Vidal, Burr, Bachmann

Gore Vidal’s Burr is a very bad book.

Michele Bachmann read it her senior year in college; she graduated in 1978. I was a bit older, working on my dissertation, when I bought a copy in 1973, soon after it came out in paperback.

She says his snotty treatment of the founding fathers was what offended her. I don’t remember exactly what irritated me, except it made me so angry I wanted to throw the book across the room. At the time, my generalization was that it represented a failure of imagination.

I’ve since continued to read his essays, including the most recent that could use a stronger editorial presence. However, I never read another of his serious works of fiction. Myra Breckinridge might be an important novel, but I’ll never know why.

I eventually did relent a little to read the three mysteries he published earlier as Edgar Box. They were readable, but not compelling enough to make me wish he’d continued writing them. As I recall, the failure of imagination in them was limited to the sex scenes. Following the hard-boiled detective tradition, Vidal felt it necessary to have his hero, Peter Sargeant, become involved with woman. However, he could only say, after he got them together, “and then they did it,” sounding much like an adolescent boy describing the wonders of something he didn’t yet know but needs to pretend he did.

Bachmann says her feelings about the book turned her from being a Democrat to a Republican. I don’t believe she’s ever said why she associated Burr with the Democrats, if it was the politics of Vidal which are snobbishly critical of both parties, or if the person who recommend the book to her was a Democrat.

In my case, I turned on the editorial establishment that had promoted the book as “wicked entertainment of a very high order,” a “tour de force,” a “novel of Stendhalian proportions,” to quote only blurbs from the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.

I’ve rarely ever read another review of a novel since, and then only of books or authors I had never heard of, usually from foreign countries. I suspect I’ve missed a good read or two, but I’m know I missed a great deal of boredom from being trapped on the same page with whatever the claque was promoting at the moment.

South Carolina - William Gilmore Simms

The 1850's repeated the crises of the 1820's and 30's, but in a compressed time span and with more deadly consequences.

The post-Revolutionary generation in South Carolina faced the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that limited slavery in the west, the Denmark Vesey trial of 1822, and James Hamilton’s nullification threat of 1832.

The next generation had the Compromise of 1850 that included the Fugitive Slave Act and led to talk of nullification. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 left the question of slavery in the territories to the settlers, and led to guerilla war in Kansas.

In this atmosphere, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin and William Gilmore Simms serialized The Sword and the Distaff in the Southern Literary Gazette in 1852 . The one criticizes the inhumanity of slavery; the other anticipates the need for guerilla warfare and recalls the aftermath of the American revolution in South Carolina when, Simms said, "peace is only a name for civil war."

Simms’ intent, based on his title, had been to use a character based on Hezekiah Maham to describe the difficulties of reestablishing plantations after the war. However, as a writer, he was better at describing action than romance. The middle section that describes his hero’s courtship of a wealthy widow drags, while the opening description of highway robbery would excite the imagination of any adolescent boy. When the work was issued as a book, he renamed it Woodcraft.

Like any work of popular fiction of the time, the reader’s interest lay in events that crowded each installment. The characters were recognizable stereotypes. There was the hard-hearted widow who’d played both sides in the war; the Scots merchant villain who’d fenced stolen slaves; his agent, a double dealing squatter; an upright Christian youth who marries after the war but is willing to fight when called upon; the hero’s faithful slaves who hid in the swamp from the British and willingly returned to the fields under the orders of a man not much better than Simon Legree; and the innocent daughter of the squatter who marries the nice, but naive son of the widow.

Maham is changed into Porgy, an insouciant scion who has mortgaged his property "which had been transmitted to him through three or more careful generations" to support a life of alcoholic leisure. When the sheriff finally forecloses on the property, Porgy makes the deputy eat the paperwork. He’s saved through the intervention of Charles Coatesworth Pickney and the squatter’s deathbed confession.

While Porgy is recognizable as a type all too common in South Carolina at the time, he bears almost no resemblance to Maham. All the virtues of the latter have disappeared, and his negative traits exaggerated.

In reality, Maham was a self-made man who worked as an overseer before gaining his own land, not an indulged son like James Hamilton who was criticized in 1850 for supporting the congressional compromise because it might redeem some of his Texas debts and save him from ruin.

When Maham returned to his land he found new seed rice. Porgy’s plantation is taken over by Millhouse, a underling sergeant eager to reestablish traditional ways. He tells him "You was always a-thinking to do something better than other people, and you wouldn’t let nater [nature] alone."

At a time when tidal cultivation was being introduced by the more innovative planters, Millhouse adds "Now I’m a-thinking that the true way is to put the ground in order, and at the right time plant the seed, and then jest lie by, and look on, and see what the warm sun and rain’s guine to do for it."

He concludes his anti-innovation critique with "It ain’t reasonable to think that a man kin find new wisdom about everything"

During the war, Maham had perfected a tower for siege warfare.

The war had dwindled to the final evacuation by the British in Simms’ novel, and most of his allusions are to Francis Marion’s units in general. Maham’s bravery at Quinby Bridge is transferred to the incident of banditry that opens the novel when an outlaw shoots his horse. The incident when Maham started from sleep and believed he was under attack is turned into a joke on Millhouse who attacks a ghost.

The only specific recollections of military encounters are ones that advance Simms’ view of war as a series of harassments bordering on torture. One of Porgy’s slaves, Pomp, recalls a scrimmage with Fraser at Parker’s Ferry where the "cappin mounted a British officer," then ‘cut him clean through his skull to his chin." Porgy himself remembers "old Echars, the Dutchman, whom we dressed in tar and feathers at Moncks’ Corner, for stealing cattle."

According to Patrick O’Kelley, Marion left Maham in charge of unmounted men at Parker’s Ferry while he took other troops to attack. While the British were retreating, unmounted men surrounded Thomas Fraser’s troop of South Carolina loyalists and opened fire at 40 yards. After the battle, Marion returned with his prisoners to where he’d left Maham.

Monck’s Corner is more obscure, mentioned by only one man who wrote Maham "took upwards of eighty prisoners" in October of 1782, months after Maham had been paroled and two months before the defeated British evacuated Charles Town.

In Woodcraft, Porgy is a middle-aged bachelor who’s spent his life in the salons of Charleston, but has to no idea how to court a woman. Maham had been married twice and fathered two daughters. His wife died after he’d returned home from battle, but before he confronted the sheriff’s deputy.

Maham only appears in histories as an actor in events, not as a person important enough to have a portrait painted and passed through generations or one who appears in diaries and journals of society life. His physical appearance and habits are unknown.

Simms makes Porgy so fat he can’t dismount his horse, and worries his trousers will split in company. He’s a heavy drinker who surrounds himself with the detritis of war, the one-armed Millhouse, and the most degenerate forms of the Enlightenment’s arts and sciences, the fraudulent Doctor Oakenburg and George Dennison, "poet of the partisans."

What we know of Hezekiah Maham comes from histories by Frederick Porcher and Joseph Johnson, both born after Mahan died. Parson Weems’ account of Francis Marion’s war effort was based on notes by Maham's rival, Peter Horry, and never mentions Maham; Marion is given credit for the tower.

It could well be the widowed survivor of war did become the man described by Simms. His great-nephew, Joshua John Ward, however, heard through the family, he had been much more.

Unfortunately, his virtues were held in contempt by the generation going into the civil war, who only praised the most atrocious actions as necessary in war and condemned anyone else as decadent as Porgy.

Notes:
Johnson, Joseph. Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South, 1851.

O’Kelley, Patrick. Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas, 4 volumes, 2004-2005.

Porcher, Frederick A. Historical and Social Sketch of Craven County, no date.

Simms, William Gilmore. Woodcraft, 1852, republished 1961 with an introduction by Richmond Croom Beatty.

South Carolina - 1822 Social Structure

The execution of Denmark Vesey brought four men into conflict: Thomas Bennett and William Johnson, Jr. on one side, James Hamilton, Jr. and John Lyde Wilson on the other.

I became curious about the ways these four men represented Charleston society in 1822, and so checked the genealogies put on line by their many descendants.

The first thing that became clear is that the city’s society in 1822 was still fluid and open, not a closed phalanx of old families and their retainers. Not one had a paternal ancestor in this country farther back than four generations.

Bennett’s great-grandfather Thomas appeared in the public record the first time in 1727 when his son was baptized in Christ Church Parish. Hamilton’s grandfather William had migrated from Belfast to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by 1733 when he married Jean McIlvaine of County Antrim. The only record of Johnson’s great-grandfather is that his name was Michael Jansen in 1715 and Wilson’s father appeared in the records of up-country Cheraw, when he moved there from Maryland in 1760.

The second trait the four men share is that any connections they had with older South Carolina families and Barbados were through their mothers or their wives.

Wilson’s first wife, Charlotte Alston, has the oldest family tree. Her father came from a family of rice planters descended from John Allston, who had arrived sometime between 1685 and 1694. Her mother, Mary Ashe, was related to John Porter, who was expelled from the Virginia House of Burgess in 1663 as a Quaker; Alexander Lillington, who moved to North Carolina from Barbados around 1669, and James Moore, who managed land on Goose Creek for the Yeamans family and married Margaret Berringer. Berringer’s mother’s second husband was John Yeamans, who had left Barbados in 1665 to head the early settlement at Cape Fear in 1665.

Charlotte’s brother married a daughter of Aaron Burr, Theodosia. When Charlotte died, Wilson married Rebecca Eden, a woman whose fortune have been saved by Burr.

The father of Hamilton’s mother, Elizabeth Lynch, had married into the same Alston family as Wilson, before marrying her mother, Hannah Motte. When his father married her, Lynch was the widow of John Harleston. His grandfather John had migrated from Dublin in 1690 and served as an attorney to the Colletons while his first wife’s grandfather, Gideon Faucheraud, had settled on Goose Creek, the symbolic center of old South Carolina, in 1707.

Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth Heyward, came from a family of rice planters whose immigrant ancestor, Daniel, left England around 1672. His sister Hannah was married to John Cordes Prioleau’s cousin, Samuel Prioleau, Jr. When she died, Prioleau married her sister Elizabeth.

Bennett’s grandfather had married Margaret Swinton, whose father Hugh had plantation lands on the Cooper River. Hugh’s wife, Judith Simmons, was born of Huguenot parents who settled Middleburg Plantation in Berkeley County.

Johnson’s mother traced her ancestry back to Thomas Amory who left Somerset for Barbados in 1653 and then moved to Goose Creek in 1699.

The third feature of Charleston society in the 1820's was the importance of the American Revolution in providing men with sufficient status to marry women from established families.

James Hamilton’s father was the fifth son, apprenticed to study medicine in Philadelphia when war was declared. He volunteered, and appeared in Charleston soon after Elizabeth’s Lynch’s husband was killed in action.

Lynch’s mother, Hannah Motte, later married William Moultrie, who had defeated the British at Sullivan’s Island in 1776. Johnson’s father William was imprisoned by the British when they took Charleston in 1780, while Bennett’s first wife, Mary Lightbourn Stone, was the daughter of a privateer, Benjamin Stone.

In many ways, the city’s social structure in 1822 was like that described by Margaret Mitchell in Gone with the Wind. There were the old families like those of Ashley Wilkes and Charlotte Alston who preferred to marry among themselves, but were pragmatic enough to barter their daughters’ status for plantations. There were children of immigrants, like Scarlet O’Hara and Elizabeth Lynch, who wanted to marry into those families. And, with the war, there were men on the make, like Rhett Butler and James Hamilton, Sr., who suddenly had access to salons where they would have been shunned before.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Recently, Judith Thurman reviewed some books about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose that suggested she grew into a rigid, domineering mother and that both drifted into conservative thought that made her books icons for people like Sarah Palin and Ronald Reagan.

I read the Little House on the Prairie books when I was ten, and I cherish my memories of them too much to reread them. When I saw them appear in small, thin paperbacks I feared by childhood would be diminished. The books I read were thick, no doubt with heavy pages, and covers swollen by the plastic wrappers that encased the dust jackets. The act of finishing such a large book was an action that felt like a step towards adulthood. I didn’t want to know they, in fact, had been so small.

I also never watched the television show. I remembered nothing of the parents from the books: the four girls inhabited that world so common in successful children’s books, the one where adults are reduced to marginal figures. When Michael Landon transformed it into a series focused on the father, it was no longer my book, but about his journey from the youngest son of the all male world of Bonanza to marriage and fatherhood. More, it encapsulated many people’s view of the frontier that went from a male world to that of the nuclear family, from the ranching pioneers to the farmers and towns.

I also knew the television series was wrong when I heard it featured the family’s long ties to the Olsens in Minnesota. As a child I knew every book took place somewhere different. The only incident I clearly remember was when they received clothes at Christmas from a barrel sent west by some church. I knew even then that signified a life of isolation and poverty where people, in fact, could not do everything for themselves.

I’ve since read Hamlin Garland, Frederick Jackson Turner and the history of my hometown. I now know settlement took place in two phases. The first often lasted no more than a year or so, when people staked claims, cleared the land, then left - they either couldn’t succeed or sold to the next group who made the settled towns we think of as pioneer communities. Wilder’s father was one of the restless breed, best romanticized by Daniel Boone, not one of those who built society.

The history of my home town makes clear that Dickens’ description of incompetent settlers lured into bogus town plats in Nicholas Nickleby was not just satire. In Cameron, Patricia Averill describes people who came west with nothing more than a few tools, and were reduced to harnessing themselves to pull their wagons or whose only cooking implements were so burned they barely functioned. Once more settlers arrived, followed by the railroad, they were able to sell some crops, make some money, and begin the slow climb towards respectability.

For the television series to have been true to the books, each season would have had a new setting and a new set of secondary characters. That would have violated the expectations for continuity held by an audience who wants the comfort of the familiar each week. It’s the same dynamic that domesticated M*A*S*H when it lasted more than a few years. The logic of the original movie would have kept the chaos the same and changed the characters every season; when the characters became stable, the outside environment followed.

The reason the books worked, despite the constant change, is that the girls were the constants and children know childhood is not a time of sameness. Every day something is different.

Notes: Judith Thurman, "Wilder Women: the Mother and Daughter Behind the Little House Stories," New Yorker 10 August 2009.

Realism and Romanticism

Recently I started reading a novel by Marge Piercy, Braided Lives, that I abandoned after 160 pages because I really didn’t care about the sex life of the heroine and her oafish boyfriend as they got through a joyless freshmen year at the University of Michigan and a summer in Detroit.

I lived that life. If I read someone else’s experience, I want it leavened by perspective and I want it in a style better than my own.

In frustration, I took down a book from the shelf as different as I could find. I ended up with a movie promotion edition of Alexandre Dumas’ Camille written more than 130 years before. It was one strange object, a thick paged Grosset and Dunlap from 1927 with photographs from the Norma Talmage production set in the 1920's interspersed with Dumas’ 1840's text.

The first problem was language. I was never sure how much simplification had been done beyond translation from the French. However, since the plot concerned a "kept woman" with a friend who provided the narrator with information on the economics of such a life, I figured it couldn’t be too bowdlerized.

The second reading problem was the conventions of the genre. While Piercy wrote about her experiences in the first person, Dumas used a third person to narrate his personal story. The anonymous narrator retells the story of a man he met when he bought a book at Marguerite Gautier’s estate sale that the stranger had given her. The lady of the camellias’ final days are described through the journal she left with a friend.

By the end of 150 pages I was bored by Dumas and went to bed. The next evening I tried again, and resumed at the point where the narrative crosses the threshold of engagement to takes on its own compelling life. This engagement existed despite the fact that the story concerned a prostitute dying from tuberculosis who gave up her pampered life to life with a jealous young man who truly loved her only to be punished by his family for her earlier ways.

At the time it was published the stereotype was fresh, but its very success - by Wikipedia’s count at least 20 movies starring women like Theda Bara and Greta Garbo, as well theatrical adaptions with Eleanore Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Gish, and Tallulah Bankhead and the opera La Traviata - has rendered it too familiar.

So why does the one autobiographical novel work better than another? I can only think the distancing required by the romantic conventions makes it easier for the author to transform private experience into the public domain without destroying the reality of the personal for the author. The imaginative leap necessary to produce art is simply easier when one can deny it’s my true life.

Point of No Return

I recently read J. P. Marquand’s Point of No Return. The thwarted tale of Charles Gray, a small town boy from a family just below the elite who became engaged to the daughter of that elite, was predictable for anyone who’s lived in such a town. The matter-of-fact style borrowed from Middletown only underlined the familiarity.

While I was reading about Clyde, Massachusetts, General Motors was filing bankruptcy papers in New York, raising once again questions about why its culture chose failure when confronted with serious challenges to its survival.

Marquand’s 1949 novel suggests that GM had not just marketed to the Clydes of the country, but had absorbed the small town social structure with its rigid hierarchy that dictated Cadillac would always be better than Chevy, and both were ordained to always be better than any other division in the company and all better than any possible competitor.

Like Laurence Lovell, a father who would refuse his daughter’s suitor because he and Gray’s father had once disagreed, GM executives believed they could ignore upstarts like Pontiac and Saturn where new ideas actually existed that challenged their world view that the best product was the one with the greatest profit margin. The company felt vindicated when they chased away John DeLorean and Roger Smith, fought off Ralph Nader and Ross Perot, battled Walter Reuther and Roger Penske to a draw, in the same way Lovell was happy when young Gray abandoned any hopes for his daughter, Jessica.

The cultural insularity was partly the product of the company decision to use its own training school, General Motors Institute. The corporation came to prefer men who came up through an organization as rigid as that of the bank described by Marquand where the talented could not be promoted if they’d attended the wrong prep school, joined the wrong fraternity at the wrong college, married the wrong woman, or joined the wrong golf club. Once Gray’s co-worker, Roger Blakesley, was perceived to entertain inappropriate ambitions, he was asked to resign.

Small towns have been dying for a long time because entrepreneurs simply no longer are willing to put up with slights like those Lovell cast on Francis Stanley, the man who bought the local brass works and not only employed most of the men in town, but brought in talented men from outside like the engineer Elbridge Sterne. Sterne married Gray’s sister, Dorothea, and took the relics of her family back to Kansas when he was offered a better job after her father died.

It wasn’t just southern towns willing to lure foreign companies with tax incentives and promises of labor that could be pacified without unions that threatened the economic existence of small towns. Every small company that located in a more open-minded area, where achievement was more important than ascribed status, represented a lost opportunity.

In the end, Jessica Lovell found no one suitable to marry and had to settle for the only single man left from her generation, one who had endured the town, forever conscious of conforming to the rules for advancement. Her now much older father continued to call her fiancé Charles years after he had vanquished that threat. The new man simply remained invisible.

The people who are most angry with GM right now are the dealers in the small Clydes across the country who now are being cut off for not being urban enough. They recognize the irony of being left behind by a company that would prefer to remain more provincial than they.