Joe Bernstein
2018-01-30 18:47:23 UTC
Charles Chesnutt was not, despite the claims of some ill-informed
critics, a fantasist by nature. However, his first and biggest
literary successes involved fantasy, he wound up with a complex
relationship with it, and his last two published fictions were, by my
standards, genuine fantasy.
He was born in Cleveland in 1858. His family lived there and in
Oberlin, Ohio, until 1866, then returned to his parents' native land,
so he grew up in and near Fayetteville, North Carolina. His mother
died in 1871, after which a young relative of hers cared for the kids.
His father soon married this woman, leading to a bunch more kids, so
Charles Chesnutt had to start working. His teacher managed to keep
him learning some by hiring him as an assistant; teaching became
Chesnutt's main work for the next decade, taking him several places
in North Carolina, and he wound up succeeding his original teacher,
as second principal of the state's school for black teachers,
established back in Fayetteville. By then he'd married (a fellow
teacher) and had kids of his own. He'd pursued a ferociously
disciplined program of self-education; partly to record this, he kept
a journal, in which he also wrote his first stories and poems. He
had big aspirations both for achievement - focused on racial matters
- and for wealth, and had somehow convinced himself that writing, I
kid you not, was a road to the latter. The stories apparently
portrayed animals realistically; one example at least got published,
his first publication so far known, in 1875; it's available online,
URL below.
In 1883, after half a year trying out New York City, he settled in
Cleveland, and brought his family there the next year. One of the
things he'd taught himself was stenography; he wound up working for a
lawyer, and became a court reporter. He passed the Ohio bar, and set
up in business for himself notionally as a lawyer, but most of his
income came from court reporting, which eventually made him sometimes
the richest black man in Cleveland. Meanwhile, he set seriously to
work as a writer. His goal was to write novels (where he thought the
money was), but he knew he wasn't ready yet, so he wrote short
fiction. He made at least one sale in 1885, several in 1886, and
over a dozen in 1887. One of that spate sold to <The Atlantic
Monthly>; he'd Arrived. That was his first "conjure" story - his
first story of any kind to come near fantasy - and what I called his
first literary success.
The "conjure" stories have this framework: The narrator is a
northern white man whose wife comes down sickly, so he buys an old
plantation in North Carolina to go into winemaking. There he finds
an old black man who used to be enslaved on that plantation; this man
becomes an employee of his. In most of the stories, this man, Julius
McAdoo, tells a story, which is the main burden of Chesnutt's story,
but at the end of the latter, the narrator and his wife respond to
the internal story in different ways - the narrator usually finding
some way McAdoo has conned him. Most but not all of McAdoo's stories
are, to us, fantasies, usually involving one or more "conjure"
workers, whose conjurations, in these stories, often involve physical
transformations of people. Most, perhaps all, are set during slavery
times (unlike the frame stories).
Chesnutt continued to produce a fair amount of short fiction
through 1889, but thereafter focused on other things - starting his
business, visiting Europe for the first time, writing novels, and
pushing the <Atlantic>'s publishers, Houghton Mifflin, to publish a
book by him. The first and shortest of the novels, <Mandy Oxendine>,
rejected in 1897 and finally published in 1997, is the most cheerful
of four novels that focused on race in the Carolinas, although people
die in each; the other three of these are the novels actually
published in his lifetime. Those three each at least refer to the
fantastic; this one, which focuses on an interracial triangle around
the titular woman, doesn't. The next novel he submitted instead
focused on white characters in the North in its story of a young
woman seeking the reason for her father's ruin; <A Business Career>,
also rejected (in 1898), also without reference to anything
fantastical, and also relatively cheerful, finally saw print in 2005.
The <Atlantic> did publish a non-fantasy story in 1898; it was hugely
popular, and finally convinced Houghton Mifflin to try a book under
his name - a collection of "conjure" stories, in each of which, at
their request, McAdoo's story would be fantasy. So Chesnutt's first
book and biggest literary success was arguably fantasy, which is why
literary critics who don't know what they're doing see him as a
fantasist turned realist.
Since <The Conjure Woman>, 1899, sold reasonably, Houghton Mifflin
came out with another collection the same year, for the Christmas
market, <The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line>;
it didn't sell nearly as well. Nevertheless, having taken the plunge,
they stuck with Chesnutt. (Partly because another publisher had
released his biography of Frederick Douglass, *also* in 1899, which
apparently sold like hotcakes.) For a while they urged and Chesnutt
worked on revisions to <The Rainbow Chasers>, another white-focused
novel, in which a reclusive scientist who thinks he's on the track to
riches neglects his finances, so ends up in a boarding house where he
Learns About Life. But then he interested his favourite <Atlantic>
editor, who'd become a partner at Doubleday, in the story he'd been
working on throughout the 1890s and had finally gotten to (shortish)
novel size; when he informed Houghton Mifflin of this, they decided
to take that instead. The surviving manuscripts of <The Rainbow
Chasers> are a mess, so it's his only novel not yet published.
Anyway, his first *published* novel is <The House Behind the Cedars>,
1900, which became in the end a fairly stereotypical "tragic mulatta"
story; its chapter X refers to prophetic dreams, but without the
conviction that leads me to list below a story focusing on those. In
1901 came <The Marrow of Tradition>, which Houghton Mifflin promoted
heavily, and which may well be his best-crafted novel; it interweaves
dramatic personal issues for its many POVs with the essentially
straight-from-the-headlines story of the first major US "race riot"
(meaning, until the 1960s, determined efforts by whites, usually
organised, to massacre blacks), which had been used in 1898 to
overthrow the local government of Wilmington, North Carolina, not far
from where Chesnutt grew up.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898>
Because the book's POVs include superstitious, illiterate, older
black characters, and because the story works in such dramatic
emotions in general, it comes across as the most fantastical of his
novels, even though the conjure woman it mentions gets no lines, and
the "ha'nt" (ghost) one character thinks he sees gets a perfectly
mundane explanation.
<Marrow> pretty much sank, despite so much critical praise that
some of it even came from the South, and Chesnutt gave up on writing
as a profession. He'd told people in New York that he'd closed his
stenography business for a year or two; if so, that ended a month or
so after <Marrow> came out. In the short run, he seems to have kept
writing anyhow. He tried another white-focused novel, <Evelyn's
Husband>, in which the men who'd competed over a young woman end up
on a desert island together; it got rejected in 1903. (In both <A
Business Career> and, with some strain to the story, <Evelyn's
Husband>, he makes it clear that his leading ladies are good at
business. The latter is probably the worst of his novels I've read.)
He did get one more novel published, from Doubleday at last, <The
Colonel's Dream>, 1905. This focuses primarily on the POV of the
titular ex-Confederate, who'd gone north and made millions, then
comes back to his Carolina hometown and tries to use his money for
its benefit; this ends badly, because it's in the interest of a local
guy much like Potter in <It's a Wonderful Life> that that town
continue to suffer, and because the colonel is less reliable than
Jimmy Stewart; so despite a fairly placid surface, it's fundamentally
profoundly bleak, and audiences unsurprisingly stayed away. Its
chapter XVI features an abbreviated ghost story. Chesnutt even got a
play produced in 1906 (or so some say - it anyway *didn't* reach New
York). <Mrs. Darcy's Daughter>, apparently a crime story rather than
an Austen sequel, survives but has never been published. I list
below a story from 1906; "Baxter's <Procrustes>", from 1904, is in my
opinion, and, I think, others', his best non-"conjure" story.
Still, poor sales were an existential crisis not only for his
ability to get published, but for his interest in writing fiction.
He'd aspired to both achievement and wealth; obviously unpopularity
meant he wouldn't get the latter from his writing. But he'd also
understood his achievement goal differently from what you might
expect. He'd wanted not to uplift his own race, but to uplift whites,
to make whites aware of what slavery and the continued enforcement of
the "color line" did not only to hold blacks down but to deform
whites as well. If his fiction didn't sell, he wasn't doing that
*either* - so why should he write it? He did publish two non-
speculative stories in 1912 and 1915, but both had been written by
1904. Instead, for years, he focused not only on his business but
also on his kids' establishment in careers, his own establishment in
the upper middle class (social clubs and such), *and* on *non*-
fiction writing, working that way as well as others on local and
national efforts to ameliorate blacks' status. He remained
nationally known primarily for those efforts, rather than for his
fiction. He maintained good relations with both Booker T. Washington
and W. E. B. Du Bois, staking out his own view between them, that
what blacks needed most, North and South, was their legal rights, and
that if these rights were protected, the problem would eventually
solve itself through the kind of interbreeding he himself, with two
white grandfathers and two mulatto grandmothers, represented. (He
was never loud on an issue many abolitionists had moved on to by the
1870s, women's rights, but did explicitly and publicly recognise the
link between blacks' struggle and women's; URL below. I don't think
he ever took the *next* step, into the temperance fight.)
<http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/Works/Essays/womens.html>
His health also started to go, starting with a stroke the year he
wrote that brief essay, in 1910.
Chesnutt's late-life silence, then, has become part of his
standard story - but guess what? It isn't entirely true. In fact,
his old age is when I think he really did become, to some extent, a
fantasist. He took a partner into his business, a white woman, in
1918, and although he never entirely retired, she gradually assumed
more and more of the work; maybe this enabled a late burst of writing,
in between health scares and other things. He tried to interest the
publishers of <Frederick Douglass> in a collection of "dialect"
stories already in 1919. They rejected <Aunt Hagar's Children>, and
no copy has been found. But his previous collections had both
contained more than 50% new material, and Houghton Mifflin still had
the rights to most of his best existing "dialect" stories, so the
lost manuscript was probably largely new stories. Furthermore, it
seems reasonable to figure that, as with his previous "dialect"
stories, some of these might have been fantasy.
Next came two more novels. Both are built around the same notion,
a kind of non-speculative fantasy: a man brought up "black", though
by looks able (like Chesnutt himself) to pass for white, learns that
in reality he doesn't have any black blood at all - but rejects his
legitimate place in the master race. As in real-life "passing", in
both cases the man would have to give up his previous life, which
helps make sense of the decision; in fact it re-creates the choice
Chesnutt himself made in the 1870s, when some relatives of his may
well have chosen differently. Anyway, it didn't convince publishers.
<Paul Marchand, F.M.C.>, whose titular is a free man of color in New
Orleans in 1821, and whose reasonably colourful, implausible surface
reads almost like a fairy tale, rejected by three publishers in 1921,
finally appeared in 1998; it begins with a series of obviously fake
prophetic dreams. <The Quarry>, rejected by two firms in 1928 and
1930, waited until 1999; its surface, set from the beginning of the
20th century to its present (or possibly later), is more realistic,
its story of its hero's education academic and sentimental (mainly in
Ohio, Kentucky, and New York City) much more Chesnutt's kind of thing,
though the hero's bland perfection gets tiresome; the book has no
significant fantastical elements.
Meanwhile, in 1924 he'd already published one last Julius McAdoo
story - in which, for the first time, the narrator confirms the
central fantasy element. In 1930 came his last published short story,
another fantasy. His last rejected book *also* dates to 1930, a
collection of stories about animals he'd told his grandson - but this
time, in contrast to his animal stories of the 1870s, *talking*
animals, fantasy again. (As with <Aunt Hagar's Children>, no
manuscript is known to survive.) He died in 1932.
The Julius McAdoo stories are consistently his most-praised fictions,
their only serious competitor "Baxter's <Procrustes>". This is
partly because his novels are *not* uniformly praised. [1] Beyond
that, much of his short fiction, especially that from early in his
career, intended for specific markets, bears those markets' marks.
He wrote plenty of comic fiction, and plenty of sentimental fiction,
and like his contemporaries didn't mind coincidences and melodrama.
Julius McAdoo's subject cut comedy, sentiment and melodrama down to
their proper places, and localised things enough for coincidences to
make sense. In essence, Julius McAdoo gave Chesnutt an escape from
his time's norms; by staying true to this character, he was able to
write timeless fiction.
An important difficulty for modern readers with the McAdoo stories
and some of Chesnutt's other more or less fantastical works is his
use of "dialect". One of the predecessors he was responding to was
Joel Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus" stories; like Uncle Remus, Uncle
Julius can be hard to follow, as can other uneducated characters,
especially black ones, in Chesnutt's fiction in general.
There are arguably three other series in his fiction. 1) His
first two stories foreshadowing the "conjure" model - stories
revolving around a "dialect" storyteller's stories - appeared seven
weeks apart in the same publication; he made a point of connecting
the otherwise unrelated "Tom's Warm Welcome", 1886, and "McDugald's
Mule", 1887, partly by giving the storyteller in each the same name.
2) By 1897 he started to use the name "Patesville" for Fayetteville;
however, only the Julius McAdoo stories among the "Patesville" set
share characters. 3) By 1898 he started to use "Groveland" as a name
for Cleveland; a minor character present in three stories (all in
<The Wife of His Youth>) is the only fictional continuity resulting
from this, however. <A Business Career> is set mainly in "Groveland",
<The House Behind the Cedars> largely in "Patesville", but neither
shares characters with any of his other stories; decades later, some
of <The Quarry> is explicitly set not in "Groveland" but in
"Cleveland". Even the "conjure" stories have little continuing plot,
and at least seem to have chronological difficulties with each other;
yet another way he was unlike most speculative fiction writers is
that at bottom, he really didn't do series.
[1] Of the novels I've read, probably the most entertaining, by my
lights, is <The Marrow of Tradition>, followed by <A Business Career>,
then <The Quarry> and <Mandy Oxendine>; <The House Behind the Cedars>,
<The Colonel's Dream>, and <Paul Marchand, F.M.C.> are back a ways,
and <Evelyn's Husband> off by itself in last place. For substance,
the first four, <House> and <Colonel's> might reasonably be re-ranked
one way or another. I think the only Chesnutt novels I'd read for
style are those published in his lifetime.
Although the previously unpublished ones get *much* less love, I'm
pretty sure you could find at least one critic who'd put each of them
on top; this is certainly true for the three published 1900-1905.
I've read for this project everything I could, except for his few
poems. This is eight novels (not <The Rainbow-Chasers>), seventy-
four stories (everything in <The Short Fiction>, cited a lot below -
fifty-five stories, twelve of which didn't appear in Chesnutt's
lifetime - and the two collections published in his lifetime -
sixteen stories - and three available to me only online, all
published in his lifetime, URLs below), and no plays. The stories
known to me that I ignored are "A Doubtful Success" and "The Train
Boy", both published 1888 and never reprinted; "The Fabric of a
Vision" (?), sold 1897 but possibly not published and not known to
survive; "John Pettifer's Ghost" (!), "An Expensive Amusement", "The
Hand of God" (?), and an untitled "love story of Mr. Peyton and Miss
Wrenn", all of which are known to survive in manuscript, but haven't
been published. I mentioned one of the three online-only stories
above, and mention another below:
<http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/Works/Stories/frisksrat.html>
<http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/Works/Stories/twowives.html>
<http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/Works/Stories/restriction.html>
I deliberately cast a wide net. I include all Julius McAdoo stories
below, even the three I don't see as fantasy; I include stories
arguably even less fantasticated; my comments on each story deal with
the extent of fantastication. One story I list, unpublished in
Chesnutt's lifetime, is certainly still in copyright in the US, and
two others originally appeared late enough that they might be. The
former and one of the latter are the only ones I list *not* available
free, from evidently legitimate sources, online. (Stories in the two
collections published in 1899 are at the usual places; nearly all the
stories I list that *weren't* in those collections are at the
academic Chesnutt site already cited.)
In case it's relevant, I indicate with an asterisk where I read
each story listed.
Six of the stories I list have been printed in more than one text,
or "version". 123) The first three appeared 1887-1889 and then,
revised, in <The Conjure Woman> in 1899. Each has an entry in both
relevant years. 4) Another <Conjure> story came out a month before
the book as a sort of ad; one scholar said there was no difference
between book and magazine versions, and I didn't check further. 5) I
deal with at least three versions of a story rejected in 1897 under
one entry in that year. 6) I give two versions of a story published
in 1901 separate entries, both in that year.
<The Conjure Woman> includes a third of the stories I list; it's
silly to list its reprintings and the books that include it in full
seven times, so here goes:
<The Conjure Woman> by Chesnutt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
February 1899)
Other editions of this book (authority):
London: Gay & Bird, 1899 (bibliography and Worldcat);
Cleveland: Rowfant Club, 1899 (biographies);
Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1899 (Worldcat; I'm dubious);
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929 (bibliography and biographies;
other sources, including Worldcat, date this printing to
1927; Worldcat also lists later reprints by this publisher,
some but not all of which probably happened);
Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1968 (bibliography and Worldcat);
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969 (bibliography
and Worldcat, which lists many printings);
St. Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press, 1977 (bibliography,
which cuts off in 1980, and Worldcat);
Tokyo: Hon-no-Tomosha, 1997 (Worldcat);
and a bunch of reprintings in this century what with the rise
of the vampire publishers.
Worldcat also knows of German and Japanese translations, at
least.
This book is available online at least from Project Gutenberg,
Google Books, and the Internet Archive. (These sites all have
Chesnutt's six books published in his lifetime but nothing else,
*except*: The Internet Archive also allows registered users to
"borrow" <Mandy Oxendine>, <Paul Marchand, F.M.C.>, and <The
Quarry>.)
Larger collections that include <The Conjure Woman> in full (not
listed *for those seven stories* below, with one exception as
indicated):
<Collected Stories> by Chesnutt, edited by William L. Andrews (New
York: Mentor, 1992); this book reprinted as * <Conjure Tales
and Stories of the Color Line> (New York: Penguin Books, 2000;
"Penguin Classics"; for other reprints with different contents
see relevant stories below)
<The Conjure Woman, and Other Conjure Tales> by Chesnutt, edited
by Richard H. Brodhead (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1993)
<Stories, Novels, and Essays> by Chesnutt, [edited by Werner
Sollors] (New York: Library of America, 2002)
<The Conjure Woman> by Chesnutt, edited apparently anonymously
(Memphis: General Books, 2010)
<The Conjure Stories> by Chesnutt, edited by Robert B. Stepto and
Jennifer Rae Greeson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012; "A Norton
Critical Edition")
critics, a fantasist by nature. However, his first and biggest
literary successes involved fantasy, he wound up with a complex
relationship with it, and his last two published fictions were, by my
standards, genuine fantasy.
He was born in Cleveland in 1858. His family lived there and in
Oberlin, Ohio, until 1866, then returned to his parents' native land,
so he grew up in and near Fayetteville, North Carolina. His mother
died in 1871, after which a young relative of hers cared for the kids.
His father soon married this woman, leading to a bunch more kids, so
Charles Chesnutt had to start working. His teacher managed to keep
him learning some by hiring him as an assistant; teaching became
Chesnutt's main work for the next decade, taking him several places
in North Carolina, and he wound up succeeding his original teacher,
as second principal of the state's school for black teachers,
established back in Fayetteville. By then he'd married (a fellow
teacher) and had kids of his own. He'd pursued a ferociously
disciplined program of self-education; partly to record this, he kept
a journal, in which he also wrote his first stories and poems. He
had big aspirations both for achievement - focused on racial matters
- and for wealth, and had somehow convinced himself that writing, I
kid you not, was a road to the latter. The stories apparently
portrayed animals realistically; one example at least got published,
his first publication so far known, in 1875; it's available online,
URL below.
In 1883, after half a year trying out New York City, he settled in
Cleveland, and brought his family there the next year. One of the
things he'd taught himself was stenography; he wound up working for a
lawyer, and became a court reporter. He passed the Ohio bar, and set
up in business for himself notionally as a lawyer, but most of his
income came from court reporting, which eventually made him sometimes
the richest black man in Cleveland. Meanwhile, he set seriously to
work as a writer. His goal was to write novels (where he thought the
money was), but he knew he wasn't ready yet, so he wrote short
fiction. He made at least one sale in 1885, several in 1886, and
over a dozen in 1887. One of that spate sold to <The Atlantic
Monthly>; he'd Arrived. That was his first "conjure" story - his
first story of any kind to come near fantasy - and what I called his
first literary success.
The "conjure" stories have this framework: The narrator is a
northern white man whose wife comes down sickly, so he buys an old
plantation in North Carolina to go into winemaking. There he finds
an old black man who used to be enslaved on that plantation; this man
becomes an employee of his. In most of the stories, this man, Julius
McAdoo, tells a story, which is the main burden of Chesnutt's story,
but at the end of the latter, the narrator and his wife respond to
the internal story in different ways - the narrator usually finding
some way McAdoo has conned him. Most but not all of McAdoo's stories
are, to us, fantasies, usually involving one or more "conjure"
workers, whose conjurations, in these stories, often involve physical
transformations of people. Most, perhaps all, are set during slavery
times (unlike the frame stories).
Chesnutt continued to produce a fair amount of short fiction
through 1889, but thereafter focused on other things - starting his
business, visiting Europe for the first time, writing novels, and
pushing the <Atlantic>'s publishers, Houghton Mifflin, to publish a
book by him. The first and shortest of the novels, <Mandy Oxendine>,
rejected in 1897 and finally published in 1997, is the most cheerful
of four novels that focused on race in the Carolinas, although people
die in each; the other three of these are the novels actually
published in his lifetime. Those three each at least refer to the
fantastic; this one, which focuses on an interracial triangle around
the titular woman, doesn't. The next novel he submitted instead
focused on white characters in the North in its story of a young
woman seeking the reason for her father's ruin; <A Business Career>,
also rejected (in 1898), also without reference to anything
fantastical, and also relatively cheerful, finally saw print in 2005.
The <Atlantic> did publish a non-fantasy story in 1898; it was hugely
popular, and finally convinced Houghton Mifflin to try a book under
his name - a collection of "conjure" stories, in each of which, at
their request, McAdoo's story would be fantasy. So Chesnutt's first
book and biggest literary success was arguably fantasy, which is why
literary critics who don't know what they're doing see him as a
fantasist turned realist.
Since <The Conjure Woman>, 1899, sold reasonably, Houghton Mifflin
came out with another collection the same year, for the Christmas
market, <The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line>;
it didn't sell nearly as well. Nevertheless, having taken the plunge,
they stuck with Chesnutt. (Partly because another publisher had
released his biography of Frederick Douglass, *also* in 1899, which
apparently sold like hotcakes.) For a while they urged and Chesnutt
worked on revisions to <The Rainbow Chasers>, another white-focused
novel, in which a reclusive scientist who thinks he's on the track to
riches neglects his finances, so ends up in a boarding house where he
Learns About Life. But then he interested his favourite <Atlantic>
editor, who'd become a partner at Doubleday, in the story he'd been
working on throughout the 1890s and had finally gotten to (shortish)
novel size; when he informed Houghton Mifflin of this, they decided
to take that instead. The surviving manuscripts of <The Rainbow
Chasers> are a mess, so it's his only novel not yet published.
Anyway, his first *published* novel is <The House Behind the Cedars>,
1900, which became in the end a fairly stereotypical "tragic mulatta"
story; its chapter X refers to prophetic dreams, but without the
conviction that leads me to list below a story focusing on those. In
1901 came <The Marrow of Tradition>, which Houghton Mifflin promoted
heavily, and which may well be his best-crafted novel; it interweaves
dramatic personal issues for its many POVs with the essentially
straight-from-the-headlines story of the first major US "race riot"
(meaning, until the 1960s, determined efforts by whites, usually
organised, to massacre blacks), which had been used in 1898 to
overthrow the local government of Wilmington, North Carolina, not far
from where Chesnutt grew up.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898>
Because the book's POVs include superstitious, illiterate, older
black characters, and because the story works in such dramatic
emotions in general, it comes across as the most fantastical of his
novels, even though the conjure woman it mentions gets no lines, and
the "ha'nt" (ghost) one character thinks he sees gets a perfectly
mundane explanation.
<Marrow> pretty much sank, despite so much critical praise that
some of it even came from the South, and Chesnutt gave up on writing
as a profession. He'd told people in New York that he'd closed his
stenography business for a year or two; if so, that ended a month or
so after <Marrow> came out. In the short run, he seems to have kept
writing anyhow. He tried another white-focused novel, <Evelyn's
Husband>, in which the men who'd competed over a young woman end up
on a desert island together; it got rejected in 1903. (In both <A
Business Career> and, with some strain to the story, <Evelyn's
Husband>, he makes it clear that his leading ladies are good at
business. The latter is probably the worst of his novels I've read.)
He did get one more novel published, from Doubleday at last, <The
Colonel's Dream>, 1905. This focuses primarily on the POV of the
titular ex-Confederate, who'd gone north and made millions, then
comes back to his Carolina hometown and tries to use his money for
its benefit; this ends badly, because it's in the interest of a local
guy much like Potter in <It's a Wonderful Life> that that town
continue to suffer, and because the colonel is less reliable than
Jimmy Stewart; so despite a fairly placid surface, it's fundamentally
profoundly bleak, and audiences unsurprisingly stayed away. Its
chapter XVI features an abbreviated ghost story. Chesnutt even got a
play produced in 1906 (or so some say - it anyway *didn't* reach New
York). <Mrs. Darcy's Daughter>, apparently a crime story rather than
an Austen sequel, survives but has never been published. I list
below a story from 1906; "Baxter's <Procrustes>", from 1904, is in my
opinion, and, I think, others', his best non-"conjure" story.
Still, poor sales were an existential crisis not only for his
ability to get published, but for his interest in writing fiction.
He'd aspired to both achievement and wealth; obviously unpopularity
meant he wouldn't get the latter from his writing. But he'd also
understood his achievement goal differently from what you might
expect. He'd wanted not to uplift his own race, but to uplift whites,
to make whites aware of what slavery and the continued enforcement of
the "color line" did not only to hold blacks down but to deform
whites as well. If his fiction didn't sell, he wasn't doing that
*either* - so why should he write it? He did publish two non-
speculative stories in 1912 and 1915, but both had been written by
1904. Instead, for years, he focused not only on his business but
also on his kids' establishment in careers, his own establishment in
the upper middle class (social clubs and such), *and* on *non*-
fiction writing, working that way as well as others on local and
national efforts to ameliorate blacks' status. He remained
nationally known primarily for those efforts, rather than for his
fiction. He maintained good relations with both Booker T. Washington
and W. E. B. Du Bois, staking out his own view between them, that
what blacks needed most, North and South, was their legal rights, and
that if these rights were protected, the problem would eventually
solve itself through the kind of interbreeding he himself, with two
white grandfathers and two mulatto grandmothers, represented. (He
was never loud on an issue many abolitionists had moved on to by the
1870s, women's rights, but did explicitly and publicly recognise the
link between blacks' struggle and women's; URL below. I don't think
he ever took the *next* step, into the temperance fight.)
<http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/Works/Essays/womens.html>
His health also started to go, starting with a stroke the year he
wrote that brief essay, in 1910.
Chesnutt's late-life silence, then, has become part of his
standard story - but guess what? It isn't entirely true. In fact,
his old age is when I think he really did become, to some extent, a
fantasist. He took a partner into his business, a white woman, in
1918, and although he never entirely retired, she gradually assumed
more and more of the work; maybe this enabled a late burst of writing,
in between health scares and other things. He tried to interest the
publishers of <Frederick Douglass> in a collection of "dialect"
stories already in 1919. They rejected <Aunt Hagar's Children>, and
no copy has been found. But his previous collections had both
contained more than 50% new material, and Houghton Mifflin still had
the rights to most of his best existing "dialect" stories, so the
lost manuscript was probably largely new stories. Furthermore, it
seems reasonable to figure that, as with his previous "dialect"
stories, some of these might have been fantasy.
Next came two more novels. Both are built around the same notion,
a kind of non-speculative fantasy: a man brought up "black", though
by looks able (like Chesnutt himself) to pass for white, learns that
in reality he doesn't have any black blood at all - but rejects his
legitimate place in the master race. As in real-life "passing", in
both cases the man would have to give up his previous life, which
helps make sense of the decision; in fact it re-creates the choice
Chesnutt himself made in the 1870s, when some relatives of his may
well have chosen differently. Anyway, it didn't convince publishers.
<Paul Marchand, F.M.C.>, whose titular is a free man of color in New
Orleans in 1821, and whose reasonably colourful, implausible surface
reads almost like a fairy tale, rejected by three publishers in 1921,
finally appeared in 1998; it begins with a series of obviously fake
prophetic dreams. <The Quarry>, rejected by two firms in 1928 and
1930, waited until 1999; its surface, set from the beginning of the
20th century to its present (or possibly later), is more realistic,
its story of its hero's education academic and sentimental (mainly in
Ohio, Kentucky, and New York City) much more Chesnutt's kind of thing,
though the hero's bland perfection gets tiresome; the book has no
significant fantastical elements.
Meanwhile, in 1924 he'd already published one last Julius McAdoo
story - in which, for the first time, the narrator confirms the
central fantasy element. In 1930 came his last published short story,
another fantasy. His last rejected book *also* dates to 1930, a
collection of stories about animals he'd told his grandson - but this
time, in contrast to his animal stories of the 1870s, *talking*
animals, fantasy again. (As with <Aunt Hagar's Children>, no
manuscript is known to survive.) He died in 1932.
The Julius McAdoo stories are consistently his most-praised fictions,
their only serious competitor "Baxter's <Procrustes>". This is
partly because his novels are *not* uniformly praised. [1] Beyond
that, much of his short fiction, especially that from early in his
career, intended for specific markets, bears those markets' marks.
He wrote plenty of comic fiction, and plenty of sentimental fiction,
and like his contemporaries didn't mind coincidences and melodrama.
Julius McAdoo's subject cut comedy, sentiment and melodrama down to
their proper places, and localised things enough for coincidences to
make sense. In essence, Julius McAdoo gave Chesnutt an escape from
his time's norms; by staying true to this character, he was able to
write timeless fiction.
An important difficulty for modern readers with the McAdoo stories
and some of Chesnutt's other more or less fantastical works is his
use of "dialect". One of the predecessors he was responding to was
Joel Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus" stories; like Uncle Remus, Uncle
Julius can be hard to follow, as can other uneducated characters,
especially black ones, in Chesnutt's fiction in general.
There are arguably three other series in his fiction. 1) His
first two stories foreshadowing the "conjure" model - stories
revolving around a "dialect" storyteller's stories - appeared seven
weeks apart in the same publication; he made a point of connecting
the otherwise unrelated "Tom's Warm Welcome", 1886, and "McDugald's
Mule", 1887, partly by giving the storyteller in each the same name.
2) By 1897 he started to use the name "Patesville" for Fayetteville;
however, only the Julius McAdoo stories among the "Patesville" set
share characters. 3) By 1898 he started to use "Groveland" as a name
for Cleveland; a minor character present in three stories (all in
<The Wife of His Youth>) is the only fictional continuity resulting
from this, however. <A Business Career> is set mainly in "Groveland",
<The House Behind the Cedars> largely in "Patesville", but neither
shares characters with any of his other stories; decades later, some
of <The Quarry> is explicitly set not in "Groveland" but in
"Cleveland". Even the "conjure" stories have little continuing plot,
and at least seem to have chronological difficulties with each other;
yet another way he was unlike most speculative fiction writers is
that at bottom, he really didn't do series.
[1] Of the novels I've read, probably the most entertaining, by my
lights, is <The Marrow of Tradition>, followed by <A Business Career>,
then <The Quarry> and <Mandy Oxendine>; <The House Behind the Cedars>,
<The Colonel's Dream>, and <Paul Marchand, F.M.C.> are back a ways,
and <Evelyn's Husband> off by itself in last place. For substance,
the first four, <House> and <Colonel's> might reasonably be re-ranked
one way or another. I think the only Chesnutt novels I'd read for
style are those published in his lifetime.
Although the previously unpublished ones get *much* less love, I'm
pretty sure you could find at least one critic who'd put each of them
on top; this is certainly true for the three published 1900-1905.
I've read for this project everything I could, except for his few
poems. This is eight novels (not <The Rainbow-Chasers>), seventy-
four stories (everything in <The Short Fiction>, cited a lot below -
fifty-five stories, twelve of which didn't appear in Chesnutt's
lifetime - and the two collections published in his lifetime -
sixteen stories - and three available to me only online, all
published in his lifetime, URLs below), and no plays. The stories
known to me that I ignored are "A Doubtful Success" and "The Train
Boy", both published 1888 and never reprinted; "The Fabric of a
Vision" (?), sold 1897 but possibly not published and not known to
survive; "John Pettifer's Ghost" (!), "An Expensive Amusement", "The
Hand of God" (?), and an untitled "love story of Mr. Peyton and Miss
Wrenn", all of which are known to survive in manuscript, but haven't
been published. I mentioned one of the three online-only stories
above, and mention another below:
<http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/Works/Stories/frisksrat.html>
<http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/Works/Stories/twowives.html>
<http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/Works/Stories/restriction.html>
I deliberately cast a wide net. I include all Julius McAdoo stories
below, even the three I don't see as fantasy; I include stories
arguably even less fantasticated; my comments on each story deal with
the extent of fantastication. One story I list, unpublished in
Chesnutt's lifetime, is certainly still in copyright in the US, and
two others originally appeared late enough that they might be. The
former and one of the latter are the only ones I list *not* available
free, from evidently legitimate sources, online. (Stories in the two
collections published in 1899 are at the usual places; nearly all the
stories I list that *weren't* in those collections are at the
academic Chesnutt site already cited.)
In case it's relevant, I indicate with an asterisk where I read
each story listed.
Six of the stories I list have been printed in more than one text,
or "version". 123) The first three appeared 1887-1889 and then,
revised, in <The Conjure Woman> in 1899. Each has an entry in both
relevant years. 4) Another <Conjure> story came out a month before
the book as a sort of ad; one scholar said there was no difference
between book and magazine versions, and I didn't check further. 5) I
deal with at least three versions of a story rejected in 1897 under
one entry in that year. 6) I give two versions of a story published
in 1901 separate entries, both in that year.
<The Conjure Woman> includes a third of the stories I list; it's
silly to list its reprintings and the books that include it in full
seven times, so here goes:
<The Conjure Woman> by Chesnutt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
February 1899)
Other editions of this book (authority):
London: Gay & Bird, 1899 (bibliography and Worldcat);
Cleveland: Rowfant Club, 1899 (biographies);
Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1899 (Worldcat; I'm dubious);
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929 (bibliography and biographies;
other sources, including Worldcat, date this printing to
1927; Worldcat also lists later reprints by this publisher,
some but not all of which probably happened);
Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1968 (bibliography and Worldcat);
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969 (bibliography
and Worldcat, which lists many printings);
St. Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press, 1977 (bibliography,
which cuts off in 1980, and Worldcat);
Tokyo: Hon-no-Tomosha, 1997 (Worldcat);
and a bunch of reprintings in this century what with the rise
of the vampire publishers.
Worldcat also knows of German and Japanese translations, at
least.
This book is available online at least from Project Gutenberg,
Google Books, and the Internet Archive. (These sites all have
Chesnutt's six books published in his lifetime but nothing else,
*except*: The Internet Archive also allows registered users to
"borrow" <Mandy Oxendine>, <Paul Marchand, F.M.C.>, and <The
Quarry>.)
Larger collections that include <The Conjure Woman> in full (not
listed *for those seven stories* below, with one exception as
indicated):
<Collected Stories> by Chesnutt, edited by William L. Andrews (New
York: Mentor, 1992); this book reprinted as * <Conjure Tales
and Stories of the Color Line> (New York: Penguin Books, 2000;
"Penguin Classics"; for other reprints with different contents
see relevant stories below)
<The Conjure Woman, and Other Conjure Tales> by Chesnutt, edited
by Richard H. Brodhead (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1993)
<Stories, Novels, and Essays> by Chesnutt, [edited by Werner
Sollors] (New York: Library of America, 2002)
<The Conjure Woman> by Chesnutt, edited apparently anonymously
(Memphis: General Books, 2010)
<The Conjure Stories> by Chesnutt, edited by Robert B. Stepto and
Jennifer Rae Greeson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012; "A Norton
Critical Edition")