Wimsatt2

Eutaw show Simms giving the antics of lower-class Tory marauders a frontier flavor—"Hell-fire Dick" bounds into his pages shouting, "‘Open to the sky-scrapers, and the bouncing wild cats; and hear em scream to beat all nater!’"²⁶—while treating their drunkenness, greed, and treachery with the kind of amused disdain the humorists sometimes showed for distasteful subjects.²⁷Michael Bonham depicts a garrulous, bungling Davy Crockett who is a far cry from the heroic figure of folk legend and Crockett Almanacs; Southward Ho! boasts gulls and gullers, a clever adaptation of the Arkansas Traveler story, and a sly little tall tale of "widely diffused folk origin":²⁸

"Been in many fights?"

"A few. The last I had was with seven Apache Indians. I had but one revolver, a six-barrel—"

"Well?"

"I killed six of the savages."

"And the seventh?"

"He killed me!"²⁹

Voltmeier stars a ruthless villain who strikes the pose of a drawling, shuffling bumpkin to annoy a proud aristocrat; Cub stars Simms’s funniest female figure, tongue-wagging, dialect-speaking Aunt Betsy Moore, who recalls talky women in southwest sketches like Hooper’s "Taking the Census" as well as those redoubtable ladies of down-east comedy, Mrs. Partington and the Widow Bedott. "Sharp Snaffles" combines the prosaic details of the frontier courtship yarn with the free-wheeling fantasy of the wonderful hunt; "Bill Bauldy" combines an especially complex tall tale with parodies of Indian captivity narratives.³⁰ But perhaps Simms’s most intriguing use of southwest humor occurs in As Good as a Comedy and Paddy McGann—each of which reveals relationships to the mode that previous commentators on Simms have overlooked.

As Good as a Comedy has a framing narrative set in a stagecoach dominated by "a huge Tennessean" (CS III, 8) and a main story which emphasizes, among other things, a gander-pulling, a horse race, a circus, a country dance, and frequent bouts of drinking. The southwest ambience of the frame is obvious; the influence of Longstreet and other humorists on the race, the gander-pulling, and the dance is obvious too.³¹What is less obvious—in fact, what has never been remarked—is the influence of William Tappan Thompson on Simms’s circus scene. Despite his reservations about Major Jones’s Courtship, Simms apparently drew on a Thompson sketch, "Great Attraction," for major elements in his circus episodes.³²In "Great Attraction," Thompson describes how Dr.

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Jones, a dandified country physician who has picked up fancy notions in Augusta, attends a circus where he relishes the acts with horses, riders, and clowns. Jones gets in a scuffle with a circus performer who rides him around the ring on his shoulders and then pitches him into a crowd of Negroes, to his chagrin and the audience’s delight. In As Good, Simms describes how Jones Barry, a rich and foolish dandy, attends a circus where he marvels at horses, riders, and clown. He assaults the clown, who rides him around the ring on his shoulders and then—to his chagrin and the audience’s delight—pitches him "headlong into the arms of a great fat negro wench, one of the most enormous in the assembly, who sat trickling with oleaginous sweat. . ."(CS 111, 104). The similarities between the scenes—from the clown, the shoulder ride, and the final humiliation to the presence, in each account, of the name "Jones"—suggest that Simms, though he publicly deplored Thompson’s "extravagancies," used him with profit for a funny sequence in As Good.³³

Paddy MCGann, at once the oddest, liveliest, and most varied of Simms’s works, is the tale of a liquor-loving Irish backwoodsman who encounters puzzling situations that he blames on the Devil—a bewitched gun, a huge buck he cannot kill, a red-eyed demon who lives in a stump, a spooky voice crying "‘Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!’" in the night, and similar annoyances. The narrative works up folk material through standard structures of southwest humor—a frame story where genteel planters and their rustic companion drink and yarn and a main story told in rich dialect laced with striking images; it also highlights rural diversions like a fight and a shoot for beef. But though it is enticing in its mixture of narrative modes, Paddy has thus far attracted scant attention from critics. Those who do treat it tend to stress its symbolic and allegorical aspects and to slight its broad base in several kinds of folk yarns.³⁴In addition to "the comic old Nick of folklore" noted in the Introduction to the Centennial Simms text (III, xxii), Simms uses specific legends (like that of the "spirit deer")³⁵which he had probably heard in the rural South and which are listed in twentieth-century folklore indexes—gun bewitched so that it will not hit target, devil in animal form that cannot be hit by bullet, magic deer, demon that lives in a tree, and so forthA⁶ One of the printed sources which he apparently used for Paddy McGann brings a number of these motifs together and combines them, like Paddy, with elements from southwest humor. That source is James Hall’s "Pete Featherton,"³⁷a tale whose several parallels to Paddy have never, to my knowledge, been remarked.³⁸Both Hall’s narrative and Simms’s have as central figures strapping young

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woodsmen who like alcohol and the marvelous in comparable degree, and there is a strong suggestion in both works that the hero’s fondness for the bottle makes him equally fond of the tall tale. Both stories center on an enchanted gun, a witch doctor who tries to remove the spell, haunted woods, deer that cannot be killed, and a mildly menacing devil who has human form in "Pete" but not in Paddy. The stories resemble each other in characters, situations, and comic tone; Simms’s interest in Hall’s work (he dedicated Beauchampe [1842] and its revised first part, Charlemont [1856] to Hall)—along with the fact that he commented in his letters (II, 165) on The Wilderness and the War Path (1846), where the last version of Hall’s story appeared—reinforces the likelihood that he poached so me elements from "Pete" for Paddy.

Simms’s use of frontier humor, then, begins early in his career with the snatches of tall tales he stuck into his youthful correspondence; it continues through his early Revolutionary War Romances, the Border Romances, a drama, a miscellany, the late Revolutionary War fiction, and the Mountain stories and tales. It permeates the short novels As Good as a Comedy and Paddy McGann, each of which leans heavily on frontier and folk materials both obvious and obscure. In character types, episodes, and structural patterns, the persistent appearance of southwest or frontier humor in Simms’s writing—which Professor Turner has noted on more than one occasion—is something which future laborers in the vast and varied Simms vineyard might do very well to explore.

ELON COLLEGE

NOTES

¹The first of these essays appeared in the South Atlantic Quarterly, 53 (July 1954), 404-415; the second, whose full title is "Seeds of Literary Revolt in the Humor of the Old Southwest." was published in the Louisiana Historical Quarterly, 39 (April 1956). 143-51 See also Professor Turner’s "Realism and Fantasy in Southern Humor," Georgia Review. 12 (Winter 1958). 451-57, and "A ‘Want-List’ for the study of American Humor," Studies in American Humor, 2 (October 1975), 116-20.
²Brooks, "Charleston and the Southwest: Simms," Ch. xiii in The World of Washington Irving ([New York]: E. P. Dutton, 1944); Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 1607–1900 ([Durham]: Duke Univ. Press. 1954), p. 592; Parks, "The Three Streams of Southern Humor." Georgia Review, 9 (Summer 1955), 156-57, William Gilinore Simms as Literary Critic, Univ. of Georgia Monographs. No. 7 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 1961), p. 9, and Ante.Bellam Southern Literary Critics (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 1962). p. 63; Holman, Three Modes of Modern Southern Fiction: Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1966), p. 52; Bush, Introductions to As Good as a Comedy and Paddy McGann, Vol. III in The Writings of William Gitmore Simms, Centennial Edition, ed. John C. Guilds (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1972). hereafter cited as CS; Kibler, "Simms’ Indebtedness to Folk Tradition in ‘Sharp Snaffles,’ ‘ Southern Literary Journal, 4 (Spring 1972),

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55-68; McHaney. "William Gilmore Simms," in The Chief Glory of Every People: Essays on Classic American Writers, ed. Matthew J. Broccoli (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 175.90; Guilds, Introduction to Stories and Tales, vol. V in The Writings of William Gilmore Simms, Centennial Edition, ed. John C. Guilds (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press. 1974). and Explanatory Introductions and Notes for "How Sharp Snaffles Got His Capital and Wife" and "Bald-Head Bill Bauldy," pp. 794-98, 803-807.
³1n this paper I use the terms "frontier humor" and "southwest humor" interchangeably, though such humor is more nearly "Southern" or even "southeastern" in its derivations than the standard designations indicate,
⁴1 also use the terms "novel" and "romance" interchangeably.
⁵The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed, Mary C. Simms Oliphant. Alfred Taylor Odell. and T, C. Duncan Eaves (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press. 1952-1956), IV, 443,63; I, 250; II, 194, hereafter cited as L.
⁶On the various versions of the coon story, which appeared in the New York Spirit of the Times and other American newspapers, see Norris W. Yates, William T, Porter and the Spirit of the Times: A Study of the Big Bear School of Humor (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ., 1957), pp. 170-73.
⁷Simms’s snake story was recorded by several South Carolina newspapers; see, for example. the Charleston South Carolinian for July 28, 1848, quoted in L, II, 420. The "aged fowl" story. according to Richard M. Dorson, is a literary folk yam embodying a "well-known tall-tale" motif; see ‘Print and American Folk Tales," California Folklore Quarterly, 4 (July 1945), 210. As "The Tough Goose." the story appeared in the Spirit of the Times, NS 6 (June 11, 1836). 134; as "The Toughest Game-Cock on Record!", in the Spirit, 18 (April 29, 1848), 116.
⁸See Hayne. "Ante-Bellum Charleston." The Southern Bivouac, NS 1 (October 1885). 258-60,
⁹On the distinctions among Southern regions, see, for example, Holman, Ch. i et passim; Randall Stewart, "Tidewater and Frontier," Georgia Review, 13 (Fall 1959), 296-307; and Howard Odum. Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1936). Though the Gulf and mountain Souths presented somewhat different kinds of frontiers, since these dovetail in Simms’s experience I have treated them together in this essay.
¹⁰A frequently made point; see, for example. Holman, Three Modes, pp. 52-53; Holman, "Ellen Glasgow and the Southern Literary Tradition," Virginia in History and Tradition, ed, R. C, Simonini, Jr. (Farmville, Va.: Longwood College, 1958), p. 92; and Louis J. Budd, "Gentlemanly Humorists of the Old South." Southern Folklore Quarterly, 17 (December 1953), 232-40.
¹¹It originates in the pairing of the romance hero and his "faithful companion or shadow figure"; on this point see Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. 1957), p. 196. hereafter cited as AC.
¹²0n the dialectic structure and polarizing tendency of much romance, see AC, pp. 196-97, and Frye’s later volume, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass, and London, England: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976). p. 53, hereafter cited as SS; on the commitment of romance to a vision of an ideal order, see AC, p. 186, and SS, passim. J. V. Ridgely, in William Gilmore Simms (New York: Twayne. 1962), p. 30, notes Simms’s idealization of his "good" backwoodsmen but fails to note that such idealization is consistent with the methods of romance. Ridgely also fails to recognize the explicit, extensive connections between Simms’s work and that of southwest writers; on this point see McHaney, p. 178, and note #33 below.
¹³On paired, contrasted characters as symbols of the moral antitheses or the polarized "mental landscape" of romance, see Frye, AC, p. 196, and SS, p. 53,
¹⁴Yates discusses the "thrust and parry" type of dialect yam on pp. 106-109,citing the "Arkansaw Traveller" motif as the best example of this kind.
¹⁵Mellichampe: A Legend of the Santee (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836). 1, 48-49, hereafter cited within the text as Mell. Simms made only minor changes in punctuation and spelling in the passages I have quoted from the novel when he revised it for the Redfield (the author’s uniform) edition.

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¹⁶Such as the Jack Downing material or the letters appearing in Southern newspapers; on the latter, see James L. W. West, "Early Backwoods Humor in the Greenville Mountaineer, 1826–1840." Mississippi Quarterly, 25 (Winter 1970-1971), 69-82, and Nancy B. Sederberg, "Antebellum Southern Humor in the Camden Journal: 1826-1840," Mississippi Quarterly, 27 (Winter 1973-1974), 41-74.
¹⁷Border Beagles: A Tale of Mississippi (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1840). II, 265; I, 159-60. The irregularities in quotation marks in the second passage quoted in the text are Simms’s; he made minor changes in punctuation, and enhanced the dialect, in revising this passage for the Redfield edition.
¹⁸On the factors affecting the book market, see Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction. First Series, ed. C. Hugh Holman (Cambridge. Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1962). pp. xx-xxii, hereafter cited as V&R, First Series.
¹⁹0n Simms’s responsibility for material in the "Editorial Bureau" section of The Magnolia, see his comments in L, 1, 308 and in The Magnolia, or, Southern Apalachian, NS 2 (May 1843), 336. During his editorship he printed a new series of Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes, commented on Longstreet in the "Bureau," and published a letter from him; for the last item, see The Magnolia, NS 1 (September 1842). 199-200. Passages in Simms’s letters indicate he wrote most of the reviews in the Southern Quarterly Review (hereafter SQR) during his editorship: see, for example, L, 111,219, t 17, 120 (where he says "1 have been dishing up my Critical Notices" for the journal).
²⁰For his remarks on Baldwin, see the Mercury for 16 December 1854; he commends Flush Times as "racy, witty, never tedious, and always truthful." Edd W. Parks in Simms as Literary Critic, p. 138, n. 26, ascribes the anonymous review of Brinley’s book in the Mercury of 6 October 1860 to Simms.
²¹For Simms’ observations on Baldwin, see SQR, NS 9 (April 1854), 555; on Hooper, SQR, 20 (July 1851), 272. The remarks on Longstreet are motivated, at least in part, by Simms’s participation in the Young American movement and his consequent determination to puff native authors; the comments, which are part of a longer section on southwest writing, occur in Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction, Second Series (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845). p. 178, hereafter cited as V&R, Second Series. (Despite the date on its title-page, this volume actually appeared in 1847; see Holman, Introduction to V&R, First Series. p. xxix, n. 67.) Similar praise of Longstreet appears in "Wit and Humour of the Professions," an unpublished Simms manuscript in the Charles Carroll Simms Collection at the University of South Carolina, which I used with the permission of Mrs. Mary C. Simms Oliphant. Simms and Longstreet corresponded: see Simms’s remarks in L, 1, 344-45, and 11, 68, and his letter to Longstreet, which I came across in 1971, printed in O. P. Fitzgerald, Judge Longstreet, A Life Sketch (Nashville, Tenn.: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1891), p. 199.
²²For the remarks on Tensas, see SQR, t7 (July 1850), 537: on Thompson, see The Magnolia; (,r. Southern Apalachian, NS 2 (June 1843), 399. For Simms’s comments on William Elliott, see, for example, his letters to Elliott in L, 11, 477-78, 492-93, and SQR, 24 (July 1853), 285. For his comments on Cobb’s Mississippi Scenes ("lively, careless essays ... more sketchy than thoughtful"), see SQR, 19 (April 1851), 562; for those on Thorpe’s The Hive of the Bee Hunter ("a pleasant and sketchy series of pictures"), see SQR, NS 10 (October 1854), 525-26.
²³SQR, 20 (July 1851), 272,
²⁴The journal was transcribed by Miriam J. Shillingsburg in "An Edition of William Gilmore Simms’s The Cub of the Panther," Diss. Univ. of South Carolina 1969. Appendix A; Simms’s various uses of it—for book review, lectures, and fiction—are described by Shillingsburg. "From Notes to Novel: Simms’s Creative Method," Southern Literary Journal, 5 (Fall 1972), 89-107,
²⁵The dates given in the text for Paddy, Voltmeier, Cub, and "Sharp" are those of their original periodical publication. Except for Cub, each has since appeared in the Centennial Simms edition. As Good, also published in the edition, originally appeared in Carey and Han’s Library of Humorous American Works, which included important volumes by southwest writers. "Bill Bauldy," though written near the time of "Sharp Snaffles," remained in manuscript in the Charles Carroll Simms Collection until it was published in CS, V.

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²⁶The Forayers, With Introduction and Explanatory Notes (Spartanburg, S.C. The Reprint Co.. 1976), p. 52, a text reproduced by offset from a copy of the first impression of the first (the Redfield) edition.
²⁷This latter point was developed by C. Hugh Holman in a paper read at the Simms Bicentennial Conference in Charleston. South Carolina, May 1976, to be published in the conference Proceedings.
²⁸James H. Penrod, "Characteristic Endings of Southwestern Yarns," Mississippi Quarterly, 15 (1961-1962), 31; he does not, however, mention Simms’s version of the story.
²⁹Southward Ho! A Spell of Sunshine (New York: Redfield, 1854). p. 329.
³⁰On the folk material in "Sharp," see Kibler, pp. 55-68; the relationship of Bill Bauldy" to southwest humor and the Indian captivity narrative was the subject of a paper, as yet unpublished, by Stephen E. Meats, read at the Southern American Literature seminar at the Modern Language Association meeting in December 1977.
³¹On this point see my dissertation, "The Comic Sense of William Gilmore Simms." Duke Univ. 1964, esp. p. 28, 88-89; see also Bush, Introduction to As Good, CS III, esp. xiv-xv.
³²See Major Jones’ Courtship: Detailed, with other Scenes, Incidents and Adventures, in a Series of Letters, By Himself. To Which is Added, The "Great Attraction!" (Madison, Georgia: C. R. Hanleiter, 1843), pp. 65-76. The story also appears in Thompson’s Chronicles of Pineville (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart. 1845). I wish to thank the staff of the Rare Book Room at Perkins Library. Duke University, for helping me locate these and related materials.
³³Simm’s use of Thompson helps refute Ridgely’s claim, p. 29, that no connection can be seen between the work of the two writers. Simms and Thompson met at least once, at a party in Columbia. South Carolina, in 1848; for this information I am indebted to Professor James E. Kibler, Jr., of the University of Georgia, who discovered it in a letter of O. B. Mayer to Paul Hamilton Hayne (4 February 1886), Hayne Collection, Perkins Library, Duke University.
³⁴See Bush, Introduction to Paddy McGann, CS, 1111, and Simone Vauthier, "Une Aventure du R�cit Fantastique: Paddy McGann, Or, The Demon Of The Stump De William Gilmore Simms," Recherches Anglaises et Americaines, 6 (1973), 78-104.
³⁵In his journal of the 1847 mountain trip (Shillingsburg, "Edition," p. 112), Simms mentions tales of "The Rocky Spur Buck—spirit deer . . . curious superstitions of this beast—how he foils the hunter &c." Although stories of unhuntable beasts abound in southwest writing and folklore, Simms may have recollected the "spirit deer" when writing Paddy.
³⁶See, for example, Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1955-1958), III, G265.8.3.1., G303.4.8.11.; I, B184.4.; III, F402.6.1., and Ernest W. Baughman, Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America. Indiana Univ. Folklore Series. No. 20 (The Hague: Mouton and Co.. 1966), e.g., G303.3.3.2.8,
³⁷First published in The Western Souvenir, A Christmas and New Year’s Gift for 1829 (Cincinnati: N. and G. Guilford, 1828), republished in Mary Russell Mitford, ed., Stories of A,nerican Life; by American Writers (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), and revised by Hall for his collection of tales The Wilderness and the War Path (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846). See Randolph C. Randall, James Hall: Spokesman of the New West ([Columbus]: Ohio State University Press, 1964). pp. 147, 153-54.
³⁸In the Introduction to Paddy McGann, CS, Ill, xxii-xxiii, Bush mentions Washington Irving’s "The Devil and Tom Walker" and J. P. Kennedy’s "Mike Brown," an interpolated narrative in Swallow Barn, as possible influences on Paddy; but he does not mention "Pete Featherton." Randall, p. 192, suggests that Hall’s story influenced "Mike Brown."

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