My Twentieth Century: Leaves from a Journal

Abstract

am not sure why the number eighty seems so weighty, compared with its predecessor or even with its successor. What are the landmark ages? Being old enough to drive? To vote? Or fifty? One young friend told me gloomily that after fifty it is all downhill. could only respond that my resume begins at age fifty. At any rate, eighty is a good time for putting the pieces together, for trying to make sense of eight decades of My title was inspired by the protagonist in Penelope Lively's novel Moon Tiger, who says--apropos of her plan to write a history of the world--My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours. The voice of ... Darwin, of whoever you like, speaks in one tone to me, in another to you. The signals of my own past come from the received past. The lives of others slot into my own life. Like this woman, assume that my twentieth century is not yours and that we can only imperfectly convey our individual life experience to each other. But also assume that with documents the historian can try to reconstruct a partly shared past--and that we are all primary sources for the social historian. The documents in this case are thirty-one volumes of a journal begun in the summer of 1939. For the years before the journal must rely on treacherous memory. My beginning was decidedly provincial and my geographic frame narrow. Born in a village in southwest Georgia, grew up from age two in the small, sleepy town of Athens, Georgia, founded in the late eighteenth century to be the home of the state university. When enrolled there 150 years later, one member of the faculty had taught my grandfather, and his colleagues were nearly all in a nineteenth-century mold, more like Mr. Chips than like twentieth-century scholars. The most admired of them were classicists. Retirement was not even a concept. There were no pensions. Faculty members continued to teach until illness or death brought their careers to an end. am astonished to find myself in 1939 writing, I enjoy him [the professor of Latin] immensely. But somehow I'm not sure he isn't a prisoner in the ivied walls of the University and the world at large is just a mass of shadows to him. It seems unlikely that had at that point come upon Plato's cave, but whence came that echo? Faculty people, along with impecunious members of long established families, a few lawyers, a couple of doctors, and a handful of prosperous businessmen made up the town elite. With few exceptions, these people lived in what was called genteel poverty. Across the river was the mill village about which children on our side of town, or indeed our elders, knew very little. Beyond the town limits were many farm families, mostly poor, and half the population of the county was black. That vanished world, so clear in my mind's eye, is now totally gone. Soon there will be no one alive who remembers it. How can convey to you, who are mostly younger and mostly not southern, what it felt like? The drowsy summer atmosphere when few students were around, and when, in that dark age before air conditioning, everyone, perforce, moved slowly. High ceilings and electric fans helped for those who could afford them. Everyone else simply accepted being hot as a fact of Evenings found most folks on front porches, their own or those of their neighbors. Twice each day a dignified African American gentleman delivered the mail on foot--letters bearing a three-cent stamp and often with only the name of the town for an address. He knew every child by name. Youngsters walked to school and in summer had to make their own recreation--in my case by hanging around the neighborhood tennis court and imitating what saw. That tennis court was itself emblematic of life in the first part of this century: a great aunt had built it for her five children. Three of them died of tuberculosis in young adulthood, yet she continued all her life to maintain the court for all the other youngsters in the neighborhood, one of whom turned out to be some sort of state tennis champion. …