Poe’s short story collection titled Tales and his poetry collection The Raven and Other Poems were compiled (686); Herman Melville’s novel Typee was also in the collection. Greenspan notes that Duyckinck and Simms worked well together, “through the mails when Simms was home in South Carolina and through personal visits when Simms made his way up North” (687). Whereas Poe, whose tastes and reputation were always more Continental than Anglo-American, was a Southern writer but not naturally sympathetic to the literary nationalism of the Young Americans, Greenspan tells us that “Simms was a natural candidate for inclusion in Duyckinck’s circle of cultural nationalists.” Greenspan explains: Keenly ambitious to establish his reputation as a literary professional both regionally and nationally, Simms had long fought to overcome the disadvantage of conducting his career from a position of isolation and distance from New York (“the true publishing city”). […] 3 The initiative for the deal came from Simms. (688) As with Hawthorne’s Mosses and Poe’s Tales, for his first book in the library Simms proposed “a volume of his tales,” eventually titled The Wigwam and the Cabin. At least equally important was the next move. As Greenspan describes it, Even before that volume was out, Simms suggested a follow-up edition of his critical pieces, which Wiley and Putnam brought out in separately printed volumes in 1846 and 1847 as Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction, one of the finest critical assessments of its topic in the decade. In particular, the impressive first volume—with its essays on “Americanism in literature,” American history for the purposes of art, American Indian art, and Daniel Boone nicely complemented one of the underlying goals of the Wiley and Putnam Library: to open up the native grounds and resources of America to literary culture. For the proponents of literary nationalism, that alliance of writers clustered around New York publishers eager to surpass the Massachusetts stalwart, Simms was a godsend. A t this point, with your indulgence, I think it worth quoting at length from the resume of Views and Reviews at the Simms Initiatives, as it summarizes this important background information so neatly and rapidly that it would be entirely redundant for me to summarize it for you. As you follow this, note how many times and places Simms had already reworked this material by 1845, when he was in mid-career and arguably nearing the height of his powers: Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction […] shows the author […] presenting and promoting the cultural agenda of the “Young America” movement, whose members included Melville, Poe, and Hawthorne. Views and Reviews is thus a central text in understanding the struggle for defining American literature […against the] Whiggish group centered around The Knickerbocker, one of the key nineteenth century American literary journals. […] Simms was intent on demonstrating and analyzing what Alexander B. Meek of Alabama had called, in An Oration before the Phi Kappa and Demosthenean Societies of the University of Georgia, at Athens, August 8, 1844, “Americanism in Literature.” Simms’s review of this oration appeared in January 1845 in the Southern and Western Magazine, a periodical that he had just started and was editing in Charleston. With the addition of two long notes and other 4 revisions, it became the lead piece in the first series of Views and Reviews.[…] Other essays did similar work, including “The Epochs and Events of American History, as Suited to the Purposes of Art in Fiction,” a long essay that presented the substance of orations Simms gave before the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah in 1842 and, in revised form, later also included in six installments in the 1845 Southern and Western Magazine. “The Epochs and Events” merged all of these various versions together into a single coherent essay.[…] Publication of Views and Reviews was slow. Both volumes (or series) have the publication date 1845; according to C. Hugh Holman’s introduction to the 1962 reprinting of Views and Reviews, the first series “was ready and the second under way by October” of that year.[2] On 19 November 1845, the Broadway Journal announced a November publication, and, then, on 4 December, a December one. Yet, to Simms’s frustration, the volume was still not out by February 1846.[3] Indeed, it did not appear until the first of May. Two months later, the second series still had not gone to press. While lamenting that Wiley and Putnam showed “so little disposition … to bring [the volume] properly to the view of the public,” Simms insisted that his contract be honored, and the compromise quickly reached was to make a smaller collection.[4] Even after this decision, it was July 1847 before the second series was issued. Not included in the end were a number of essays that Simms had indicated, in the “Advertisement” to the first volume, would be part of the work; these excluded essays were pieces from the Knickerbocker, the American Monthly Magazine, the Orion, and other similar publications. Because of its central place in the struggle between the Young America movement and its enemies, the reception of Views and Reviews was cold. The Knickerbocker was savage in its review, and Harvard College’s Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, Cornelius Felton, attacked not just Simms, but the whole Library of American Books, in a review essay in the October 1846 issue of North American Review, the Boston ally of The Knickerbocker. According to Felton, Views and Reviews “breathe[d] an extravagant nationality, equally at war with good taste and generous progress in liberal culture.”[5] In Britain, Blackwood’s concurred, judging that “in every page” Simms “has quite liberated himself from all those fetters and prejudices which, in Europe, go under the name of truth and common sense.”[6] The coldness of its reception would seemingly indicate how seriously the enemies of Young America took Simms’s work in Views and 5 Reviews—and thus also how well the essays themselves elucidated the cultural project of Young America. (Simmons) I trust this establishes that by the middle 1840s, well before our convenient entry point in 1853, Simms was a major national author whose fiction and criticism both were making waves, and that his reputation was inextricably tied up with his outspoken advocacy of a distinctively, even aggressively, American literature. Before the details of this passage fade, though, we should pause to remember Elbert Hubbard’s crushing sentence, that Simms had “courted oblivion—and won her.” It is worth remembering, of course, because that 1896 editor’s work was not only over the title of G.P. Putnam’s sons (a splinter of Wiley & Putnam), but over the title of The Knickerbocker Press. And why, according to Hubbard, had Simms found such oblivion? By relocating, Hubbard said, “from Massachusetts to South Carolina.” Snubbed Yankees, let it be said, have a better memory for grudges than geography. Simms, of course, had never lived in Massachusetts. Let us return to Bryant’s lulling prose for a better sense of where and how Simms lived: In a 1943 article, John W. Higham fills in a few more biographical blanks. Higham gives special attention to the economic and political differences between Charleston society and the planters. Higham points out that as “the son of a Charleston merchant, Simms was born […] when commercial interests and Federalist philosophy dominated the coastal plain of South Carolina” (210). In 1830, when he would have been 24, Simms was far more loyal to the idea of 6 American unity than to regional considerations. Higham points out that in articles and speeches, Simms fought the State Rights party with an unswerving fidelity to the Union. In Webster’s reply to Hayne he found full expression of the just principles of government.[…] “What God hath put together,” he cried at a Union meeting, “let no man put asunder.” (212) Higham rounds out this portrait by describing Simms as not only possessed of “A strong sense of Americanism in literature” but also “an ardent Anglophobe”; Simms advocated an “intellectual independence” and called for “native artists to express the national character” (212). Some of these sentiments fared better than others as the 1830s got underway. Says Higham, “The fall elections completed the defeat of the Unionists, establishing the supremacy of the doctrine of nullification. Federalism had made its last stand in South Carolina” (212). From that point forward, Simms would be steadily maneuvered into an increasingly narrow space, until eventually (after about 1856, say) he would be considered a staunch defender of the plantation culture of South Carolina—but we are still anticipating. There is something unsatisfying about Higham’s 1943 depiction of Simms; something that smacks of a preachy story with a simplistic moral. Something that smacks of Elbert Hubbard and that remote tie to the Massachusetts claque that formed around The Knickerbocker. Higham’s description of Simms reads like the liner notes on an opera CD at times, full of melodrama lightly sketched. A sample: His hopes of a legal and political career shattered, Simms determined to seek a vocation in literature. The collapse of his party marked the beginning of a fundamental change in Simms’ ideas as well as in his vocational aspirations.[…] By the middle of 1835 Simms had moved from Charleston to the cotton belt, and in the following year he married the heiress of six hundred cultivated acres and seventy slaves. By this means the erstwhile merchant’s editor entered the ranks of the ruling class and permanently linked his destiny with that of the landed gentry. (212-3) Higham’s dates and times are correct. But the narrative is far too simple, and will not fit with what we have already worked out. For Higham, the great inflection point in this melodrama is an election in 1830, when Simms was just 24 years old. Higham does not give enough weight to the fact he well illustrates, that everything Simms had done in pursuit of a “legal and political career” had been done in the manner of a literary man, by editing and writing for newspapers and magazines. And Higham seems to treat the move from Charleston to the plantation as a retreat, as though Simms were now on the defensive. Higham is right, however, that 7 Simms did change his views on a number of issues, and that some of this change must be linked to the difference in perspective between his Charleston merchant upbringing and the plantation life he married into. Higham acknowledges that “devotion to the cause of a distinctively American literature still consumed” Simms throughout the 1830s and into the 1840s (215). “As yet,” he says, “[Simms] did not consider the North as a hostile entity.[…] Simms could still avow himself ‘an ultra American.’” All sources agree with Higham that Simms was gradually becoming an apologist for slavery, moving from an awkward dismissal to an attempt to argue that white slaveholders were training their slaves for eventual freedom (214). We need hardly point out that laws forbidding the education of slaves would make a liar out of Simms to see the serious problems with that reasoning, but perhaps we can credit Simms with at least hoping he could find a justification that reflected some sense of justice and the unique worth of every human being. As Higham says, “Simms was still far from the vanguard of slavery’s apologists” in his 20s and 30s. I am sorry to have to report that this would change, as Higham reports: Called upon in 1852 to reprint the article which he had written in 1837 justifying slavery, he deleted the reference to its ultimate disappearance, substituting: The African seems to have his mission. He does not disappear, but he still remains a slave or a savage! I do not believe that he ever will be other than a slave, or that he was made to be otherwise; but that he is designed as an implement in the hands of civilization always. We would not be doing justice to the fervor with which Simms argued the point, nor the cost of the final decision against race slavery in our culture and in this country, if we did not acknowledge how wrongheaded and inexcusable such a position must be for us; how reprehensible even for him! And in the same breath let us remember that it is this same William Gilmore Simms that is described in William Cullen Bryant’s sketch, published in 1853; a Simms that will not easily fit into the box Higham has tried to build for him. I know that “ultra-American” Simms cannot be kept in Higham’s narrative shoebox, because Higham has to arbitrarily abandon his own rationale to explain Simms’s advocacy for industrialization in the South: “A charter member of the South Carolina Institute for the Promotion of Art, Mechanical Ingenuity, and Industry,” Higham says, “[Simms] sponsored the movement for the encouragement of manufacturing not because of any reversion to old class sympathies, but simply as a measure of sectional exigency” (217). Such special pleading gives away the game: Higham’s attempt to attribute Simms’s changing views to class affiliation is far too simplistic to account for the material he describes. Nonetheless, whatever 8 its flaws, Higham’s 1943 article is itself a useful marker for the end of the “Oblivion” Hubbard proclaimed for Simms in 1896. P erhaps I should admit that I am being a little bit hard on Hubbard. Even though his Foreword does plainly differentiate between those who his publishing affiliates had canonized and those like Simms who Hubbard thinks worthy of “Oblivion,” Hubbard does at least try to say some nice things about the author whose name his book will help to perpetuate. Quoth Hubbard: Well, it’s not exactly fulsome praise; I doubt very much that Simms would have received with equanimity the implication that his works require, like those of a foreigner, to be translated and introduced and contextualized for an American audience. For better or for worse, Simms would have thought it quite un-American to speak of him that way; and we must suspect that even in these compliments there lurks some Knickerbocker spite. I do not know whether it is a defense of Hubbard to point out that he is scarcely less acid to Bryant himself. I will say that I have never heard the name of Elbert Hubbard mentioned as a candidate for the pantheon of all-time literary greats. What makes this passage worth quoting, though, is the reference to “Atalantis” and to the recovery of reputation, for our exploration should tend that way, next. First, and briefly, let me just point you to Bryant’s mention of Simms’s poetry: 9 Based on the criticism I’ve read, and what little I’ve seen of the poetry Simms generated in his early 20s (after which he wrote very little poetry), I think I can honestly say that Bryant is being kind. Nobody wishes that Simms had fancied himself a poet, rather than a novelist or essayist. What Bryant is ill-qualified to judge, however, is Simms’s fiction, partly because he is writing in 1853 on the basis of an earlier visit; partly because, as a poet, Bryant judges by poetry. Although there is a complex background to the next stages of our exploration, I am going to focus on just a few major steps in the restoration of Simms’s reputation. One of the most important has to be this introduction by C. Hugh Holman, written in 1958: Holman, like Higham, is trying to account for the “Oblivion” that Hubbard pronounced for Simms. His literary judgment is considerably more worthwhile than that of Higham, and has the advantage of being formed after at least ten years of working with Simms; he published on Simms’s use of Shakespeare in 1950, and 10 on the relationship between Simms, Sir Walter Scott, and James Fenimore Cooper in 1951—and I regard both of these as among the best of the criticism I have read on Simms. The dramatic works Holman mentions are universally agreed upon to be failures; they were apparently attempts to create spinoffs from Shakespeare’s works, and unsurprisingly went nowhere. Holman is perhaps too hard on the stories, and thinks too little of the essays, but critics I’ve read are divided on their real worth. W e do not need to defend everything Simms wrote in order to think he did something important. Simms himself referred to some of his early poems, essays, and stories as “trash” in a line John C. Guilds has excavated from Simms’s early work. Guilds concludes his very detailed 1968 investigation into Simms’s work in 1828-29 as editor of the Southern Literary Gazette with the following admonition: But before one comes to a settled conclusion on the accomplishments of this highly productive young editor, he should remember Simms’s own dictum: “As long as the Editor is compelled, as we have frequently been, to write one half of his book himself, one half of what he writes, must be trash.” (87-8) What Guilds successfully points out, though, is that in 1828 and 1829, about the age of 23, Simms was keeping a modestly well circulated monthly, then semimonthly, literary magazine afloat while writing most of its content and submitting material to other venues. According to the chronology included with my copy of The Yemassee, by the year 1830 Simms had apprenticed with an apothecary, studied law, married at 20, passed the bar at 21, served as a city magistrate, and published several books of poetry (“A Simms Chronology”). Guilds describes the very young man who began editing the Southern Literary Gazette in this way: “William Gilmore Simms, Jr., now twenty-two years old and the author of three modest volumes of verse and formerly an editor of another Charleston miscellany, the Album (1825)” (60). This was not the failing, crushed man Higham seemed to depict; today we might call Simms a “serial entrepreneur” in magazine editing. If one magazine did not last, Simms moved on to another, as he did when the Southern Literary Gazette went defunct after a failed merger with a new magazine, the Pleiades. Again, Guilds has the best summary: Why the Pleiades failed after a single issue can only be surmised, but whatever the reason, Simms was not long away from the editorial fauteuil (as he liked to put it), for at the beginning of the new year he became editor and one of the proprietors of the City Gazette and 11 Commercial Advertiser, the first of four newspapers with which he was to have editorial connections. (69) And it is when Guilds, writing in 1968, and Holman, writing in 1958, agree in this depiction of William Gilmore Simms that we may be confident we have begun to recover the true measure of the man. Holman has it thus: This portrait seems to bring together all the essential qualities that contributed to Simms’s high literary reputation when he was at the peak of his powers, and that made him one of those who helped to shape what generations would call “American” in our culture. W hat changed? For there is no doubt that Simms did undergo change: he was a peer of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Bryant and the great publishers, essayists, and lecturers of the day throughout the 1830s and 40s; yet in the latter half of the 19th Century and on into the early 20th, he disappeared from view, and even today we would hardly expect to see a Simms novel on a high school reading list, though Hawthorne, Poe, and even occasionally Melville will show up. One thing we can discount is Higham’s simplistic story of a crushed Simms retreating, tail tucked, from a crushing political and commercial failure in Charleston and retiring to the decadent plantation life. Referring again to the chronology, we find that Simms did indeed bury his first wife in 1832; she had already been diagnosed with tuberculosis when they married in 1826. Simms married again in 1836, just after hitting his stride as a novelist: before marrying Chevillette Roach, Simms had published Martin Faber, the book-length expansion of “Confessions of a Murderer,” in 1833; Guy Rivers, “his first border romance” and probably his breakthrough as a popular novelist, in 1834; and in 1835 he published both The Yemassee, “his most popular work of fiction,” and The Partisan, which critics today generally view as the beginning of his best work, the 12 series of Revolutionary War romances. And in the year he married for the second time, he also published Mellichampe, his second Revolutionary War story. Simms was not a warped, frustrated young man in retreat at this point in his career; his successful efforts in his late twenties easily dwarf the efforts he put into defunct literary magazines and lost political campaigns. Nor was his marriage a debilitating “golden crutch,” either, as Holman points out: Having spent most of his time after his first wife’s death in the North, cultivating his friendships with prominent publishers in New York and Philadelphia, Simms now maintained connections in cotton country, Charleston society, and the younger Northeastern publishing centers (conspicuously not Boston, Massachusetts, the older publishing powerhouse). Under these circumstances, Simms managed his friendships with the likes of Bryant and Duyckinck, his role in the Wiley & Putnam Library, and his participation in the Young America movement through the early 1840s. In the middle 1840s, Simms continued to be engaged in all these ways, and also weathered the noisy and nasty high-profile rivalry of the writers clustered around The Knickerbocker against the writers in his Young America circle. Lewis Gaylord Clark at The Knickerbocker, especially, was so hostile to the work Simms was doing in various magazines and the books for Wiley & Putnam that, by 1845, the pages of Knickerbocker and The Broadway Journal were afire with invective (Tomlinson 106-7 et passim). Simms, editing the Southern and Western magazine, kept up his end without engaging Clark directly—while friends such as Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews were drawn into the broil (113). Poe, though not necessarily a supporter of the Young Americans, was then editing The Broadway Journal, was drawn into the fray: 13 And so Tomlinson, writing in 1975, joins Holman and Guilds in underlining the importance of Simms’s magazine editing, his role as a public advocate for a certain idea of American literary culture. Tomlinson summarizes the role Simms played in the Knickerbocker controversy as follows: And with that agreement, we seem to have firmly grasped one dimension of the career William Gilmore Simms. A ll of which leads us to a 1980 article by Miriam Shillingsburg, one that I think summarizes the importance of his career better than almost any other—and touches on the thread of his career that we have been neglecting, the novels. Shillingsburg leads with a summary that will, by now, seem familiar: 14 And Shillingsburg helps to firmly establish that Simms viewed local and regional concerns as crucial to the meaning of a unified American culture: 15 Shillingsburg then attempts to account for the change in Simms’s literary output after the 1850s. She traces this to a career move that made Simms into the Southern institution that he is best remembered for being—and that made it easy for his rivals to push him to the margins after the Civil War, in part because of the part he came to play in defending slavery and advocating secession. Shillingsburg points out that Simms “gave up the literary wars and in 1849 took up the editorship of the Southern Quarterly Review. This was an important turn in his career, for the magazine was the first which Simms edited that was not almost entirely literary in its intent” (412). And while Simms brought a higher cultural standard to the magazine than it had before, Shillingsburg points out that The key phrase, here, is “his own fiction fell off in quantity and […] in quality” (413). Simms, precisely in living up to his role as a leading American public intellectual, found the radical divisions of his time impossible to avoid. In the end, he quit trying, and threw in wholly behind his section. We have spared almost no word for Simms’s fiction, which would require an entirely separate exploration, equally long. Let me simply follow almost every critic I have found and recommend that, if you plan to read some Simms, you begin with the eight Revolutionary War novels, the first of which was the 1835 romance The Partisan. If that is sufficiently intriguing, some of you may also enjoy dipping into his Life of Francis Marion, which touches on similar themes and persons in the form of a biography. Those who have seen the 2000 Mel Gibson movie The Patriot will be at least slightly familiar with the flavor of Simms’s work, as much of the material there seems to have come from these works (though I do not know what he would have made of Gibson’s interpretation of the role of Marion). A s I have done so much throughout this talk, let me rest in the end on the words of another, better critic; I offer as a summation these lines from a 2004 article 16 by Thomas C. Allen. One need not defend every view the man held to recognize that Simms did a great deal in the way of defending a way of being American that, until the early-to-mid 20th Century heyday of Southern Gothic and the spate of literary interest in the South it engendered, had come to seem impossible. For that, and probably for more, he is worth a look. Thank you for your kind attention. I will be happy to answer any questions I can. [speaking text: bibliography available upon request]