SUT’S TRAVELS WITH DAD

Agreeing with Mark Twain that the humorous American story depends more upon the manner of the telling than the matter, Neil Schmitz has recently argued that the humorists of the Old Southwest stress the mode of the tall tale, tall talk, not the mythos, the subject of the tall tale."¹ Inadvertently, perhaps, Schmitz is also voicing the approach that most scholars of the Old Southwest have been using for years in discussing tall tales, particularly the tall tales of George Washington Harris. For years, we have been told that the humor in Harris’s tales depends more upon Sut’ s manner of telling them than upon their repetitive plots. Harris’s humor, we know, relies heavily upon his use of language, especially his "gift for wild yet appropriate simile," his "amazingly acute ear for vivid comic metaphor, for astonishingly apt imagery, cadence, and dialect."² Perhaps Brom Weber puts it best when he writes that no one has "equalled the concentrated richness of [Harris’s] style." The distinctiveness of Harris’s humor, Weber suggests, lies in his "lyric intensity" and "prodigious outpouring of poetic similes and metaphors. Characters and situations may at times be repetitive in outline, but they are vivified and transcended by imagery which practically never repeats itself."³ Weber and others who have centered the distinctiveness of Harris’s humor in Sut’s manner of telling the tales are, of course, right. However unwittingly, though, they have fostered the notion that the humor of the Lovingood tales rests almost wholly upon the comic language and imagery with which Sut bombards the reader, and that the plots themselves—the matter of the tales—are, at best, monotonous. Almost any discussion of the Lovingood tales merely notes that their plots generally rely upon the box-like, framework structure typical of many tall tales, and that they normally revolve around "an elaborate practical joke . . . a method of pricking certain balloons that the writer thought both obnoxious and dangerous."⁴ Elmo Howell eloquently states the common complaint against Harris’s plots: "In subject matter they are tirelessly reiterative. The Harris formula is simple: some pompous ass needs to be brought down a buttonhole, the stage is set, and when Sut lifts the curtain all hell breaks loose."⁵

Tirelessly reiterative, yes; tiresomely, no. The force of Harris’s humor derives not only from Sut ‘s manner of telling the tales, but

also from the plain fact that the plots of the tales are, indeed, so repetitive—a good deal more repetitive than anyone thus far has bothered to point out. Harris conditions the reader to anticipate certain plot motifs that invariably await the poor, unsuspecting victims Sut menaces, and that sometimes await poor, unsuspecting Sut himself. Without these repetitions all the vivid language and imagery in the world cannot save some of Harris’s stories from falling flat, and without these repetitions we might not have the slightest idea what makes Sut such a "nat’ral born durn’d fool."

The average Sut Lovingood story is more than just a joke in a box. Because most of the Lovingood tales are so obviously episodic and digressive, it would be foolhardy to pretend that even the best of them are elaborately contrived. Still, the most humorous ones, particularly in the 1867 edition, include many, if not all, of the following plot motifs: (1) as a prelude to the "skeer," Sut or someone who will participate in the skeer somehow changes his identity, pretending to be someone or something he is not; (2) some sucker (normally Sut or some particularly obnoxious hypocrite or ignorant blockhead) becomes physically or psychologically trapped. In the first type of entrapment, the dupe becomes physically confined in a choice of harnesses, ropes, or other annoying attire; in the second type, which often accompanies the first, the dupe becomes mentally ensnared by some kind of lie, concealment, or disguise; (3) the skeer begins and chaos erupts, replete with ludicrous skirmishes and chase scenes, while the comically discomforted dupe is tormented or imagines himself tormented by some kind of varmint, human or otherwise; (4) as the skeer runs its course, the dupe finds himself behaving like an animal, then (5) being stripped of his clothes; (6) the dupe seeks relief by running for cover—usually the nearest water source—and (7) in cases where he is not the victim, Sut does his best to salt the poor, misfortunit devil’s wounds, then runs away before getting his butt kicked. Although this is hardly the kind of plot Tolstoy would envy, it is the pattern Harris conditions us to expect in the Lovingood stories, and generally the most humorous tales are those that satisfy our expectations.

Harris establishes the shape of things to come in the first two Sut stories, "Sut Lovingood’s Daddy, Acting Horse" and "Sut’s New-Fangled Shirt." In the first story, Dad sets out to be something he is not—a horse—and finds himself physically confined in a harness. "Main an’ me made geers fur dad," Sut reports, and when they "got the bridil fix’d ontu dad, don’t yu bleve he Sut in tu chompin hit jis like a rale hoss."⁶ Dad impersonates a horse so well that he stupidly

blunders into a hornet’s nest. Then the skeer is on, the chase begins, and chaos erupts as Dad madly gallops about, trying to rid himself of those ornery varmints. Dad throws off his shirt, then the. rest of his clothes, and eventually ends up with "nuffin on the green yeath in the way ove close about im, but the bridil" (Yarns, 37). Seeking cover, Dad heads for the creek, and "tu keep up his karacter es a hoss, plum thru, when he got tu the bluff he loped off, ur rather jis’ kep on a runnin. Kerslunge intu the krick he went" (Yarns, 37). Finally, after taunting him about the "hoss-flies" hovering about his head, Sut decides he had better get a head start on Dad while the hornets have him preoccupied.

In the second story, Sut gets a new-fangled shirt in what will shortly become an old-fangled plot. Again, the story begins with a mock change of identity. In this case, Betts Carr decides to deck Sut out in a starched shirt, lawyer-like, and Sut goes along with the idea, hoping to stand "es much pussonal discumfurt as [the lawyer] cud, jis tu git tu sampil arter sumbody human" (Yarns, 41). Physically confined after putting on that "infunel, new fangled sheet iron cuss ove a shut," Sut nonetheless manages to build an ashhopper for Betts, "an’ work’d pow’ful hard, sweat like a hoss" (Yarns, 41). After seeking comfort in a jug of bumble bee whisky, Sut falls asleep and dreams that "the judge ove the supreme cort had [him] sowed up in a raw hide" (Yarns, 41). He awakens in a frenzy and decides to rid himself of that varminty contraption, which, he has told us, makes him feel like he is "crowded intu a ole bee-gum, an’ hit all full ove pissants" (Yarns, 41). First, he strips himself of his pants, then tears a plank from the loft, nails down his shirt, and jumps through the hole to safety thirteen feet below (approximately half the distance of Dad’s twenty-five foot leap into the creek; later, having established himself as Dad’s rival for King Fool by the time he narrates "Taurus in Lynchburg Market," Sut also takes a twenty-five foot plunge).

It would be tedious to rehash the plots of all the remaining stories in Sut Lovingood’s Yarns, not because only Sut’s manner of telling them makes them funny, but also because their plots are familiar to most people who would bother to read this essay. The most humorous of these eighteen stories—"The Widow McCloud’s Mare," "Parson John Bullen’s Lizards," "A Razor-Grinder in a Thunder-Storm," "Old Skissim’s Middle Boy," "Sicily Burns’s Wedding" and "Old Burns’s Bull-Ride" (read as one selection), "Sut Lovingood’s Chest Story," "Sut Lovingood’s Dog," "Sut at a Negro Night-Meeting," and "Hen Baily’s Reformation"—include most of the plot motifs characteristic of Sut’s tales. Only two of the stories lacking a

majority of these motifs—"Blown Up With Soda" and "The Snake-Bit Irishman"—remain funny because of the sheer force of the skeer; only one of them—"Mrs. Yardley’s Quilting"—remains funny almost entirely because of Sut’s manner of telling it; but despite Sut’s humorous manner of relating them, the others—especially "Taurus in Lynchburg Market," "Sut Lovingood’s Sermon," "Bart Davis’s Dance," and "Tripetown: Twenty Minutes for Breakfast"—all fall flat because they contain so few of the plot motifs prevalent in Sut’s best.

By the time we arrive at the last five stories in the Yarns, then, we have come to expect certain plot motifs from Harris, and these last tales—"Frustrating a Funeral," "Rare Ripe Garden-Seed," "Contempt of Court—Almost," "Trapping a Sheriff," and "Dad’s Dog School"—are humorous largely because he does not disappoint us. "Frustrating a Funeral" remains among the most humorous Lovingood tales not because we continue to enjoy the spectacle of the black man running around with his eyes bugging out, but because, perhaps more than any other story in the Yarns, it employs and repeats all the plot motifs we have come to expect. It begins with the ultimate change of identity as Sut makes a dead man of Major and a talking spirit of Seize by swapping them. Leaving Major physically confined in Seize’s coffin, Sut transforms Seize into his "dolefulest skeer makin mersheen" (Yarns, 165) ever, complete with frog and firebugs. When they encounter the devil’s varminty emissary, Simon and Hunicutt are scared out of their shirts, the first figuratively and the second literally, flying "outen [his] shut like a dorg outen a badger-barril" (Yarns, 166). Turning then to the havoc Major creates, Sut recalls how, trapped in Seize’s coffin, Major pounds on the lid, frightening Seize’s wife, Suckey, and the other women who had "swarmed ontu the waggin" (Yarns, 168) when the funeral procession began. Suckey strikes out "a cow gallop fur home" (Yarns, 169), and Major strikes out for the doggery to drown his fears. After seeing his own face in the mirror, however, he strikes out for the river, meeting Sheriff Dozier on his way. Dozier catches the contagion, and "durn ef he didn’t sheer outen the road like a skeer’d hoss, an’ went ofen the bluff. . . intu the river" (Yarns, 172). Hot on Dozier’s trail, Major plays "skeered hoss better nur Dozier did, fur he lit furder in the river" (Yarns, 172). And with his customary good grace, Sut concludes his narrative by taunting them both.

Read as one story, "Rare Ripe Garden-Seed," "Contempt of Court—Almost," and "Trapping a Sheriff" offer yet another variation of the same structural pattern. "Rare Ripe Garden-Seed" begins.

this time with a shift in identity as Mary McKildrin marries Wat Mastin and assumes his name. Having psychologically ensnared Wat by concealing her pregnancy and pretending to love him, Mary continues to meet Sheriff Doltin on the sly even as "Rare Ripe" blossoms in her belly. But after discovering the trick, Wat returns the favor by feigning ignorance and baiting Doltin; then, following a long digression introducing us to Wirt Staples, Sut resumes his narrative in "Trapping a Sheriff." The tables turned, Mat, Wirt, and, of course, Sut now ensnare Doltin by again using Mary as bait—or at least what Doltin assumes is Mary. Caught in a cheat, the cheater discovers that he has been braying not to Mary Mastin, but to Wirt’s wife, Susan, who has disguised herself as Mary. For beating around the wrong bush, Wirt and the boys strip Doltin of everything but his shirt (eventually that comes off, too) and threaten to hang him. After they slip a noose over his head, Doltin takes a terrible skeer, running away while two tom-cats tear up and down his back, pulling "agin each uther like ontu two wile steers in a yaller-jackids nes’. . . . Jis’ think ove two agravated, onsantified he cats at yearnis’ war, makin yer bar-back thar battil groun" (Yarns, 200, 202), Sut muses. The thought of those two varmints ripping Doltin’s back to shreds is almost too delightful for Sut and—having long expected some kind of varmint to light into Doltin—for us to bear. Doltin heads for Mary’s house, hurling curses at her as he passes by, and she takes the skeer too, "jis’ bust[ing] thru the standin corn like a runaway hoss" (Yarns, 202). Completely debased, Doltin heads for water: he "shot down the bank, run thru the ferryboat an’ plouted off the fur aind head fust intu the river" (Yarns, 203). But even as he swims away, "every now an’ then he’d snort like a hoss, an’ look back over his shoulder" (Yarns, 204). To make the story complete, all we need now is for Sut to rub it in, but Doltin’s wife does that for him, vexing him with questions about how he ever managed to get into such a fix even as she "wer ilin ove his torn hide" (Yarns, 204).

Sut’s last story in the Yarns, "Dad’s Dog School," fittingly concludes the volume not only by returning to Dad’s antics, but by again providing nearly all of the plot motifs contained in the most humorous Sut stories. The story begins with the expected change of identity—this time Dad wants to "play ho’ned cattil"—after which Dad becomes physically confined in Suggins’s hide. Again, Dad performs admirably as an animal, "a bellerin jis’ the bes’ sampil ove a yearlin’s nise yu ever hearn," and continues his cow impersonation even after that miserable varmint, Sugar, lands "a steel-trap holt ontu the pint ove his snout" (Yarns, 208-9, 210-211). Dad’s nakedness—"he’d tuck

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off every durn’d stich ove his close" (Yarns, 209)—further contributes to his discomfort, for while Main beats him with her repeating bean-pole and he "squall[s] low onder hit, like a sore-back hoss" (Yarns, 217), the salted hide begins to salt his wounds. Meanwhile, Squire Hanley pokes his nose into the "famerly ’musement" (Yarns, 213), and for his efforts gets to complete Dad’s skeer by taking a plunge with his burr-arsed horse into the creek. For once, though, instead of running off to embark upon yet another skeer, Sut closes his story by taking the rest he always craves and wishing his listeners sweet dreams.

But many of the stories collected in High Times and Hard Times are less than sweet and far from amusing. The satires make especially tedious reading today because, as others have pointed out, they are bitter, vindictive, and dated. But more than that, they are tedious because they so infrequently provide the plot motifs we came to relish in the Yarns. With the exception, perhaps, of "Sut Lovingood Lands Old Abe Safe at Last," in which Sut alters Abe’s identity by packing him in an "elephant". suit and Abe performs a remarkable horse routine during his skeer, the satires are especially humorless not only because they are dated remnants of Harris’s bile, but also because, to anyone who has read the Yarns, they are disappointingly plotless. Indeed, despite Sut’s lively manner of telling them, many of the remaining stories in High Times and Hard Times share the same disability as the satires, and only a few—"Sut Lovingood’s Adventures in New York," "Sut Lovingood’s Hog Ride," "Sut Lovingood’s Big Dinner Story," "Sut Lovingood’s Big Music Box Story," "Sut Lovingood, A Chapter from His Autobiography," and "Well! Dad’s Dead"—remain humorous because they combine Sut’s comic language and imagery with the plot motifs characteristic of Harris’s best stories.

Thus, the most humorous Sut stories are also the most predictable. We look forward to someone being physically ensnared, being scared shutless, being assaulted by some kind of varmint, being reduced to nakedness, and being compelled to seek cover, preferably in the nearest river or creek. By the time Major heads for the doggery in "Frustrating a Funeral," we are just waiting for him to kick up his heels and head for the river. Once Dad puts on Suggins’s hide in "Dad’s Dog School" we look forward to Sugar pestering the hell out of him. We look forward, in other words, to the misfortunes that await Sut or his victims because we know what they are in for long before they do. In no small way, that is what makes the best Lovingood stories so funny.

The repetitive plot motifs therefore cause us to look forward to many of the incidents that reputedly make Sut such a callous brute. Sut, we have been told, possesses "genuine malice," "real hatred," and a "malicious desire to hurt others."⁷ According to Richard Boyd Hauck, "Sut becomes, of course, a sadistic monster," so that "ultimately . . . the reader tends to hate Sut. . . . Sut’s laughter at his own vicious antics," Hauck concludes, "is grotesque. We do not laugh at them at all, unless we laugh in derision of Sut himself."⁸ I am not ashamed to admit that I laugh plenty at all the poor suckers Sut traps. To be sure, if we isolate particular incidents Sut seems cruel and heartless. He does leave poor Dad fending off the hornets for himself, he does cause poor old Mrs. Yardley to croak, and he does blow up poor Rack Back Davy’s backside. But the more Lovingood tales we read, the more we become aware not of Sut the character in the tales who performs these monstrosities, but of Sut the narrator—Sut the conscious artificer of plots designed to make his listeners laugh. We cannot be sure that Sut has actually committed any of the atrocities he relates. In fact, if he is half the coward he tells us he is, we have good reason to suspect that he never committed any of them, and that the tales he relates are simply his way of achieving a kind of bravado he does not possess in real life. What we can be certain of, however, is that Sut is constantly aware of the effect his tales are having upon his audience, and that in his most humorous tales he consciously includes all the ingredients he knows are sure to elicit a grin.

In effect, when we read the Lovingood stories we need to remind ourselves that Sut is a consummate farceur, that it is Sut the farceur we need to keep an eye on (since Sut the character in the skeers exists only as a creation of the farceur), and that the audience Sut addresses is one he knows will appreciate farce. These stories are not, as we often hear, "close imitations of the real events of frontier and rural life."⁹ Perhaps the dialect is real and an occasional scene may strike us as being realistic; otherwise, they are out-and-out farces. Harris’s familiarity with eighteenth-century poetry and drama should make it no surprise that most of the plot motifs discussed in this essay—the changes in identity, the concealments, disguises, and posturings, the delight in physical discomfort, the violent physical action, beatings, and noise—and, of course, the episodic nature of the plots and the exaggerated characters, were all features common to eighteenth-century farces.¹⁰ And farceurs, as John Mason Brown points out,

belong to a race apart. . . The sky is the limit so far as they are concerned. . Every trick or stunt is legitimate if only they can get away with it. And why not? The sole point and justification of farce is that it be funny. It is comedy written with a slapstick rather than pen. Its business is to make us accept the impossible, the deranged as normal, and silliness as a happy substitute for sense.¹¹

Perhaps we need to keep in mind, then, that if we find the plot motifs in the Lovingood tales monotonous and the incidents repulsive, it is not Sut the character in the skeers that we are quarreling with, but Sut the farceur and the very essence of farce itself.

Only when we accept the recurrent plot motifs in the Lovingood tales as essential elements of farce—and not the grotesque creations of some sadistic monster—and only when we focus upon Sut the farceur—and not his havoc-wreaking namesake in the skeers—can we arrive at a sensible understanding of Sut’s durn’d fool nature. It has frequently been assumed that Sut is "the creator of his own being," that he even achieves some sort of "transcendent self-realization as creator of his own being," that he is a "creator not of order, not of beauty, but of freedom," indeed, that he rivals "Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in his spiritual freedom."¹² And so he appears. Sut the character in the skeers exudes a kind of freedom that most of us mature folks can only dream about. But Sut the farceur—Sut, that is, not his creation—is a different character altogether. Milton Rickels argues that in his tales Harris sought "to escape the earth in imagination" and that he vicariously experienced through Sut a "freedom from all limitations," even though his yearning for freedom is repeatedly accompanied in the tales by the "sober knowledge that freedom is impossible."¹³ But the remarkable thing about Sut, it seems to me, is that he, like Harris, seeks a freedom that is impossible through the image he creates of himself, and that, beneath all the wild shenanigans of his namesake, beneath all the exuberant digressions, language, and imagery, he remains imaginatively chained to the past, compelled to tell variations of the same story over and over again.

When Sut flees at the end of "Sut Lovingood’s Daddy, Acting Horse," he thinks he has escaped Dad’s influence. But for all his running on his superfine legs, Sut remains essentially a static character largely because the memory of Dad’s acting horse governs not only the structure of his tales, as we have seen, but even his most casual remarks. Hardly a tale goes by without. Sut somehow referring to Dad’s "ho’net tribulashin," whether he is talking about Parson Bullen or Doe Fabin under a skeer, himself spewing "sody-powder," or

even Stuff-gut tearing down the street in "a sort ove haness made outen strings, sorter like the set dad wore when he acted hoss" (Yarns, 124). When Sut compares the antics of people under a skeer to horses and hornets, he may, of course, be implying something unflattering about human nature; equally likely, though, he is revealing his inability to escape the memory of Dad’s acting horse. Even his telling George that he "ladles out [his] words at random, like a calf kickin at yaller-jackids" (Yarns, 114) suggests that he does not ladle out his words half as randomly as he supposes. Similarly, when he thinks of putting "a gill ur so ove pussonal discomfurt onder [Stilyard’s] shut" (Yarns, 45) or when he imagines George and Lum Jones scared "onder thar shuts" (Yarns, 103) as boys, or even when he tells old Abe to "sit still and keep [his] shut on" (HT, 273), he may be simply displaying his nasty disposition; equally likely, though, he is again displaying his inability to forget the wonderful time those hornets had under Dad’s shirt before he discarded it. And Sut’s constant refrain, "I’ll drownd mysef sum day, jis see ef I don’t" (Yarns, 39, 42, 43, and passim), may be simply his way of mocking a familiar romantic pose; equally likely, though, it is spoken in memory of Dad’s twenty-five foot plunge into the creek. In short, from the time he tries on his new-fangled shirt and asks his listeners, "Dus yu mine my racin dad, wif sum ho’nets, an’ so forth, intu the krick?" (Yarns, 43), to the time he shouts "Wo, dad!" (HT, 209) to the scared horses at Dad’s funeral, the memory of Dad’s acting horse colors virtually every aspect of Sut’s storytelling.

The memory of Dad’s acting horse governs not only Sut’s storytelling, but also his conception of his own identity. Much has been made of Sut’s "implacable self-contempt," of the vendetta he conducts against Dad by riding bulls and all that, and of how "he would rather be illegitimate than the son of this brute animal."¹⁴ But beneath all his blustering about how "dod-dratted mean, an’ lazy, an’ ugly, an savidge" (Yarns, 35) Dad could be, beneath his apparent relief that Dad finally managed to do one good thing in life—die—Sut is darned proud to be a Lovingood. Both of the attributes he prizes most—his durn’d fool nature and his superfine running—are the two qualities he remembers most about Dad and his hornet adventure. It may well be true that in "Sut Lovingood’s Daddy, Acting Horse" Sut "not only tells his audience he is ‘damn fool’ in the American vernacular sense, but also . . . that he is playing the fool," and therefore that "his image is enlarged from the stupid fool to the creative whose foolishness . . . is his mask and his armor."¹⁵ But Sut, I am sure, would be distraught to hear that. For regardless of how wise he may

seem to us, the important thing to remember is that in his own eyes Sut is a durn’d fool and proud of it—proud because Dad was King Fool, because no one ever played fool better than Dad when he acted horse or better than Sut himself since Dad’s heyday, and because, even if it is not much, the one thing a Lovingood can do better than anyone else is play damn fool. When Sut initially mentions his own name five times in the Lovingood roll call, he is not only demonstrating "the perporshin [he] bears in the famerly fur dam fool, leavin out Dad in course" (Yarns, 34), but also reinforcing in his own mind his rightful place in that damn fool family. "I am a Lovingood," he boasts, because according to Dad he is "by a long shot tu cussed a fool tu belong tu enybody else" (Yarns, 64). Indeed, when George begins to relate W. T. Haskill’s story about training a pup, Sut proudly interrupts him, saying "yu can’t du jestis’ tu that ar doleful business. . . . [H]it cudn’t a-been did by eny uther peopil on this yeath but us [Lovingoods], fur hit am plum clarified dam fool . . . an’ ef we didn’t make a purfeck finish’d cumplete durn’d momox outen the thing, thar’s no use in hevin a genus fur bein infunel nat’ral born fools et all" (Yarns, 206). How heartless of us, then, to make Sut a wiser fool than he cares to be, and to take away from him the one thing that makes him feel useful—his damfoolery. As he is quick to point out during his new-fangled shirt escapade, he skinned himself not in the name of wisdom, but "in the name, an’ wif the sperit, ove plum nat’ral born durn fool. . . . I’se a durnder fool nor enybody," he gladly admits, "’sceptin ove my own dad" (Yarns, 39). The close kinship Sut feels with his fool Dad is especially apparent when he remarks in "Sicily Burns’s Wedding" that "Dad’s pint is tu be king ove all durn’d fools. . . . I used tu think my pint an’ dad’s wer jis’ the same, . . . but when he acted hoss, an’ mistook hossflies fur ho’nets, I los’ heart. Never mind, when I gits his ’sperence, I may be king fool, but yet great golly, he gets frum bad tu wus, monstrus fas’" (Yarns, 77). Dad has built up such a staggering lead in damfoolery that Sut nearly despairs of ever catching up. But folks said he would "make a beautiful damfool some day" (HT, 304), and he is proud to let them know he did not disappoint them. "Ain’t I the durn’dest fool yu ever seed in all your born days?" (HT, 133) he boasts after "killing" the daguerreotype artist’s camera in New York. Sut even loves to hear the crowd chant his family motto, so much so that one of his greatest disappointments during his hog ride is that no one was around to shout " ‘dam fool’ jis then" (HT, 162). Such a pity that no one was there to appreciate the Lovingood genius for damfoolery.

Aside from his whole damn fool nature, the trait Sut identifies with most is his "onapproachabil, onnatral, onekeled laigs" (HT, 243). Despite all that crane nonsense, Sut repeatedly makes it clear that he has inherited his beautiful stumpers from Dad. After watching Dad’s superfine running in "Sut Lovingood’s Daddy, Acting Horse" and in turn running away from Dad just like a Lovingood, Sut proudly informs the stranger at the end of the tale that "that man is my dad," and, looking at Sut’s "laigs an’ pussonal feeters a moment," the stranger replies, "Yas, dam ef he aint" (Yarns, 38). All the members on Dad’s side of the family, Sut says, "run tu durn’d fool an’ laigs powerful strong. . . . The stealin streak in the Lovingoods all run tu durned fool, an’ the onvartus streak all run tu laigs" (Yarns, 163, 34). Like his father before him, Sut is "celebrated fur the use of [his] laigs" (HT, 271). "Jis look at these yere laigs!" he shouts, proudly displaying them. "Dye see em? Aint they sum superlativ," ain’t they "the best par ove laigs (d’ye see em?) what ever grow’d tu the aind ove man" (Yarns, 57; HI’, 243, 126). Why, even Horace Greeley never saw the like, because there just "aint such anuther par on yearth" (HT, 142). "D’ye see ‘em? d’ye see ‘em? d’ye see ‘em?" Sut nearly badgers his listeners at times (see, e.g., HT, 135, 136, 140, 142). If someone were to say, "Why, no Sut, they look like ordinary legs to me," he would be crushed. His legs and his durn’d fool nature may not be much, but they are all he’s got to make him feel the least bit extraordinary. They are the Lovingood legacy.

Sut’s identification with Dad and his patterning many of his tales after Dad’s hornet tribulation hardly suggest that he "hated his father in life and death."¹⁶ To be sure, Sut feared his father, not because he hated him, but because Dad "jis’ cud beat a pinchback watch, a hen, or the devil at bein’ onsartin" (HT, 184). But many young men have feared their fathers, rebelled against them by running away from home, and even wished at times that they might prematurely meet their maker without loving them any the less; and Sut is no exception. In the unpredictable, Dad-like world in which he lives, Sut has learned to survive by talking big and by masking his feelings behind the image he has created of himself. But if we look beyond that image at the man telling the tales, we can see that he has also learned to express his affection for the old hoss by telling Dad’s story over and over again and by frequently addressing his tales to another authority figure, George, the man he fondly calls "hoss" throughout the tales. "Take keer ove that little cackus ove yourn," he asks George. "I loves you by jings" (HT, 242). Sut’s love for George should come as no surprise; his sense of his own identity and especially

his storytelling technique have been continual confessions of his affection for the man George has replaced.

Even Sut’s last story of any consequence, "Well! Dad’s Dead," is a tribute to the lasting effect the old hoss has had upon his imagination. M. Thomas Inge suggests that this story "calls to mind the darker work of Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner. . . . [H]ere a nadir of consistent morbidness in tone and subject matter is reached."¹⁷ If read in isolation, the story is a grim one indeed. But to anyone accustomed to the repetitive plot motifs Sut employs and his powers as a farceur it is funny. It begins with the customary change of identity—Dad’s dead now—followed by the expected physical confinement—he’s been sewn up like "a mummy" (HT, 208)—followed by the horses’ skeer, followed by Sut’s memories of Dad acting horse and the hornet attack, and all capped off with Sut dropping Dad’s body into a hole, a fitting farewell for a man used to taking plunges in out of the way places. Sut’s mind never left home; now, Harris seems to say, he has also returned in the flesh to take his rightful place as King Fool.

What finally makes Sut such a nat’ral born durn’d fool, then, is that, for all his superfine running, his imagination has never really left Dad’s doorstep. As Noel Polk and others have argued, beneath all the madness of the skeers Sut emerges as "a civilising force and not a destructive one. . . . He is committed to taming, bringing under control, the chaos in which he lives."¹⁸ One way he does it, as Polk suggests, is by acting as an agent of order within the skeers. But the most persistent way in which Sut orders his world is as farceur or storyteller. Sut claims that he "thinks at random," and that he’s "got no steerin oar tu [his] brains" (Yarns, 163). Yet even as his language and imagery randomly gallop across the page, he constantly steers toward the past to order his plots and to understand his identity. The usual conception of Sut is that his character mirrors the South in its "supreme individualism, audacity, independence, [and] resistance to authority."¹⁹ But if we keep a close watch on Sut the teller of the tales and not his mask within the skeers, we realize that he probably does not perform that function. Rather, if anything, he mirrors the South in his constantly keeping one eye over his shoulder toward the past. And if Faulkner bothered to read Harris seriously at all, perhaps this is what he finally took away from Sut’ s tales. For Sut is a comic version of the many Faulkner characters who find their narratives and their own identities chained to the past. As storyteller, he is a comic version not so much of Jason Compson, as has been suggested,²⁰ but of Quentin, who constantly asks himself

in Absalom, Absalom! "Am I going to have to have to hear it all again . . . I am going to have to hear it all over again I am already hearing it all over again . . . I shall have to never listen to anything else but this again forever so apparently not only a man never outlives his father but not even his friends and acquaintances do."²¹ But Sut is, after all, a comic figure, because unlike Quentin he is hardly aware of his inability to escape the past. Whereas Quentin’s insight into his bondage eventually leads to his suicide, Sut would be more likely to end his storytelling days by saying, "Ain’t I the durn’dest fool yu ever seed in all your born days? I’ll drownd myself sum day, jis see ef I don’t."

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BINGHAMTON

NOTES

   ¹"Tall Tale, Tall Talk: Pursuing the Lie in Jacksonian Literature," American Literature, 48 (1977), 473; "How To Tell A Story," in Selected Shorter Writings of Mark Twain, ed. Walter Blair (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), p. 239.
   ²Edd Winfield Parks, intro. to "Sut Lovingood’s Big Dinner Story," The Lovingood Papers, ed. Ben Harris McClary (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1963), p. 49; Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America’s Humor (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), p. 216.
   ³Intro., Sut Lovingood, by George Washington Harris (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. xlii.
   ⁴Parks, intro, to "Sut Lovingood’s Big Dinner Story," p. 49.
   ⁵"Timon in Tennessee: The Moral Fervor of George Washington Harris," Georgia Review, 24 (1970), 312.
   ⁶I use M. Thomas Inge’s edition of Sut Lovingood’s Yarns (New Haven: College and Univ. Press, 1966) for all selections originally included in Harris’s 1867 edition (including, as Inge does, "Sut Lovingood’s Chest Story"). All subsequent references to Inge’s edition are provided in the text with the abbreviation Yarns and page number. References to the additional stories Inge has collected in High Times and Hard Times: Sketches and Tales (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1967) are provided in the text with the abbreviation HT and page number.
   ⁷Stephen M. Ross, "Jason Compson and Sut Lovingood: Southwestern Humor as Stream of Consciousness," Studies in the Novel, 8 (1976), 283.
   ⁸A Cheerful Nihilism: Confidence and ‘The Absurd’ in American Humorous Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 75, 44.
   ⁹Hauck, p. 41.
   ¹⁰See Leo Hughes, A Century of English Farce (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 21–32. To the best of my knowledge, the term "farce" has been only loosely associated with the Lovingood tales without any effort to pinpoint precisely what makes these tales farces.
   ¹¹The Saturday Review of Literature, 24 March 1951, p. 26.
   ¹²Milton Rickels, George Washington Harris (New York: Twayne, 1966). p. 101; Eugene Current-Garcia, "Sut Lovingood’s Rare Ripe Southern Garden," Studies in Short Fiction, 9 (1972), 128; Rickels, p. 103; Inge, "The Satiric Artistry of George W. Harris," Satire Newsletter, 4 (1968), 64.
   ¹³Rickels, p. 37.
   ¹⁴Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), p. 137; Inge, "Sut Lovingood: An Examination of the Nature of a ‘Natral Born Durn’d Fool,’" Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 19 (1960), 242.
   ¹⁵Rickels, p. 75.
   ¹⁶Inge, High Times and Hard Times, p. 116.
   ¹⁷Inge. High Times and Hard Times, p. 116.
   ¹⁸"The Blind Bull, Human Nature: Sut Lovingood and the Damned Human Race, in Gyascutus: Studies in Antebellum Southern Humorous and Sporting Writing, ed. James L. W. West III (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1978), p. 26; see also Inge, "Sut Lovingood: An Examination of the Nature of a ‘Natral Born Durn’d Fool,’" p. 244, and Howell, p. 318.
   ¹⁹Current-Garcia, p. 117.
   ²⁰This is the subject of Ross’s informative essay, "Jason Compson and Sut Lovingood: Southwestern Humor as Stream of Consciousness."
   ²¹Absalom, Absalom! (1936; rpt. New York: Random House, 1972), p. 277.