The Peripatetic Reviewer

FOR a good many months now, I have enjoyed the sensation of living in two centuries; for part of each day I have been looking forward, planning the twentieth-century contents of the special issues which will celebrate our Centennial next autumn, and for the other part — the more reflective part — I have been exploring the nineteenth century, familiarizing myself with the early editors and reading those contributors who gave luster to the magazine long before I was born. This has been an enriching and in some ways a quite humbling experience.

There are three reasons why the Atlantic has managed to live so long. First, because we have changed our editors more frequently than any of our competitors. Whenever there was a sag in our circulation we brought in a new editor. For instance, there was a marked decline in 1870, and at that, time we brought in a Westerner, William Dean Howells, from Columbus, Ohio. He, in turn, attracted our first Western contributors, Bret Harte and Mark Twain. As you would expect, interest in the magazine immediately revived.

Secondly, from the very beginning we have championed American writers. This preference for American talent was very daring in the 1870s when every one of our competitors was either pirating or importing English novelists and poets.

The third reason for our longevity is that we have always been printed in Boston. Boston has been our vantage point, and I think the country respects us for the Yankee humor and integrity which flow in our veins.

The Northerners who founded the Atlantic wrote with the conviction that slavery must be abolished. This could not have made the magazine welcome below the Mason-Dixon line, and in fact it kept Southern contributors out of our early issues. But under our third editor, William Dean Howells, the Atlantic at last made its peace with the South. Howells did this by firsl bringing in the cleansing gift of laughter through Mark Twain. We tend to forget today that Sam Clemens was as much of a Southerner as he was a Westerner, and when he wrote for us his celebrated “Old Times on the Mississippi,” people saw the color and character of the South again with amity and without, wounds.

Howells made a still greater stroke when in 1874 he published an extended series of papers by George Cary Eggleston under the title of “A Rebel’s Recollections.” As I look back, the power of reconciliation seems to me one of the noblest American traits, and Eggleston had it to the full. At 1 he age of seventeen he had inherited his family’s plantation in Amelia County, Virginia; at twenty-one he was riding with Jeb Stuart; at twenty-three he was in command of a mortar battery in the hopeless defense of Richmond. What he wrote was honest and valiant and magnanimous. “It is impossible to say precisely when the conviction became general in the South that we were to be beaten. We persuaded ourselves that a people battling for the right could not fail in the end. And so our hearts went on hoping for success long after our heads had learned to expect failure. . . . There was no longer any room for hope except in a superstitious belief that Providence would in some way interfere in our behalf. Prayer-meetings were held in every tent, and a sort of religious ecstasy took possession of the army. Men in this mood make the best of soldiers, and at no time were the lighting qualities of the Southern army better than during the siege. Disaster seemed only to strengthen the faith of many. They did their soldierly duties perfectly. They held danger and fatigue alike in contempt.” Eggleston’s articles ran for seven months and the manifest fairness in them disarmed readers the country over.

After that the door began to open and the opening coincided with a feeling in many Americans’ minds that at last the time had come for us to have a national as opposed to a local literature. This feeling was fostered in the Atlantic by our first editor from the South, Walter Hines Page. Mr. Page was a North Carolinian who had studied the classics and history at Johns Hopkins, He took office shortly before our war with Spain and was one of the first to realize that the country was entering a new destiny as a world power.

The forward-looking Mr. Page persuaded young Theodore Roosevelt to do an article on the reform of the New York police; he persuaded Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Princeton, to do a remarkably prophetic article on the making of the nation; he encouraged Booker T. Washington to slate the ease for the Negro, and John Muir to write a magnificent account of the big tree; he persuaded Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant, to tell the brutal truth about the battle of the slums, and William Allen White to ring the bells for the burgeoning state of Kansas.

From Page to the present, the South has been enjoying a literary renaissance, and the fertility measured in works of fiction, history, biography, and criticism is incomparably richer than that of any time in the past. The renaissance of the South begins with three Richmond writers, all of whom were nationally known by the end of the First World War; Ellen Glasgow for her novels and poems, James Branch Cabell for his novels and essays, and Margaret Prescott Montague. Of the three, Miss Montague, who wrote regularly for the Atlantic, was a brave figure. She was physically handicapped, deaf and with fading eyesight, but she never let this interfere with her writing. Her famous short story “England to America,” which we published in 1919, was the most heart-searching narrative to appear in any American periodical.

As I look back to the serenity of the 1920s, I see emerging a very colorful group of Old Primitives. These writers came from the Ozarks, they came from Berea and the Kentucky mountains. Women like Lucy Furman and Olive Tilford Dargan; young storytellers like James Still, the librarian of the Hindeman Settlement; and Jesse Stuart with his outpouring of poems and stories. Much of this writing was in dialect, and although we did not realize it at the time, it was the sunset of the dialect school. When I was a junior editor on the Atlantic thirty-four years ago, twenty-live per cent of all our short stories were in one form of dialect or another: Irish, Pennsylvania Dutch, Jewish, Negro, Southern mountaineer. But today almost no dialect survives. There is plenty of slang, but the broad sweeps of color and quaintness which set apart one region from another are disappearing as the nation matures.

Curiously enough, it is the Depression which really marks the fountainhead of Southern genius, and it is exciting to see such brilliant writing come to the surface from so many different areas. In Look Homeward, Angel we hear Tom Wolfe speaking in the accents of North Carolina. In God’s Little Acre and Tobacco Road Erskine Caldwell is creating characters who fit anywhere from Virginia to Florida. Robert Penn Warren makes his bid from Tennessee. In New Orleans we hear from Roarke Bradford and DuBose Heyward, the author of our poignant Porgy and Bess. Chapel Hill is a beehive sending forth the plays of Paul Green, the biographies of Phillips Russell, and the criticism and stimulus of Allen Tate. And in Greenville, Mississippi — in a town no bigger than Concord, Massachusetts, at its (lowering—we have a whole bevy of writers: Leroy Percy, the author of Lanterns on the Levee, Hodding Carter, the crusading editor of the Delta Star, David L. Cohn, the pungent, penetrating essayist, Eudora Welty, whose short stories again have been given the O. Henry Award, and last and greatest, William Faulkner, winning the Nobel Prize with that unpronounceable county of wondrous and unpredictable people. No area in the North or West could match that quality of competition.

And now for the first time the Negro makes his authentic contribution to American literature. For years the Negro had been the subject of stories of sentiment and comedy, but very few writers took him seriously in print. Way back in 1867 the Atlantic had published six semiserious stories by Charles W. Chestnutt, a Negro then in his thirtieth year. Historians today regard him as the first American Negro novelist. But in the 1930s a whole school of Negro writers began to emerge. They were not interested in dialect as it was once spoken by Uncle Remus; they were interested in justice and heartache and aspiration and the New America. Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and our recent Atlantic discovery, Nathaniel LaMar, of Georgia — the arrival of these Negro authors opens a new horizon in American letters.

Richmond’s contributions in these years were first the monumental biographies of Robert E. Lee and George Washington by the great historian Douglas Southall Freeman. Then came the novels and more recently the historical studies by that younger Virginian, Clifford Dowdey. The main emphasis falls on history, on a revaluation of the American character. And I think it is significant that Virginians should be thinking of this at the time when Hitler’s shadow was becoming increasingly ominous in Europe, it almost seems as if Virginia’s historians were saying, “Here is the heritage, here are the traits you must draw upon as you face a world in jeopardy.” I like to remember that one of the last things Dr. Freeman wrote was a post-war article for the Atlantic, entitled “Washington’s Hardest Decision.” There is a cause and effect in literature, and Virginia’s sage was getting us ready for difficult choices ahead.