Sut Lovingood;
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'*X*www*X# l#X*Xwwwf' LINCOLN ROOM UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY Sciacn^-a SUT LOVINGOOD Grove Press, New York X X X X KXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X SUT I LOVINGOOD j X X X X X X X X X X x By GEORGE WASHINGTON HARRIS x X X X X X X X X x Edited with an Introduction by Brom Weber x x x X X X X X X X X X X X _ X x ^J^r X X >HK X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx X X X X COPYRIGHT 1954 BY GROVE PRESS 795 BROADWAY, NEW YORK 3, N. Y. DESIGNED BY BETTY KORMUSIS MANUFACTURED IN THE U.S.A. BY H. WOLFF, NEW YORK "I'll tell you what I'll do; I'll just dedicate this here production to the durndest fool in the United States —and Massachusetts too—he or she. DEDICATED WITH THE SYMPATHIES OF THE AUTHOR TO THE MAN OR WOMAN, WHOEVER THEY BE, WHAT DON'T READ THIS HERE BOOK." CONTENTS Introduction by brom weber ix Preface by george Washington Harris xxxi ONE: IN THE FAMILY BOSOM Sut Lovingood's Daddy, Acting Horse 3 TWO: SUT AS A BOY Old Skissim's Middle Boy 17 A Razor-Grinder in a Thunder-Storm 26 THREE: SUT AND THE BURNS FAMILY Blown Up with Soda 35 Sicily Burns's Wedding 45 Old Burns's Bull-Ride 57 FOUR: SUT SETS CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS RIGHT The Widow McCloud's Mare 69 Parson John Bullens Lizards 79 Bart Davis's Dance 92 Hen Baily's Reformation 104 CONTENTS FIVE: SUT MEETS THE LAW Rare Ripe Garden-Seed 119 Contempt of Court—Almost 137 Trapping a Sheriff 1^8 SIX: SUT TAKES ON THE WHOLE WORLD Mrs. Yardley's Quilting 171 Sut Lovingood's Sermon 186 Tripetown: Twenty Minutes for Breakfast 195 Frustrating a Funeral 200 SEVEN: SUT ON THE NATIONAL SCENE Sut Loving ood Travels with Old Abe as His Confi- dential Friend and Adviser 219 Sut Lovingood with Old Abe on His Journey 221+ Sut Lovingood Lands Old Abe Safe at Last 230 EIGHT: A SECOND VIEW OF THE FAMILY BOSOM Dad's Dog-School 2!±1 INTRODUCTION Commenting on George Washington Harris in his anthology of Southwestern frontier humor, Franklin J. Meine wrote: "For vivid imagination, comic plot, Rabelaisian touch, and sheer fun, the Sut Lovingood Yarns surpass anything else in American humor." The judgment is not mere hyperbole, for the combi- nation of virtues found in Harris's writing is genu- inely unique. Nonetheless, this is the first full-length collection of his work to appear in almost a century. The reasons for neglecting the monologues of Sut, the Southern mountain youth, might virtually be de- scriptions of their valuable qualities. Permeating the stories throughout is an unadulterated determination IX SUT LOVINGOOD to evoke laughter and to reveal the delight of animal- ity. This is achieved by picturing the doings of Great Smoky Mountain folk with racy details and generous sympathy, in a language more faithful to the vernac- ular and its poetry than most American literature written since has contained. Furthermore, Harris loved to tell a good story and did so with an extraor- dinary narrative zest. The dominant literary interests of the pre-Civil War period in which Harris wrote were the New Eng- landers. These men looked askance at stories whose main stress was on humor, in which the common man figured as a central character, whose style was speech as he spoke it, which mercilessly ridiculed sentimen- tality and gentility, in which there were no taboos on the robust expression of the funny and the pleasur- able. Such stories were surely the epitome of Jackso- nian democracy, composed by someone flaunting his coarseness, ignoring the canons of good taste, abys- mally unaware of respectable culture, and probably uneducated too. If Harris was disregarded on these counts by the guardians of the cultural temple, it was not because they even bothered to read him. Work like his was simply outside their province, of no inter- est to their publishers and magazines, and undoubt- edly not even submitted to them. As for the South, where Harris lived, its genius was resolutely permit- ted to go elsewhere or subsist in obscurity unless caught up in propagandizing for slavocracy. Yet it was Southern politics which ultimately nur- tured the ribald humor of Harris, even though politi- ; INTRODUCTION cal disquisition on a higher level represented the South's conception of virtuous literary art. Aloof though a gentleman might be, he still had to depend on the vote of the common man. And since party newspapers were anxious to appeal to the latter, they provided space for a literature centered on folk expe- rience. More than expediency was involved, of course gentlemen, despite disclaimers, usually stemmed from the lower classes and shared a mutual interest in the South's indigenous humor with them, as well as in the sport and conviviality which played a large role in it. Until a quarter of a century ago, however, Harris remained almost completely forgotten. The post-Civil War period witnessed an intensification of the values proscribing Harris and his fellow frontier humorists in the North. When Mark Twain, the greatest of these men, finally came East, he was greeted with a disturbed queasiness which never quite vanished. In the South, meanwhile, writers and men of affairs argued over whether to accept the harsh socio- economic lessons of Northern victory or to romanti- cize the departed days of plantation society. While this crucial debate proceeded, some writers turned to an exploitation of the quaint and exotic local color of their region. Mary Noailles Murfree ("Charles Eg- bert Craddock") created fiction based on the moun- tain region previously treated by Harris. Generally speaking, there was nothing in Miss Murfree's polite work to prevent its publication in the genteel maga- zines. Except for its dialect, there was little to invite xi SUT LO VINGOOD comparison with the realistic and earthy Sut Lovin- good yarns. A few perceptive scholars paid some inci- dental attention to Harris and the frontier humorists. However, not until the publication of Meine's Tall Tales of the Southwest (1930), Constance Rourke's American Humor (1930), and Bernard DeVoto's Mark Twavrfs America (1932) were Harris and frontier humor re-incorporated into the main stream of American literature. II Mark Twain could not possibly have been overlooked by the Bostonians. He was the spokesman for a por- tion of the nation larger in size than New England, more vital in spirit. Men and women had flowed from one shore of the vast continent to the Pacific at its other shore. All that had transpired in those years of journey and settlement was blended into his writings. Much of it bore the direct stamp of Harris; Twain had reviewed Sut Lovingood in a San Francisco news- paper and the book's influence is traceable in his own work. Beyond that, the fantasy of Harris, his gro- tesque humor and satirical imagination, his sensitive reproduction of ordinary language are also charac- teristics of Twain. With all their similarities, how- ever, Harris was fated to be overshadowed. Twain was prolific for a greater number of years; he went beyond the short newspaper piece of Harris into the complex form of the novel ; he was a man of the world rather than a provincial like Harris ; and, at the last, xii INTRODUCTION the equalitarian strain in Harris was enriched with humanity in Twain. The smaller compass of Harris, however, fostered a lyric intensity which reflects itself in his prodigious outpouring of poetic similes and metaphors. Charac- ters and situations may at times be repetitive in out- line, but they are vivified and transcended by imagery which practically never repeats itself. Details flash by at breathless speed ; their insight into motive, their re-creation of the sensuous texture of life plunge the reader deep into the heart of Sut's strange world. Working intensively within a limited scope, Harris veritably embraced almost every aspect of his chosen reality and, as will be discussed later, seems to have gone beyond it too. There is not elsewhere in Ameri- can literature, certainly not in the Nineteenth Cen- tury and not even in Twain's masterpiece, Huckle- berry Finn, a similar portrait of primitive, insular man in all his bestiality, glory, and humor. Nor, for that matter, has anyone equalled the concentrated richness of his style. A writer's appropriateness for subsequent ages may be measured by the extent to which his funda- mental elements have reappeared discernibly. By this test, Harris surely belongs to us. The influence of Twain is undoubtedly responsible in part. In greater part, however, those major artists who resemble Harris—Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, and Wil- liam Faulkner, Southerners all—do so because the American frontier tradition is ineradicable. The con- tinuity may be seen at once in the basically-identical Xlll SUT LOVINGOOD plot structure of Harris's uncollected "Well! Dad's Dead" and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. It is more subtly comprehended in Wolfe's largeness, Faulk- ner's violence, and Caldwell's antic peasantry, though this curt catalog by no means exhausts the similari- ties. To a limited extent, all three modern writers have composed humor in various forms—grotesque and ironic in Faulkner, grandiose in Wolfe, nostalgic and eccentric in Caldwell—and they have all written in the common tongue.