On the honesty,
self-reflection, and unabashed ambition contained in the personal journals of
my favorite American author.
I daresay most
of us—including this AmericanStudier to be sure—have kept a youthful journal
(or diary, as I called it), have recorded in secret, for our eyes only, our
fears and hopes, our doubts and goals, and above all our constant romantic frustrations
and failures (no, just me?). But the private journal of a young professional writer?
That’s an entirely different proposition. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, in
his essay “Nature” (1836), that “I am not solitary whilst I read and write,
though nobody is with me”; while he was arguing that that is the case for all
people, I would say that it’s infinitely more true for those who hope that
their writing will find a public audience. Even if the young professional
writer doesn’t plan for his or her journal to be read—and honestly, it seems likely
to me for many to secretly hope that they’ll become famous enough that it will—that
journal nonetheless becomes an extension of the burgeoning career, a space
where its possibilities and problems can be addressed, engaged with, given
explicit shape and definition. And I don’t know of a more exemplary, nor more
compelling and American, such young professional writer’s journal
than that of Charles W. Chesnutt.
When I give my brief
introduction to Chesnutt in my American Literature II survey course (on the
first of our four days with The
Marrow of Tradition [1901]), I focus on many of the ways in which his life and identity existed on
a complex border between different realities: born in Ohio, just before the
Civil War, to parents who had been slaves in North Carolina, he then moved back
to North Carolina after the war and lived there most of his adult life; born to
African American parents but with both grandfathers white men (likely his
parents’ owners), he was light-skinned enough to pass for white but apparently chose
to self-identify as African American throughout his life; he began his career writing
dialect historical
fiction in the plantation tradition (although in a far more complex and
subversive vein than most of the tradition’s authors), then shifted abruptly to
contemporary
political and social novels; and so on. One thing that makes Chesnutt’s
journals so darn loveable is that he was apparently fully aware of those many
complex liminal spaces he identified, and numerous moments reflect his nuanced
engagement with them. One of the richest is when he takes on the task of revising
and compiling a collection of African American spirituals for a charismatic
local minister: Chesnutt on the one hand acknowledges that the spirituals
represent a vernacular and somewhat lowbrow literary form, but on the other hand
recognizes that they have a power denied much highbrow literature; he also both
takes pride in his authorly role in revising and reshaping them (and the
recognition he might receive) and yet admits that the minister is the real
driving force behind the project (as well as in the community).
It’s on that
latter theme, Chesnutt’s hopes and fears, his goals and concerns, for his
literary career, that I find the journals most impressive and loveable. “My principal
object,” the 19 year old Chesnutt wrote in the first entry of the journal (in
1877), is to improve myself in the art of composition”; that meant in part
specific readings of and responses to rhetorical and composition advice
manuals, such as Hugh
Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles
Lettres (1783), but also and
more crucially honest and yet deeply ambitious self-reflections on his
strengths and weaknesses, his potential and challenges, and above all his goals
and purposes, as a writer. Some of those reflections are full of the confidence
required to make it as a professional writer: responding to Albion
Tourgée’s
A Fool’s Errand (1881), Chesnutt wonders, “Why could
not a colored man write a far better book about the South?” Some are far more
humble and poignant, as when Chesnutt admits that, despite having “so little
experience in composition, … I think I must write a book.” Some are particularly
ambitious and inspiring, as when Chesnutt frames two distinct yet
interconnected social purposes for his career: “If I can exalt my race”; “The
object of my writings would be the elevation of the whites.” And all, all these
personal yet professional revelations, make me love Chesnutt that much more.
My next American
love tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Responses to this post? Loves you’d share for the weekend post?
No comments:
Post a Comment