Fetching the Old Southwest: Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain

Abstract

Fetching the Old Southwest: Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain. By James H. Justus. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Pp. xiii, 578. Acknowledgments, list of abbreviations, introduction, afterword, bibliographic note, index. $54.95.) Fetch n. A contrivance, dodge, stratagem, trick. v. To go in quest of; to steal (Obs.); to succeed in bringing (Now rare); to move to interest. . . . to close in upon, surround; to enclose, take in; to cheat (Obs.). -Oxford English Dictionary This is the source of the title of James H. Justus's study of Old Southwest humor. Justus closes in upon, surrounds, encloses, and takes in this subject in a substantial volume. He shows the ways in which the authors of the humorous sketches of the antebellum Southwest contrived to present the crude, disorderly, fluid life of the region by literary and linguistic stratagems and tricks. book contains copious footnote references to the humorous sketches and a bibliographic note that includes both standard works and recent critical and bibliographic scholarship. While any reader will benefit from it, for Arkansas readers, in a region that still enjoys a vibrant humorous tradition, this is a particularly informative and useful book. book has three sections. first is a convincing argument that the Myth of the Ruined Homeland was only that, a postwar creation of southern romantics. European and English visitors wrote home about antebellum America as primitive, unruly, and dirty, remarking little difference between patricians and yeomen. And the Americans' heroes of this period, such as Daniel Boone, David Crockett, J. J. Audubon, or Johnny Appleseed, were famous for their unwillingness to settle down. Typically the antebellum South did not resemble the romanticized film version of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Indeed, the Irish Catholic Gerald O'Hara, Scarlett's father, was more representative of the Old Southwest than of Old Virginny. In the second section, The World the Humorists Found, Justus shows that the inhabitants of that world were not settlers so much as passers-through. really settled townspeople established farms, businesses, churches, and other institutions, but the dominant spirit was a restless pursuit of wealth by speculation, financial chicanery, or any means but plodding, monotonous labor. In the fluid society of the West, men came from elsewhere or nowhere and could create a past to suit their present circumstances. A farmer might also be preacher or a carpenter. A man might claim to be a lawyer, a schoolmaster, a doctor-whatever the main chance dictated, a fact that worked to the advantage of the pranksters and con men in these humorous sketches. authors themselves often adopted writing as an alternate occupation. Batesville's C. F. M. Noland was a newspaperman and politician, and Thomas Kirkman and Alexander McNutt were planters. George Washington Harris, among other occupations, was a steamboat captain and a railroad conductor. …