DuBose Heyward: A Charleston Gentleman and the World of Porgy and Bess. (Book Reviews).

DuBose Heyward: A Charleston Gentleman and the World of Porgy and Bess. By James M. Hutchisson. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Pp. [xxii], 225. $28.00, ISBN 1-57806-250-0.)

In his beautifully written biography of DuBose Heyward (1885-1940), James M. Hutchisson rescues this Charleston author from undeserved oblivion. A novelist, poet, dramatist, screenwriter, and lyricist, Heyward enjoyed a national reputation during the post-World War I revival of the arts in the South, often called the Southern Renaissance, but was later eclipsed by younger writers such as Allen Tate and William Faulkner during the 1930s.

With only a modest formal education and a family hard-pressed by the poverty known to many of the old Lowcountry aristocracy, Heyward spent his early career as an insurance salesman. Sensitive and perceptive, he began experimenting with writing a style of poetry that gloried in the natural beauty of the South. He found like-minded friends in Charleston who shared his passion for writing, such as John Bennett and Josephine Pinckney. With Hervey Allen, he wrote his first book of poetry, Carolina Chansons (1922). These four writers had founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina in 1920, a literary organization that proved a vehicle for both promoting the arts in the region and launching Heyward's own career among New York publishers.

Heyward's most memorable work, Porgy (1925), was the first literary attempt to honestly depict the unique culture of Charleston's Gullahs. He continued his quest to realistically confront the question of the fate of blacks in the modern world in his later novels, Mamba's Daughters (1929) and Brass Ankle (1931), but Heyward also explored a variety of themes. One of his best novels was Peter Ashley (1932), a tale of the Civil War.

As the subtitle suggests, Hutchisson organizes his narrative around the quiet, genteel Heyward's collaboration with the brash New Yorker George Gershwin to create the 1935 folk opera Porgy and Bess. Both men were deeply affected by the experience that resulted in the forging of an enduring southern cultural icon with its memorable characters from Catfish Row. Although Gershwin received most of the applause at the time, Hutchisson redirects the spotlight upon the retiring Heyward by pointing out that the Charleston poet not only wrote the libretto for Porgy and Bess but also the lyrics for such haunting arias as "Summertime." Additionally, Hutchisson underscores the important contributions of Dorothy Kuhns Heyward, DuBose's wife, who had her own career as a playwright.

Hutchisson writes with empathy about Heyward's struggle to reconcile the code of his ancestors with his more modern understanding of race and class. A social liberal by the end of his life but not a revolutionary, Heyward was able to return home to Charleston after he soured on New York. At the time of his death in 1940, Heyward was the resident dramatist at the Dock Street Theatre, where he continued to promote local talent through regional theater.

Hutchisson's study of Heyward and his times is the product of exhaustive research that includes important Heyward manuscripts that have only recently become available. Specialists and the general reader will find much of interest in this study, which provides a privileged window into the black and white worlds of the modern South.

BARBARA L. BELLOWS
University of South Carolina