SIMMS AND SOUTHWEST HUMOR

Mary Ann Wimsatt

Arlin Turner’s interest in Simms, the southwest humorists, and the connections between them, evidenced in such essays as "William Gilmore Simms in His Letters" and "Seeds of Literary Revolt . . ."¹ prompts the subject of this paper—an investigation of a major strain in the work of an important writer keenly responsive to the literary currents of his age. The topic, though unexplored in all its facets, has been touched upon by scholars besides Professor Turner—by Van Wyck Brooks and Jay B. Hubbell, by Edd Winfield Parks and C. Hugh Holman, and by several people associated with the Centennial Simms textual edition or the University of South Carolina—among them Robert Bush, James E. Kibler, Jr., Thomas L. McHaney, and John C. Guilds.² Though ground has therefore been broken, much work remains to be done, for Simms’s use of frontier humor³ is a subject thus far treated only in segments and still imperfectly understood. This essay attempts, in necessarily brief and general fashion, to sketch the outlines of the entire picture by tracing Simms’s use of frontier-related humor from his early Revolutionary War novels⁴ and Border Romances through later miscellaneous pieces and Mountain fiction, pointing out where his work seems merely analogous to southwest writing and where it borrows directly from that mode. The essay describes the aspects of his tastes and temperament that connect him to the humorists, discusses certain cultural experiences he shared with them, suggests some relationships of his early comedy to romance conventions, and outlines the professional and personal experiences in mid-career that caused him to increase his use of frontier humor in his fiction. It focuses, finally, on two works that clearly draw on southwest writing, As Good as a Comedy and Paddy McGann—works which, despite their recent republication in the Centennial Simms edition, remain relatively obscure.

By temperament and talent Simms was destined to create the kind of earthy, uninhibited comedy at which the humorists excelled. Robust, rampaging, outspoken, opinionated, he showed the same delight in frank and sometimes coarse language that they showed and the same interest in oral anecdote that underlies many of their printed works. Particularly when flaying politicians, he packed his letters with pungent phrases of a sort a humorist would relish: he called Congress "a many-headed ass," some Southern statesmen

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"vain puplings & talking potatoes," a politician "a miserable piece of moral whip-syllabub," and lamented that "a most insane cry for rotation in office—as if office was a public cow at whose dugs every body had a right to suck—has helped the opposition."⁵ He was noted for his imitation of backwoods dialect, an ability he himself acknowledged: of his travels on the frontier, he said, "I saw the red men in their own homes; could imitate their speech; imitate the backwoodsmen, mountaineers, swamp suckers, &c" (L, IV, 178). Snatches of tall tales enliven his correspondence, like the clever reworking of a familiar anecdote told of Captain Martin Scott, Davy Crockett, and Daniel Boone. While praising a particular brand of gunpowder, he remarked:

This powder with the use of the drop shot, is all potent & persuasive with duck & deer, squirrel & partridge, and, when it is once known that the sportsman uses it the fowl, beast or bird, is apt to cry out to him in the language of the Coon to Capt. Scott—" Don’t shoot, Captain—I’ll come down!" (L, V, 200) 6

Simms was also widely known for his ability to tell a story, often one with a distinctly tall slant. Among his famous stories were his oft-told yarn of a rattlesnake that swallowed itself and a tale with roots in folklore, "the aged fowl that defies cooking," disseminated by the Spirit of the Times and other publications.⁷ In Simms’s version, as recorded by his friend Paul Hamilton Hayne, "Lawyer F---," with some professional acquaintances, was served for dinner at a lonely country tavern "a suspicious-looking fowl, large, but gaunt, skinny, and skeleton-like." To carve it was impossible; one "might as well have attempted to disjoint a stone." With the eloquence of his trade, Lawyer F--- denounced the cook who had prepared the miserable fare:

 "Wretch! only look at this abominable THING you have offered to Christian palates! This rooster lived, strutted, and died more than a thousand years ago.

"By some vile charm you have managed to revivify the bones, to partly cover them with flesh, and to subject the creature, no doubt, to a second decapitation and a second revolution on the spit. .

And now, faugh! there’s a grave-like blueness in the meat, and the toughness of ages in the joints. Confess, woman! confess!

"Is not this the veritable cock which crew when Peter denied his Lord?"⁶

Both certain leading humorists and Simms were steeped in the life of the Southern countryside that surrounded and penetrated sophisticated

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city and plantation existence; the interest of these men in the rural South, its sports, and its "low" or rustic figures helps account for the many similar characters and episodes in their writing. Moreover, like Longstreet, Hooper, and other humorists Simms knew the South in two of the aspects identified by twentieth-century scholarship which crop up again and again in southwest writing: the aristocratic coastal, seaboard, low country, plantation, or "Tidewater" section and the newer, rawer, wilder frontier territories of Gulf and mountain regions.⁹ A native of Charleston, he grew up in the low country, and throughout his relatively long life he lived in or near it, warmly supporting its social institutions and customs. While still young, however, he traveled widely in the Old Southwest during its primitive Indian phase of the 1820s and in the flush times of the 1830s when, his letters tell us, he heard tall tales of a place where "corn grows without planting, and cotton comes up in five bales to the acre, ready picked and packed" (L, 1, 37). In the 1840s he traveled on what someone called the "retarded frontier" of the North Carolina mountain region, joining in deer and bear hunts and watching woodsmen drink and yarn. His awareness, grounded in broad experience, of the southern low country or Tidewater and the frontier is reflected by the two major divisions of his fiction— historical romances set in the low country describing its development from a point near the founding of the Carolina colony through the Indian wars and the Revolution, and Border and Mountain fictions, both short stories and romances, set in the nineteenth-century South in one or another of its frontier phases.

Along with the humorists, then, Simms had seen and felt the distinctions and the tensions between coastal and frontier or civilized and rural South, and he mirrored these distinctions in his writing through standard devices which the humorists also used—the contrast of gentleman and backwoodsman, the friction between plantation and rustic types, the aloof, amused, condescending authorial commentary which is sometimes taken to reflect the judgment of the Tidewater upon the unruly frontier.¹⁰ The most prominent of these devices, his contrast of gentleman and woodsman, derives more directly from romance procedures,¹¹ however, than from southwest humor, as one sees if one examines similar character configurations in romances before Simms, In the Revolutionary War novels, this contrast functions through the pairing of partisan hero and scout; in the Border books, of hero and saucy frontiersman— Clarence Conway and Jack Bannister in The Kinsmen (1841), for example, or Harry Vernon and Dick Jamison in Border Beagles (1840).

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Through its playing off of different character traits and language levels and its resulting comedy, such pairing resembles the pairing of gentleman and yokel or Easterner and Westerner in frontier writing. But within the framework of Simms’s long fiction, it serves the needs and reinforces the esthetic patterns of romance. In the Revolutionary novels it stands for the union of aristocracy and middle class against the British/loyalist enemy; in the Border books. for the union of the plantation and the "good" part of the frontier South against the "bad" part represented by gangs of backwoods criminals. Hence in each set of books, it helps to weight the dialectic basic to romance which appears in all Simms’s long fiction in favor of the "right," the "winning," and the "ideal" side.¹²

There are, however, numerous scenes in both groups of books which show parallels, sometimes fairly close parallels, to the comedy in frontier writing. Such scenes in the Border novels have been noted by a few critics; in the early Revolutionary War Romances, however, they have been almost completely ignored. Yet Simms’s novels of the Revolution abound in character types and situations like those which sinew southwest humor. In Mellichampe (1836), for example, partisan scout Thumbscrew Witherspoon and Tory scout Ned Blonay confront each other on a lonely country road. Their encounter reflects romance procedures in its contrast of the virtuous and the wicked scout,¹³ but its heavy use of dialect, its "thrust and parry" structure, and its "Yorkshire Versus Yorkshire" designation suggest that it also looks toward southwest humor and, beyond that mode, toward a strain in English writing that influenced frontier literature.¹⁴ Blonay is trying to worm information about partisan military maneuvers out of Thumbscrew, who resists him by playing dumb, and drawling:

 "They gits a-fighting every now and then in these here parts, and they do say they’re a mustering now above, the sodgers."

"What soldiers?" demanded Blonay, with an air of interest.

Eh! what sodgers?—them that carries guns and swords, and shoots people, to be sure—them’s sodgers, aint they?"

"Yes! but have they got on uniforms, or is it only them that carries rifle, or a knife, or perhaps a rusty sword, or a hatchet. Some soldiers, you know, has fine boots and shoes, with shining buttons, and high caps and feathers; and some haint got shoes, and hardly breeches. . .

"They’re all the same to me, stranger, breeches or no breeches, boots or no boots . . . they’re all the same to me. A sodger’s a sodger—any man that can put a bullet into my giz zard, or cut me a slash over my cheek . - - he’s a sodger for me. . . ."¹⁵

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A similar bit of humor, also in Mellichampe. occurs in a sprightly little dialect letter which Simms apparently stuck into the novel for fun, since it serves no real structural purpose. Written before the "Pete Whetstone" letters and Major Jones’s Courtship, it reflects Simms’s knowledge of the tradition of dialect epistles whether of down-east or southern extraction.¹⁶ A "‘dear old granny, Mother Dyson,’" writes Francis Marion:

‘Dare Gin’ral—There’s a power of red-coats jist guine down by the back lane into your parts, and they do tell that it’s arter you they’re guine. They’re dressed mighty tine, and has a heap of guns and horses, and as mitch provisions as the wagons can tote. I makes bold to tell you this. gin’ral, that you may smite them, hip and thigh, even as the Israelites smote the bloody Philistians in the blessed book. And so, no more, dare gin’ral, from your sarvant to command, BETSY DYSON." (Mell, I, 179)

These examples, from one of the weakest of Simms’s Revolutionary War Romances, suggest his strength as a worker in modes of humor related to southwest writing.

Simms’s Border Romances, appropriately enough for volumes set in the Old Southwest, show even clearer ties to frontier comedy. Here one finds character types like those in southwest humor—backwoodsmen, a Yankee peddler, a strolling actor, a country preacher, a puffed-up pettifogger, a corrupt justice, a swaggering Irishman, gamblers, counterfeiters, and so on; one hears lively bursts of tall talk; and one notes Simms, or his narrative spokesmen, commenting condescendingly on frontier behavior in the manner of Longstreet or Hooper. In Border Beagles, for example, Alabamian Dick Jamison tells an officer of the law, "‘to be spoke to on behalf of such a couple of small-souled sappy sticks as these—Grim! it makes me all bristles. I feel wolfy in twenty places. . . .’" Elsewhere in the novel an actor, Tom Horsey, defends his victory over an eye-gouging opponent in educated language containing an imitation of frontier speech:

". . . it’s absolutely necessary now and then to make an example of these fellows. They rely on superior strength to be insolent, and nothing would have pleased this chap so much as carrying home my eyes as atrophy, Years hence he would have had a history for Dick Jenkins, and Jim Dobbins, and Peter Pinchback and a dozen others, of the dandy from below that he met at Yarbers’ house, and ‘how he caught,’"—imitating the patois of the country—" ‘how he caught the chap mighty sopti

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ous with the gal, and how he gin him the cross-buttock, and, before he could say Jack Robinson, had a finger in his shock and a thumb in his eye, and sent him off with the blind-staggers . . .’ and then, to prove the truth of what he said, he would bring forth a bottle of eyes preserved in whisky. . . . The eyes of Tom Horsey preserved in whisky! Whew! The thought makes me shudder again. Eyes, Harry Vernon, are absolutely necessary to an actor."¹⁷

Simms’s increased use of frontier humor in his late work springs largely from his professional and personal experiences during the 1840s and the early 1850s—in particular, from his temporary shift from long to short fiction, his reading and reviewing of major documents by southwest writers, and his travels on the lingering frontier of the mountain South. The sharp decline in the market for long fiction caused by the Panic of 1837 and related matters¹⁸ forced him from 1842 to 1850 to abandon the writing of novels for various other literary forms, including tales, novelettes, and similar types of short pieces in which frontier humor, which had flourished chiefly in the tale, the sketch, and the essay, found a natural home. Additionally, to make money and to shore up the fortunes of southern periodical literature, he edited the Magnolia (1842-1843) and the Southern Quarterly Review (1849 through 1854), where, as chief book reviewer,¹⁹ he discussed important works by leading writers of humorous and sporting materials—among them William Elliott, W. T. Thompson, T. B. Thorpe, J. I. Hooper, A. B. Longstreet, J. G. Baldwin, and J. B. Cobb. Somewhat later, he reviewed Baldwin’s Flush Times and Party Leaders for the Charleston Mercury, and he may have written the notice of Francis Brinley’s Life of William T. Porter, which also appeared in that newspaper.²⁰

Simms’s remarks in these reviews and in his collection of essays, Views and Reviews (1845), show that he recognized the diverse strains in southwest writing, liked the sporting lore that loomed large in it, and preferred humor that was clever, lively, and believable to that which was extravagant, exaggerated, or grotesque. Thus he praised Baldwin’s "salient and racy" sketches in Flush Times, Hooper’s "adroitly told" stories in The Widow Rugby’s Husband, and, at some length, Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes—"rare, racy, articulate, native humor. . . . the best specimens in this field that the American genius has produced."²¹ But he denounced what he called the "ludicrous" element in Madison Tensas’ Odd Leaves and the "extravagancies" of Thompson’s Major Jones’s Courtship, which he said bore small resemblance to "the actual and the true."²² He liked the language of southwest humor—"the audacity of its illustration . . .

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its queer allusions, sudden repartee" (V&R, Second Series. p. 179), and he liked its zestful, Unconventional spirit. Yet as Professor Turner has noted ("Seeds of Literary Revolt," p. 144), his well-known remarks on Folly Peablossom’s Wedding—"just the sort of volume to snatch up in railway and steamboat, and put out of sight in all other places"²³—show that, however much he privately relished the humorists’ productions, he sensed the gap between their yarns and the polite effusions of his genteel South. And, in the main, his comments on southwest humor suggest that he favored works with some commitment to "Tidewater" social values over those where frontier rawness or grotesquerie predominated.

During the same years when Simms’s reading of these and similar writers made him newly aware of their materials and methods, his travels in the North Carolina mountain South gave him first-hand exposure to frontier humor in oral form. In the late summer of 1847 he spent nearly two weeks camping with a group of professional hunters, watching them shoot, butcher, and cook game, hearing them tell yams, and soaking up details of mountain living. The journal he kept on this trip²⁴ shows him collecting material which eventually went into his fiction, including tales of bear and deer hunts of a sort that had long been a staple in printed humor. The trip and the reading together, then, increased his familiarity with a major strain in southern experience and encouraged him to employ that strain freely and inventively in drama, novelettes, novels, and tales during the last two decades of his life.

In his writing of the 1850s and 1860s, Simms uses, with increasing skill, the subjects, techniques, and character types of southwest humor—hunting, horse-racing, gander-pulling, country frolics; frame stories with lively exchanges between gentlemen and woodsmen preceding equally lively tall tales; ruffians, shysters, yokels, and plain, honest mountain people. Moreover, in the manner of some southwest humor, his late works combine a realistic presentation of southern life with flights of fantasy often based on folk stories which he had picked up on his travels or heard in the Carolina countryside. These elements link volumes otherwise diverse in mode and method—the late Revolutionary War Romances, especially The Forayers (1855) and Eutaw (1856), the melodrama Michael Bonham (1852) and the miscellany Southward Ho! (1854), the novelettes As Good as a Comedy (1852) and Paddy McGann (1863), and the mountain romances and tales Voltmeier (1869), The Cub of thePanther (1869), "How Sharp Snaffles Got His Capital and Wife" (1870), and "Bald-Head Bill Bauldy."²⁵ The Forayers and

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