An Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms

Abstract

Art Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms. Edited by John Caldwell Guilds and Charles Hudson. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. iii, 604. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $39.95.)For some time now, John C. Guilds has led a dedicated drive to the recovery and revivification of the writings of William Gilmore Simms. Guilds has written a full biography and has edited an anthology sampling Simms's many genres, not to mention tirelessly encouraging Simms studies through conferences. In this latest venture, he teams up with anthropologist Charles Hudson to focus on one theme: Simms' s literary use of southeastern American Indians. An Early and Strong Sympathy brings together most of the essays, letters, short stories, and poetry (but not, clearly, the novels or histories) where Simms used Indian characters or themes. It is a thick book, which of course it would be, given Simms' s extraordinary output. Included here are stories familiar to Simms readers (Caloya: The Loves of a Driver, Jocassee: A Cherokee Legend), plus many hard-to-find nonfiction essays and a full account of his Indian poetry, much of which was previously unpublished.It is best to ask up front what the intent of such a collection might be. Guilds has been properly anxious to call more attention to Simms, whose reputation languished on the margins for most of a century after his death in 1870. That period of neglect is decidedly over now, partly because of Guilds and partly because antebellum southern intellectual history is itself a hot field and Simms must and should play a central role in its evolution. This revival presents its own problems, as Guilds points out. Renewed interest is fine, but too often Simms gets treated as the planter class's pet litterateur, a kind of cultural artifact. The actual Simms was contradictory and ambivalent, at once in love with southern culture and at war with it. was a complex iconoclast (xiii) whose considerable talents displayed a sensitivity and ambiguity that is easy to overlook. Pursuing a single theme through his writings is to follow a mind that was curious and restless and evolutionary. As a topical exploration of Simms's changing attitudes, this anthology is superb.As an examination of Indian culture in the Old Southwest, on the other hand, it is necessarily limited. Charles Hudson's introductory essay on the ethnographical potential in Simms's writings is candid. Simms, Hudson notes, lacked the knowledge and skills to understand the complexities of Indian culture. He viewed it as an appropriate subject for belles lettres, not as an exotic human institution that begged for explanation(xxxxix). This is a sensible caution. Simms tried in his own way to make his stories as accurate as possible, but he was the first to admit that historical fact could not contain his imagination. he wrote to instruct and to capture the genius of a people or a time, so he gave his inventiveness free play. Many of his stories were myths of place-tales concocted to explain the origins of so many Indian place-names-and show almost nothing of actual Indian culture. More commonly, he tended to take universal plots of love and revenge and place them in Indian settings, and much of his characterization of Indian kinship relations and power structures was more European than native American.If we learn little about Indians, we nonetheless learn quite a bit about Simms. What is most striking is his willingness to challenge-through the use of Indian scenarios-two sacrosanct conventions of white culture. …