Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition.

Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown. The Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. xxvi, 235. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8071-2844-9; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8071-2822-8.)

An expansion of the Fleming Lectures delivered at Louisiana State University in 1995, Hearts of Darkness examines the work of southern writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the arresting, Conradesque title to the final page, the book commands the reader's attention. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, a leading historian who has written many books and essays about the South, is concerned to show the relationships among "the ethic of honor, the tragedy of melancholy, and the personal origins of artistic imagination" (p. xi). In the preface, Wyatt-Brown points out that his interest in melancholy is not only intellectual but also personal; he describes briefly and poignantly his own experience with depression following the death of one of his children from cancer at the age of seven.

Acknowledging that a connection between depression and creativity has been identified in a number of cultures, Wyatt-Brown argues that the nineteenth-century South--with its stifling code of honor, choking conservatism, and deep-seated anti-intellectualism--provided particularly fertile soil for both depression and artistic alienation. Wyatt-Brown studies the lives and works of writers ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Ellen Glasgow. Some of the authors are major figures--Poe, Mark Twain, and Willa Cather, for example. Others are decidedly minor--for instance, Mirabean B. Lamar, Thomas Holley Chivers, and Father Abram J. Ryan. All of them, Wyatt-Brown asserts, suffered from depression and transformed that suffering into art, albeit with widely varying degrees of success.

Among the strongest features of an almost uniformly solid work are Wyatt-Brown's discussion of Abraham Lincoln as a southern poet--in the course of which is presented a moving explication of the "Gettysburg Address"--and his argument that the women writers Constance Fenimore Woolson, Kate Chopin, Cather, and Glasgow were the heralds of modernism in the South's literature. Wyatt-Brown is certainly fight when he concludes that "We should look upon the evolution of southern literary alienation and inner heartbreak as something to acclaim rather than deplore.... The emergence of a melancholy sensibility with each generation ... furnished the American literary landscape with works of extraordinary and distinctive forcefulness" (pp. 228-29).

Hearts of Darkness is smoothly written and thoroughly documented, reflecting Wyatt-Brown's felicitous style and wide reading not only of southern literature but also of medical writing. Yet an otherwise excellent study suffers from two defects: the absence of a bibliography and some factual errors. Although published lectures sometimes omit a bibliography, in this case--the book has 230 pages of text and almost 550 footnotes--one would have been very helpful. The errors of fact are not usually germane, but they are distracting. Some examples of inaccuracies are as follows: Edmund Kirby Smith was the last Confederate general to surrender; George Washington Cable did not experience the Civil War; Waiter Hines Page was from Virginia; Joel Chandler Harris resigned from the Atlanta Constitution at the age of thirty-eight; and Woolson died in 1890 and in 1894. The reviewer contends, moreover, that at least two writers could have been excluded. Wyatt-Brown does not present persuasive evidence that Father Ryan and Sidney Lanier suffered from depression.

Despite these drawbacks, Hearts of Darkness is an important achievement. The dust jacket calls the book "a major reinterpretation of the South's fertile literary culture." Indeed it is.

WAYNE MIXON

Augusta State University