The Southern Autobiographical Impulse

Abstract

The questions are simple. Is there a southern autobiographical impulse, and if so, what are its sources? How does it express itself, and how does it differ from other American autobiographical impulses? Have the impulse and its expression changed over time, and if so, why? Is there a territory ahead, and what does it look like? Of the existence of an impulse there can be little doubt. It helps explain the meandering, anecdotal style of southern conversation. It is central to the southern habit of storytelling. Even when the stories are not explicitly autobiographical, they come down to the self of the teller--his identification with or repudiation of the neighbor, relative, or outsider who is the focus of the story. Down to the self, too, in terms of the teller's ability to grip listeners and work his way on them. Style is the man--vividly individual but simultaneously connected to the audience. He speaks my language, listeners inwardly affirm. Story calls to story in a game of conversational tag. Each becomes teller and listener in turn. Not only content and style, but the process itself both assumes and promotes a sense of community, wide or narrow: our family; fellow Methodists and others of the better sort; our race; this beloved state; the South; this country, beloved, too, right or wrong. Especially, for southerners, when wrong. All kinds of people can be loyal to the right. It is loyalty to the wrong that's the true test of character. This storytelling is the prototype of southern autobiographical writing. In this storytelling, the fates of individual and community become one and inseparable, for better and worse. Almost no autobiography (except nature writing) treats the individual totally in isolation from others, but the degree of embeddedness differs radically. Consider an axis with the individual at one pole and community at the other. American autobiography has exalted the individual as the end, measure, and symbol of the country, constitutive of community rather than the other way around. The myth of America has transported the individual out of community, out of history itself, and into a present, endlessly rocking. American loneliness begins in American ideology. The southern myth is one of community, soily, with a torn and tragic past. For southern autobiographers, the axis has been short: no community without the individual it exists to nurture and protect; no individual without the community, which shapes, confers purpose and meaning, and carries the memory of its members. So why was there relatively little formal autobiography from the white South? All talked out? The South from its colonial origins had participated in autobiographical writing in the form of letters and diaries. The National Book Award-winning The Children of Pride, a collection of letters written in the 1850s and 1860s by the family of a wealthy Georgia slaveholder and minister, illustrates how revealing a portrait of self and the South personal correspondence could paint. For diaries, one thinks first of that of William Byrd of Westover, although Byrd, who died in 1744, wrote before there was a United States, let alone a South. Unquestionably southern and fine is the Civil War journal of Mary Boykin Chesnut, revised and added to by Mrs. Chesnut and the whole so artfully crafted that it reads like an epistolary novel addressed to the self. Yet letters and diaries do not constitute autobiography, nor, judging from what has survived, did the South produce so much of this material as did other regions. Only once prior to the 1950s did the white South contribute much autobiography. After the Civil War, Confederate generals and others rivaled their northern counterparts in the furious fire that was military memoir. A number of the memoirs make good reading. H. K. Douglass's I Rode with Stonewall, for example, is full of vivid characterization and colorful stories--the sheer dash and tumble of military action. …