The Life of the Southern Skylark
The Southern Skylark has a long history. It began in 1976 or 1977 as a short story, informed by local history and lore as well as hell-raising generally shared by the night shift proofreaders at the old Michie Law Publishers — we had a lot of night to kill. The original Kanawha Canal piece twinned out into a second short story about stray dogs in 19th century Lynchburg, and then both fragments played dead for years until I was obliged to come up with a master’s thesis at UVA's brand-new shiny MFA program. I returned to this fragment and converted it into a larger and even more ragged fragment and handed that in as a thesis and all was well. Two or three years later, feeling it would be a shame not to finish the piece after wasting so much work on it, I completed a draft.
Maybe the 1830s are not a neglected period in American history, but the Randolph-Calhoun era has not had a great deal of play in the public imagination. That is our loss. The period saw the collapse of the best-intentioned practical effort to end American slavery and a Nullification Crisis that helped sectionalize American politics and set the stage for the Civil War. This was also an era of mechanical progress and, for lack of a better phrase, cultural growth. To “observe” or really just glimpse this society in the medium of fiction, it seemed self-evident that the narrator should be British for several reasons. First, an unbiased American narrator was not easily imagined; second, the era of the uplifting lecture had begun; third, Romantic poetry and Gothic literature were sweeping the land. Thus Hingely, British dilettante lecturer on “The Lives of the Poets.”
Nothing is more loathsome than historical exposition, so The Southern Skylark avoids any trace of that. The other important early goal was to make sure I enjoyed myself. I always liked working on this book and there are at least a dozen versions. A penultimate stage was reached in 1991 or 1992 when it got as close as an author’s ethnic identity questionnaire in a university press venue. It’s fortunate for the book that this did not happen. The most important goal of The Southern Skylark had not been reached: to pay some justified attention to the Romantic movement itself and to the poetry Hingely so desperately wants to lecture about.
Recalling our school days, we may think of Keats, Shelley and Byron as obstacles to our free time but Romantic poetry was the vital revolutionary literature of its day. Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry,” unpublished and largely unknown in Shelley's day, and the essay Hingely is trying to popularize, could just as well be titled “A Defense of Human Freedom”. And where more paradoxically appropriate to bring that up than slaveholding America?
The proper romanticization of The Southern Skylark required several more drafts. It might have been easier to write a longer and heavier book but length and gloom were not the goals. The goal was the thoughtless joy of the lark ascending.
Maybe the 1830s are not a neglected period in American history, but the Randolph-Calhoun era has not had a great deal of play in the public imagination. That is our loss. The period saw the collapse of the best-intentioned practical effort to end American slavery and a Nullification Crisis that helped sectionalize American politics and set the stage for the Civil War. This was also an era of mechanical progress and, for lack of a better phrase, cultural growth. To “observe” or really just glimpse this society in the medium of fiction, it seemed self-evident that the narrator should be British for several reasons. First, an unbiased American narrator was not easily imagined; second, the era of the uplifting lecture had begun; third, Romantic poetry and Gothic literature were sweeping the land. Thus Hingely, British dilettante lecturer on “The Lives of the Poets.”
Nothing is more loathsome than historical exposition, so The Southern Skylark avoids any trace of that. The other important early goal was to make sure I enjoyed myself. I always liked working on this book and there are at least a dozen versions. A penultimate stage was reached in 1991 or 1992 when it got as close as an author’s ethnic identity questionnaire in a university press venue. It’s fortunate for the book that this did not happen. The most important goal of The Southern Skylark had not been reached: to pay some justified attention to the Romantic movement itself and to the poetry Hingely so desperately wants to lecture about.
Recalling our school days, we may think of Keats, Shelley and Byron as obstacles to our free time but Romantic poetry was the vital revolutionary literature of its day. Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry,” unpublished and largely unknown in Shelley's day, and the essay Hingely is trying to popularize, could just as well be titled “A Defense of Human Freedom”. And where more paradoxically appropriate to bring that up than slaveholding America?
The proper romanticization of The Southern Skylark required several more drafts. It might have been easier to write a longer and heavier book but length and gloom were not the goals. The goal was the thoughtless joy of the lark ascending.
