Southwestern Humor Research Articles

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

Mark Twain in Context

Mark Twain in Context

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

Mark Twain: American Humorist

Mark Twain: American Humorist

Tom Sawyer Said He Was “a Stranger from Hicksville, Ohio, and His Name Was William Thompson”

Abstract This article highlights the impact that southwestern humorist William Thompson had on Mark Twain's composition of his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and his 1894 book Tom Sawyer Abroad. In both novels, Huck refers to Tom Sawyer as “William Thompson” and “Bill Thompson.” This prompts a further investigation of Twain's authorial intention. There are many textual elements in these two novels which suggest the possibility that Twain was conscious of Thompson and critical of his dubious literary and political involvement in promoting slavery and a secessionist agenda both before and after the Civil War. Consequently, Twain's masterpiece can be read in quite an unprecedented way. It also becomes important that Tom is punished in both books for his mischievous and evil doings, which he deems “romantical” and “noble.” This ultimately demonstrates Twain's mastery of southwestern humor and how he turns the tables on Thompson and other proslavery southwestern humorists and southern writers.

The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire

The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire

“It’s Good to Be Shifty”: The Local Democracies of Old Southwestern Humor

Emerson’s essay reassesses representative texts of the popular antebellum tradition known as Old Southwestern Humor—among them Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes (1835), Johnson Jones Hooper’s Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845), and George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a Durn’d Fool (1867)— arguing for a new point of departure from the level of locality and with special attention to democratic decision making. Most nation-oriented readings portray the humor of the Old Southwest either as a regional subset supplementing nationalization via print culture or as reactionary polemics rejecting the impingements of nation, market capitalism, urbanization, or modernity. This essay, instead, reads these fictions in terms of locality and for their articulations of alternative democratic socialities. These socialities, Emerson argues, evidence local decision making existing alongside or outside the abstracting, normalizing tendencies of elitist republican ideology; they are unreceptive to traditional social hierarchies and civic institutions that supplement the Constitutionally managed nation-state; and they often engage in a more radical version of democracy characterized by dialogical negotiations in immediate spaces and temporalities. Unyoked from the nation and its norms, these local episodes yield an unexpected trove of alternative democratic positions in the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to new readings of the primary texts, Emerson concludes with some consideration of their circulation in print culture across the country and their subsequent impact on democracy in the national imaginary.

Views from the Dark Side of American History by Michael Fellman (review)

Reviewed by: Views from the Dark Side of American History by Michael Fellman Mark Grimsley Views from the Dark Side of American History. Michael Fellman. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8071-3902-9, 176 pp., paper, $22.50. This slender volume contains six essays. With slight revisions, four have been published before, and the basic theme—that American history has a “dark side”—will come as no news to most readers. What, then, makes this book worth reading in its entirety? The answer is that it traces the intellectual journey of its author, the late Michael Fellman, who died a few months after its publication. The inspiration for this book may be familiar to many senior scholars. While cleaning out his history department office, Fellman discovered a long-forgotten conference paper. That might have been the end of it, save that a few weeks later he happened to mention the paper to Michael Parrish, a series editor at Louisiana State University Press. Parrish urged Fellman to send it to him. Fellman agreed, and Parrish responded with a suggestion that Fellman might put together a collection of his essays, tied together with stories of their intellectual origins. The stories make the book worth reading. The first concerns Fellman’s firsthand observations of the foment of protests at the university. The second focuses on Jewish American historians of slavery—particularly of Stanley Elkins and Lawrence W. Levine—and here, Fellman, who was himself Jewish, contends that the work of such historians is strongly tinged with knowledge of the Holocaust and that this background knowledge “in some ways has limited Jewish approaches to the problems of power and authority as exemplified in the black slave character” (42). This is particularly obvious in the case of Elkins, who famously drew direct parallels between slavery and Nazi concentration camps that could and did break down the psyches of their inmates. [End Page 483] Fellman initially presented the paper at the American Studies of Israel conference in Haifa and subsequently at the 1982 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Knowing that his thesis was provocative, he confesses to a case of pre-presentation jitters. Because it is representative of Fellman’s commentary on each of his essays, the passage is worth quoting: “It was impossible for me to sleep the night before delivering this paper. I was to be the only white person on a panel about the writing of African American history at a time when there was considerable tension between African Americans and Jews in the historical community as well as in the wider society. And this was not my field of specialization.” Then, in words from which any jittery scholar on the brink of a conference presentation could profit, Fellman goes on to say that he gave himself “a silent pep talk just before I began speaking: ‘You believe in this paper and these are professional historians who will give you a fair hearing. Besides, what the hell is academic freedom all about—just go for it’” (43). Although, as it turned out, the paper was well received, Fellman asserts that a prominent journal refused to publish it because its thesis was so controversial. He then filed the paper away, there to languish, forgotten for nearly thirty years, until he rediscovered it while cleaning out his office. The remaining essays are, in one way or another, drawn from Fellman’s published work: “At the Nihilist Edge: Reflections on Guerrilla Warfare during the American Civil War”; “Alligator Men and Sharpshooters: Deadly Southwestern Humor”; his iconoclastic “Robert E. Lee: Myth and Man”; and “Reflections on Inside War.” Inside War, perhaps Fellman’s best-known book, dealt with guerrilla warfare in Missouri and marked Fellman’s first foray into the Civil War, a subject that dominated the remainder of his career. Fellman’s reflections on the book typify the perspective that dominated most of his work: If traditional military historians often have continued to write of the Civil War with a patina of celebration, social historians like himself “are down in the trenches, smeared with blood. For us, the Civil War was a gigantic, messy, decentralized affair, severing limbs...

Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology (review)

Reviewed by: Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology John Mayfield (bio) Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology. Edited by M. Thomas Inge and Ed Piacentino. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. Pp. 360. Paper, $26.95.) Between 1830 and 1860, a diverse group of southern humorists produced a catalog of tall tales, satires, spoofs, and reminiscences that still ranks as the Old South's major literary contribution. "Serious" writers such as William Gilmore Simms always labored in the shadow of Cooper or Hawthorne, but the amateur humorists had no equal. The tradition began with Augustus B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes in 1834 and persisted in George Washington Harris's wildly anarchic Sut Lovingood. Clustered around these classics were many more, some well known and some not. The writers drew their characters from all strata of southern society, put them in uncomfortable and often ludicrous situations, and let them speak in their own words. Twain picked up the tradition in Huckleberry Finn, Faulkner developed it in Spotted Horses, and Andy Griffith brought it to television in Mayberry RFD. There have been anthologies of this humor from its beginnings. William T. Porter of the New York sporting journal Spirit of the Times encouraged the craft, and in 1964, Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham issued Humor of the Old Southwest, which has served as the standard for two generations. Now Thomas Inge and Ed Piacentino have produced a handsome new anthology that will carry us through for years to come. The differences between this volume and Cohen and Dillingham's are subtle. The new one has more emphasis on lesser-known wits such as Christopher Mason Haile ("Pardon Jones") or Hardin Taliaferro, and more stories feature blacks and women (although all the tales were written by white men). The editing is superb, the introductory biographies are to the point, and the core is there: Longstreet and his descendants live on. So does a core question: Why should we take such tales seriously? At one level the answer is simple: They are fun. Who can resist Sut Lovingood's moment of conquest when he slips two wriggly lizards up a revivalist's pant leg and watches the old windbag strip naked before a throng of pious females, hollering "the Hell-sarpents hes got me!" Or when Henry Clay [End Page 551] Lewis's Widow Rugby impulsively decides to horse-race a preacher to church and beats him by stripping to the buff to lighten her load? In this sesquicentennial "celebration" of the Civil War—with all its nostalgia for crinoline ladies and chivalrous gentlemen—it is good to remember that in 1860 the South was an unformed, fluid place where social status was insecure and life was anything but serene and elegant. The tales also remind us of what literary historian Richard Gray has called the patrician/populist divide in southern identity. Humor is by definition subversive of propriety and social conventions, and we have here what James Justus has called a "riot" of those very conventions. Given the fact that the stories came from literate, well-read gentlemen writing often about the antics of an underclass of plain folk and con men, who exactly was poking fun at whom, and why? An anthologist's selections and the ways in which they are framed are important issues. Early collections tend to be fondly nostalgic. The humorist is a yarn spinner and cracker-barrel philosopher telling whoppers about a time gone by. The lovable folk bring up visions of Jefferson's virtuous agrarians, and the fact that they whoop and holler and fight is a sign of democratic enthusiasm. Seen from this perspective, southern humor was populist to the core, and the humorist was a fond chronicler of its spirit. That changed during the 1960s as historians rediscovered the dark and bloody ground of antebellum social relations. There was nothing inherently funny about social stratification, poverty, cruelty, or illiteracy, unless one was using comedy as a shield. Kenneth Lynn's highly influential Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (1960) regards the storytellers as self-controlled gentlemen using satire to draw a cordon sanitaire between themselves and the bumpkins by mocking them. Lynn's analysis emphasizes class antagonism...

C. M. Haile’s “Pardon Jones” Letters: Old Southwest Humor from Antebellum Louisiana ed. by Ed Piacentino

BOOK REVIEWS C. M. Haile’s “Pardon Jones” Letters: Old Southwest Humor from Antebellum Louisiana. Ed. Ed Piacentino. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009. xiii, 240 pp. $37.50 cloth. MORE THAN A QUARTER-CENTURY AGO A HANDFUL OF SCHOLARS PUBLICLY argued that the most pressing need for Americanists working in nineteenth-century humor was the availability of accurate and dependable texts. Since much of this writing originated in regional as well as national newspapers, the problem was not an easy one for conscientious editors. Even if issues common to ephemeral publication (dialectal variation or typo?) were never quite settled, we eventually saw reliable editions of many of the Southwestern humorists emerging from the studies of M. Thomas Inge, David Rachels, David C. Estes, Raymond C. Craig, Edwin T. Arnold, and others. That record continues with Ed Piacentino’s impressive edition of the letters to “Pic” (George Wilkins Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune) of “Pardon Jones,” the creation of another northeastern migrant to the Old Southwest, C. M. Haile. In what he rightly calls “a recovery project,” the editor has unearthed sixty-seven letters from 1840 to 1848. Scarcely known alongside more familiar journalistic cousins who specialized in the mock letter (.C. F. M. Noland, W. T. Thompson), Haile follows the generic interest of most of his fellow humorists. Along with references to the Millerites, camp meetings, medical quackery, and political controversies, these letters, pulsating with vernacular exaggeration, feature such topics as hunting trips and animal hoaxes, militia fights, political speechifying, practical jokes, domestic squabbles, and self-inflicted misadventures. As Piacentino argues, however, Haile has his own distinctions. He is the only humorist of his day “to set some of his letters in three separate geographical locales: Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Mexico during the Mexican War.” A serious journalist who covered the early trying-out of the Civil War with the Texas problem, Haile used the “sociocultural milieu” of his fictional comic letters to expand the contours of Old Southwest humor. His “amusing scripts of cross-cultural engagement” during the Mexican War make him unique among his fellow humorists, but some students of culture might find more of interest in the second of those specified 312 Mississippi Quarterly three locales. When Haile sends Pardon and Jerushy back home to Massachusetts, he in effect is returning Southwestern humor to the northeast where, it could be argued, it had begun. On Pardon’s home turf, the seven letters from April to September 1841 are among the liveliest of the lot. Most of the notable characters, even those now living in the heart of Cajun country, are New England rustics, providing rich textual space to Pardon’s family and friends in the Bay State. They include Jerushy, who comes to life when she travels north (she names the old Jones homestead “Shady Grove” because “it sounded genteel.”); Capt. Nathan Potter; Simon Spalding (inept cannon master of the artillery company); Parson Miller (surviving his scolding by a brother of the cloth for getting too celebratory at Potter’s wedding, he becomes chaplain to Pardon’s Mexico Volunteers); Bill Fox (the bewhiskered Boston lawyer who threads his way through the letters as Pardon’s bête noir.); and Pardon’s rambunctious brother Bill (who gets thrown in a British prison for being caught in Queen Victoria’s bedroom). Even at home, however acclimated to Southern climate and culture (casual pejoratives for blacks come easily to his pen), Pardon is quick to suggest how his agricultural fellows in Luzyanny could benefit from his and Capt. Potter’s superior experiences in the colder regions, such as raising chickens and growing melons. And allegiance to his old house remains, despite tensions caused by abolitionists: he identifies himself in his letters to Pic from the war front as “Col. of the Bay State Melishy.” Despite their form, whose permutations of excess persist throughout the century and beyond, many mock letters are rich in realistic notation. Leaking into the fictional foreground of persons and places—vernacular speech, farcical situations, jokers and victims, mangled quotations, and tortured literary “offerings”—are data of immediate historical context: domestic, political, cultural. The primary interest, say, in Pete Whetstone’s letters may be the hunting...

The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor

The Old Southwest flourished between 1830 and 1860, but its brand of humor lives on in the writings of Mark Twain, the novels of William Faulkner, the television series The Beverly Hillbillies, the material of comedian Jeff Foxworthy, and even cyberspace, where nonsoutherners can come up to speed on subjects like hickphonics. The first book on its subject, The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor engages topics ranging from folklore to feminism to the Internet as it pays tribute to a distinctly American comic style that has continued to reinvent itself. The book begins by examining frontier southern humor as manifested in works of Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Woody Guthrie, Harry Crews, William Price Fox, Fred Chappell, Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, and African American writers Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, and Yusef Komunyakaa. It then explores southwestern humor's legacy in popular culture, including comic strips, comedians, and sitcoms, and on the Internet. Many of the trademark themes of modern and contemporary southern wit appeared in stories that circulated in the antebellum Southwest. Often taking the form of tall tales, those stories have served and continue to serve as rich, reusable material for southern writers and entertainers in the twentieth century and beyond. The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor is an innovative collaboration that delves into jokes about hunting, drinking, boasting, and gambling as it studies, among other things, the styles of comedians Andy Griffith, Dave Gardner, and Justin Wilson. It gives splendid demonstration that through the centuries southern humor has continued to be a powerful tool for disarming hypocrites and opening up sensitive issues for discussion.

Fent Noland: The Early Years

ON THE FIRST DAY OF 1858, sitting in a silent, empty house on Main Street in Batesville, Arkansas, a slender man, between coughing spells, penned a letter to his nephew in far-off Virginia: I am the sole tenant of the old mansion, in it and write from a room filled with a thousand memories of the past. Were I a believer in spiritualism and a medium, I could conjure up many beloved forms, who have passed from this to a better world. I do not ever feel lonely-a pleasant and sad feeling comes over me-soothing in its influence than otherwise. . . . What will the year 1858 do? How many who enter it full of life and hope are destined ere its race is over to in the cold and silent grave. . . . I have scarcely the shadow of a hope that I shall be able to visit Virginia. I am beginning to feel old and somehow or other have not managed to have me a home. I shall build this summer and then I expect to pass quietly away the life it may please a kind providence to grant me.1 In another man, such musings might have seemed morbid affectation. From Charles Fenton Mercer Noland, they were an honest assessment of his circumstances. He was back in Batesville to handle the depressing business of disposing of his father-in-law's estate. John Ringgold had recently vanished from the dark deck of a steamboat on the Mississippi River. Despite Ringgold's financial success-he was known as one of the most important businessmen in north Arkansas-the Panic of 1857 and his unexpected death had conspired to eat up much of his wealth. Ringgold's wife, Elizabeth, had died two years earlier, and the couple's daughters had married, leaving the brick house empty. Noland's own circumstances were happier, with a beautiful wife and a thirteen-year-old son. Thanks to two decades of publishing letters that had been embraced by a national audience, he was famous. As a legislator, public official, and newspaperman, he had also become a luminary among Arkansas's Whig minority. He was about to build in Little Rock the first home he had ever owned. Yet there were aspects of his life that dimmed the brightness of the future he hoped for. At forty-seven, he had enjoyed little financial success of his own, despite years of seeking the right endeavor, one that would be worthy of his enthusiasm and abilities and bring material rewards. He had lived in Little Rock for two years, and he had worked in three jobs, none of which proved satisfying to him. In addition, there was his persistent bad health. For more than two decades, he had been weakened by consumption and had several times been ill to the point of expecting to die. By 1858, his health was worse than ever, and he knew it. His words to his nephew were prophetic-before six months had passed, he would sleep in the cold and silent grave, in a donated plot in Little Rock's Mount Holly cemetery. His son, Lewis Berkeley Noland, would marry and manage to live through the Civil War, only to die childless in 1870 after a fall from his horse. With no estate and, ultimately, no posterity, Noland's only legacy seemed to be a mass of short publications, spinning tales of bear hunts, horse races, tavern brawls, and down-home politics in Arkansas. He had created a literary character, Pete Whetstone, whose letters to the New York Spirit of the Times delighted the nation. As perhaps the most popular and prolific contributor to one of the most influential outlets for humorous writing of his day, Noland would later be recognized by scholars as a major figure in the literary school of Southwestern Humor.2 In his own time, Noland would be confused with his creation (he received notes and gifts addressed to Pete) and imitated by other writers. Noland's fame grew so great that he became a celebrity, perhaps the best-known antebellum Arkansan. But unlike many of his colleagues in America's literary world, Noland did not collect his writings in a published volume, so he never made any money from the book sales that would almost certainly have followed. …

Southwestern Humor: The Beginning of "Grit Lit"

Southwestern Humor: The Beginning of "Grit Lit"

The Humor of the Old South

humor of the Old South-tales, almanac entries, turf reports, historical sketches, gentlemen's essays on outdoor sports, profiles of local characters-flourished between 1830 and 1860. genre's popularity and influence can be traced in the works of major southern writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Harry Crews, as well as in contemporary popular culture focusing on the rural South. This collection of essays includes some of the past twenty five years' best writing on the subject, as well as ten new works bringing fresh insights and original approaches to the subject. A number of the essays focus on well known humorists such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, William Tappan Thompson, and George Washington Harris, all of whom have long been recognized as key figures in Southwestern humor. Other chapters examine the origins of this early humor, in particular selected poems of William Henry Timrod and Washington Irving's The Legend of Hollow, which anticipate the subject matter, character types, structural elements, and motifs that would become part of the Southwestern tradition. Renditions of Sleepy Hollow were later echoed in sketches by William Tappan Thompson, Joseph Beckman Cobb, Orlando Benedict Mayer, Francis James Robinson, and William Gilmore Simms. Several essays also explore antebellum southern humor in the context of race and gender. This literary legacy left an indelible mark on the works of later writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, whose works in a comic vein reflect affinities and connections to the rich lode of materials initially popularized by the Southwestern humorists.

Play in Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes

The distinguishing feature of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Scenes is its depiction of play--in its two senses of contesting and role playing--as hallmark of antebellum southern life. The titles of sketches indicate that they are predominantly concerned with games, sports and artistic performances, and every sketch there is some form of play, from obvious forms of sport and role playing to, a few sketches, more complicated social and rituals. In most cases Longstreet presents characters as behaving life as if they were performing on a stage. These characters range from young man Georgia Theatrics, who rehearses a courthouse fight, to Ned Brace who assumes different characters pursuit of humor, to Miss Crump and her affectations, to a group of young men pretending to be wax figures, to narrators, Hall and Baldwin, taking part activities that are essentially role playing. Characters that act directly and immediately without a sense of a deliberate performance are scarce. Few critics have noted importance of play Scenes. The pioneering effort this respect is that of Michael Oriard his essay on southwestern humor. Oriard observes that in Southwestern humor center appears to be play and games (4). The collectively reveal the fact that game-playing was virtually a mode of existence for many of frontier denizens described hundreds of humorous tales, a mode that captured imaginations of writers that recorded (5). More recently, Scott Romine commented on Longstreet's tendency to connect communal harmony with play. He states, If Longstreet's ideal community each man should be easily apprehended and roles mutually accepted, a corollary truth is that a measure of uncertainty and instability--in short, a measure of play--is no less necessary for maintenance of communal norms and (9). Apt and revealing though these commentaries on play may be, they broach subject rather broadly and generally. A detailed discussion of play Scenes is needed if Longstreet's achievement this book is to be properly assessed. The first thing to note is that Longstreet does not present play simply as a significant activity southern society of early nineteenth century, but depicts it as essence of life of that society. He focuses on it to such a degree that it becomes identical with life or a substitute for it. The sketches contain examples of play that comprehend significant aspects of antebellum southern society, such as trade, education, politics, and interpersonal relationships general. In these examples, typical activities are presented without seriousness and logic that normally define them. They are divested of moral and rational elements order to become flexible enough to exist contexts from which they are normally excluded. Scenes shows clearly that forms of play are useful transforming or, at least, channeling violence, cruelty and similar negative impulses into harmless (if not, altogether, meaningful and creative) action. In these forms of play, there are two possible effects. The obvious and predominant one is catharsis that a player experiences as a result of directing his negative and antisocial impulses to object of play and using them up a contest instead of directing them at other people. The cathartic effect, as we shall see, :is possible even fights between men which violence is displayed, because violence, this case, occurs a context that ultimately transforms it into play. The other effect, which is less frequent and sometimes overlaps with first one, may be described as affirmative effect. This is produced by kind of play which is designed to affirm values of society and educate its members into significance of these values. James B. Meriwether states that Georgia Scenes provides abundant evidence that Longstreet thought impulses towards savagery and violence were to be found not far from surface many men, perhaps most of them; and it is function of human laws and institutions to restrain, discipline and civilize these impulses and to make good citizens out of barbarians (361). …

Oysters Rubinstein: An Afterword

An Afterword When Gavin Campbell first shared this vivid anecdote with us at Southern Cultures, it touched off a mixed response. Some of us saw it as a funny story in the vein of southwestern humor, popular from frontier days through Mark Twain and on down to Hollywood's fling with Gomer Pyle and The Beverly Hillbillies. Nobody disagreed with that, and Campbell's apt introduction makes clear that Jud's ambivalence about classical music was not a private idiosyncrasy but a real historical experience for many southerners of his own and subsequent decades. But a couple of us thought there was something else at work in Bagby's energetic sketch, and much discussion ensued. The fact that the lead essays in this issue debate Gone with the Wind as part of an ongoing crisis in southern gender relations only made the conversation livelier. So, Gentle Reader, we leave it to you to decide. Is George William Bagby another southern author who is hiding something in plain sight? The case for a double meaning in How Rubenstein [sic] Played starts with the problem of how to make longhair music seem palatable to southern countrymen. The author sets up the situation by eavesdropping on the conversation of Jud Brownin, cracker barrel philosopher, talking with a group of friends. Since this is 1873, the middle of Reconstruction, the men are undoubtedly ex-Confederate soldiers, still smarting from defeat. Jud has just been to New York to hear Anton Rubinstein, the great Russian concert pianist, and the good ole boys want to know what it was like. In popular stereotype, however, the artist and his music are effete, and the last thing these boys want to hear is another northern-inspired invitation to give up more of their war-wounded manhood. Even so, Jud liked the concert, and wants to say so without sounding like a sissy britches. What's his narrative strategy? Jud decides to tell his story as the tale of a powerful man, a feminized piano, and a listener who is almost feminized too. starts off with the lyrical beauty of the concert, so exquisite it moves him to womanly tears. The brief appearance of Cupid (the little white angel boy) hints at what is to come, and makes Jud [want] to love somebody. But this pastoral prelude is really just deceptive foreplay, for the onset of tender desire triggers a violent mood swing in the pianist. He got mad, Jud tells us, and turns on his instrument in a shocking reenactment of domestic violence. Sir, just went for that old pianner, Jud remembers. As if to punish his partner for tempting him with softness, he slapt her face, boxed her jaws, pulled her nose, pinched her ears and scratched her cheeks, till she farly yelled. …

Humor and revelation in American literature: the Puritan connection

Both the Genteel Tradition and Calvinistic Puritanism exhibited a sense of possessing inside information about the workings of the universe and the intentions of the Almighty. In Humor and Revelation in American Literature, Pascal Covici, Jr., traces this perspective from its early presence to the humorous tradition in America that has been related to the Old Southwest, showing how American Puritan thought was instrumental in the formative stages of American humor.Covici argues that much of American literature works as humor does, surprising readers into sudden enlightenment. The humor from which Mark Twain derived his early models had the same sort of arrogance as American Puritan thought, especially in regard to social and political truths. Twain transcended the roots of that humor, which run from works of nineteenth-century Americans back to British forms of the eighteenth century. In doing so, he helped shape American literature.In addition to reexamining Twain's art, Humor and Revelation in American Literature considers some of the writers long regarded as among the usual suspects in any consideration of cultural hegemony, including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville. Covici explores not so much the hypocrisy as the ambivalence repeatedly displayed in American literature. He demonstrates that even though our writers have always had a strong desire to avoid the influences of the past, their independence from its cultural, theological, and psychological effects has been much slower in coming than previously thought.Original and well-written, Humor and Revelation in American Literature will be welcomed by all scholars and critics of American literature, especially those interested in Puritanism, major nineteenth-century writers, Southwestern humor, and Mark Twain.

Heart in Conflict: Faulkner's Struggles with Vocation.

Heart in Conflict is a study of two periods of intense vocational crisis in William Faulkner's career as a writer: his time of apprenticeship, before the composition of Sound and the Fury, and the beginnings, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, of the long season of decline that followed the completion of Absalom, Absalom!These periods of crisis, Michael Grimwood argues, grew out of an ongoing tension between the divided components of Faulkner's personality between two versions of himself: the illiterate bumpkin and the sophisticated aesthete. It was a collaboration between these two postures that formed Faulkner's vocation, that created the impulse to translate the rural, unlettered world of Oxford, Mississippi, into a literature of the highest ambitions. But Faulkner was neither bumpkin nor aesthete. His awareness of the fraudulence of both his self-images, and ultimately his art, caused him to create, beginning with Wild Palms in 1939, novels divided against themselves both structurally and thematically, novels whose complexities emanate from their author's own complex personality.Grimwood traces the formation of Faulkner's divided personality in his childhood and youth, in the conflicting influences of literature and landscape, in the conflicting urges wrought by a mother who called him to the rigors of the schoolhouse and a father whose interests led to the diffuse pleasure of the world outside. The conflict gained dimension when Faulkner's earliest poems, written in the style of the European pastoral, were mocked by students in the pages of the University of Mississippi literary magazine. Faulkner internalized this mockery, and it would emerge in the late 1930s and early 1940s as a destructively self-critical compulsion to write novels Wild Palms, Hamlet, Knight's Gambit, and Go Down, Moses that were simultaneously pastoral and mock-pastoral, that reflected both an impulse to bequeath his own substance through words and a virtual surrender to illiteracy.In many ways, the tensions that divided Faulkner tensions between pastoral ideal and rural reality, between flights of language and attachment to the wordless soil also divided the whole of southern literature and society from the time of its origins. Such conflicts can be found in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, philosopher of democracy and slaveowner; in the southwestern humor and plantation fiction that dominated southern letters in the 1830s; and in the works of the agrarian writers of the 1930s, whose European poesy belies their dirt-road political beliefs. Showing how the tensions in the narratives mirrored tensions in the author and in his society, Heart in Conflict reveals William Faulkner as he struggled with his inheritance both as a southerner and as a southern writer.

Images of America: Travelers from Abroad in the New World by Robert B. Downs

Reviews 77 I See by My Get-Up. By Ron Querry. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. 151 pages, $19.95/$11.95.) On the literal level, Ron Querry tells the story of his metamorphosis from English teacher at the University of Oklahoma to cattle baron in New Mexico, to writer in Taos. Allegorically, the narrative celebrates fortitude, patience, and rashness as it interweaves the scenarios of the drifting cowboy who helps to save the ranch, of the tenderfootwho acquireswestern arete, and of the cow­ boywho is socompetent that he can stop being a cowboy—theVirginian motif. Morally, the tale recounts the way in which Querry is able to reconcile, in the process of writing the book, his desire to be a good old boy with his desire to use the academic training which the “real people” regard as womanly. The narrative is a bit weak anagogically, but characters and events are vividly and, as far as my experience reaches, accurately presented. The accounts of the Department Chair at the chili cook-off and of the first meeting of tenderfoot, bull, and squeeze chute do not depend on prior knowledge of the characters—I know the Chair but not Retardo Mountalbull, the two char­ acters least steady on their legs in this otherwise decorous narrative—but they are equally funny. Querry also has a real feeling for the landscape, people, and fauna of eastern New Mexico, and he conveys the passing of a generation whose legacy has been despoiled and abandoned by suburbanites for whom the West has become a picturesque diversion. The style exhibits the strengths (wryness of tone, vernacular rhythm, comic inflation) and weaknesses (vocabulary strained to archness, pseudo-oral padding, mock-self-deprecatory parentheses of southwestern humor.) More damagingly, this mode restricts Querry to stereotyped character and to anec­ dote, so that he is unable to make connections between events and their contexts. If Querry uses his own voice more consistently,' if he abandons the per­ sona of good old boy; and if he learns to trust his material and his reader— then in future work he can do more than entertain: he can tell us some important things about himself, about the West, and about those who read and enjoy his work. ROBERT MURRAY DAVIS University of Oklahoma Images of America: Travelers from Abroad in the New World. By Robert B. Downs. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. 232 pages, $24.95.) In a career that extends over more than half a century, the author of this volume has contributed prolifically to the literature of American librarianship 78 Western American Literature and bibliography. During the past three decades Robert B. Downs has also successfully addressed a nonspecialist reading audience as a scholar-bookman, summarizing and commenting on groups of “great books” in Western culture —west, that is, of China. His Books that Changed the World (1956) is a classic of the genre. Images of America, Downs’s most recent offering, is a seasoned perform­ ance in the latter line. Here he introduces us to forty works, issued between 1770 and 1944, all describing parts of America as seen by foreign travelers. Following a general introduction, he devotes one chapter to each of the titles under review. The reports of “standard” visitors like Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, and Stevenson all receive treatment, but Downs makes productive forays into less familiar territory. His accounts of independent visits to the United States in 1857 by a Japanese, Yukichi Fukuzawa, and a Russian, Aleksandr Lakier, are especially recommended. Downs’s claims for Images of America as a work of scholarship are mod­ est. His research, cited in the bibliographical notes, is not extensive. His book contains no footnotes, nor do page-references accompany his quotations. His practice of allotting on average about 1250 words to each author necessitates painful omissions and unsatisfying summary comments. Of course, Downs does not pretend to be encyclopedic or definitive. Instead, he offers a pleasant, well chosen, intelligently edited sampler. As he moves from author to author he agreeably varies the mix of biographical background, summary, and quota­ tion. (Henry Nevinson’s Good-bye, America! [1922] is represented almost entirely by a single...

Dan Jenkins' Needle

Dan Jenkins' Needle David L. Vanderwerken (bio) Drama critic Maurice Charney has written that comedy "provides a form of awareness by which we may understand and deal with a puzzling reality" (5). Dan Jenkins' Billy Clyde Puckett echoes Charney when he says that "laughter is the only thing that'll cut trouble down to a size where you can talk to it" (Life 272-273). Billy's country-shrewd remark could serve as his creator's underlying assumption in his sport-centered fiction and journalism. Indeed, Dan Jenkins has fashioned a lucrative career out of deflating sportsworld, lampooning the excesses and foolishness of organized sport so that we can "talk to it," doing so from a position of common sense and, paradoxically, deep affection. In his fiction, he reveals himself as a satirist very much in the American grain, a Mark Twain of the NFL, the Soumwest Conference, and the sports media. Larry L. King, a fellow master of redneck prose, has said in private conversation that some of the funniest moments in his life have occurred simply listening to Jenkins read and comment on the morning paper over coffee and cigarettes in Manhattan. In his recent journalism, especially his regular monthly column for Playboy, Jenkins has become our Mencken, outrageously and unabashedly prejudiced, jaundiced, eccentric, ornery, taking well-aimed [End Page 125] slapshots at all sorts of tomfoolery across the spectrum of contemporary sport. And who is Jenkins' audience? The same audience the satirist has always written for, what Louis I. Bredvold calls the "invisible church" (260) of good people, people like Puckett and his circle, Shake Tiller and Barbara Jane Bookman, who "nominated pretension as the gravest sin of all" (Life 49) way back in elementary school in that haven of good sense, Fort Worth, Texas. Perhaps all humorists eye folly from a haven of good sense, a known locale, familiar and comfortable, from Will Rogers' Oklahoma, Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, or Woody Allen's Manhattan, providing both a center and a stance. In short, a provincial quality inhabits much of our best humor, along with an attendant nostalgia and more than a touch of suspiciousness toward the outland and its outlandish behavior. Jenkins' psychic headquarters, despite twenty years of exile in New York City, is Texas in general, Fort Worth in particular. His frequent homecomings are likely the result of compelling urges even deeper than the perfectly understandable craving for an edible chicken fried steak with cream gravy and biscuits. Even if, as Billy Clyde says, Fort Worth is becoming a homogenized noncity "where people in the future were only going to communicate by word processor or over strawberry Margaritas at Happy Hour." Fort Worth was "once the world headquarters for white socks, Western music, and Tex-Mex food, an honest town where a man wasn't considered drunk unless he was lying down in a livestock pen and couldn't speak his native language," but "one day soon, if the planners had their way, everybody in Fort Worth could step gingerly into a restaurant specializing in fern salads and carrot boats" (Life 74). Standing behind Jenkins' Fort Worth looms the tradition of southwestern humor, that tradition that the major scholars of American humor claim is the most distinctively and natively American. As Walter Blair has pointed out, the nineteenth-century Southwestern Humorists such as Johnson J. Hooper and A. B. Longstreet were journalists who tailored their colloquial, locally colored tall tales of Georgia and Arkansas for an Eastern seaboard audience (64). Much of the appeal of the Southwestern Humorists, and that of the Local Colorists like Joel Chandler Harris as well, lies in their use of American vernacular speech, characterized by Walt Whitman as "native grand opera" (qtd. in Rourke 141). In the hands of a master such as Mark Twain, Jesse Bier rightly suggests, American oral idiom becomes a literary language of "powerful subtlety and eloquence" (12). Reviewing Semi-Tough, David Halberstam praises Jenkins' style, "black-white-rural-Southern, our richest national language," as reminiscent of Ring Lardner. But in Lardner "we were looking at the bush ballplayer. In Jenkins, the ballplayer is not so bush, and he is looking at us" (22). Not...