The Division of the Heart: Cable's the Grandissimes (1969)

In an important sense, George W. Cable's The Grandissimes (1880) may be said be the first Southern novel. For if the modern Southern novel has been characterized by its uncompromising attempt deal honestly with the complexity of Southern racial experience, then The Grandissimes was the first important work of fiction written by a Southerner in which that intention is manifested. In this respect, Cable opened up the path along which Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, William Styron and others would follow. In unmistakable and uncompromising terms, he dealt with that most pervasive of all Southern social issues, the race question and the role of the Negro in society. If the loss of the Civil War had at last freed the Southern writer from the need defend Southern racial attitudes, it was Cable who first took advantage of the new freedom. In its own day The Grandissimes was highly praised, and its author compared, and not unfavorably, Nathaniel Hawthorne himself. Along with Old Creole Days, the volume of short stories that was his first published book, the novel seemed augur a brilliant career for the young ex-Confederate cavalryman and cotton house clerk now come into national literary prominence. Unfortunately, that promise was never borne out. Cable went on write seven more novels and numerous short stories before his death in 1925, but nothing that he did was ever surpass, or even equal, the literary achievement of his first two books. To explain why Gable failed develop beyond his first work is more than can be attempted in the confines of a single essay. It involves complex questions of time and place, his relationship the South and the Genteel Tradition that dominated American letters during the latter years of the nineteenth century, and, most importantly of all, his own complicated and sometimes even contradictory personality. All the same, if we look carefully at The Grandissimes, both in terms of its successes and its shortcomings, we may discover some clues the answer. meant, Cable wrote later in his life, to make The Grandissimes as truly a political work as it ever has been called.... I was still very slowly and painfully guessing out the riddle of our Southern question. And again, wrote as near truth and justice as I knew how, upon questions that I saw must be settled by calm debate and cannot be settled by force or silence; questions that will have be settled thus by the Southern white man in his own conscience before even the North and South can finally settle it between them. This was part of my politics and as a citizen I wrote. But Cable's novel was more than a disquisition on race; it was also the picture of a society in transition, very much a Kulturroman as his friend the novelist H. H. Boyesen had predicted. And although set in New Orleans in 1803, just after the Louisiana Territory had been purchased by the United States from France, its implications were very much for post-Civil War Louisiana. What seems most striking about The Grandissimes today is its rich social texture. Though the story had its romantic elements, in particular the conventional love story plot of the day, more than almost any other Southern novel of its time it was, use the distinction set forth by Hawthorne in his Preface The House of the Seven Gables, a Novel, as opposed a Romance, in that it presumed deal with the probable and ordinary course of man's experience rather than the fanciful, the Marvellous. Not of course that it is a work of Howellsian realism, and still less does it resemble the kind of faithfulness everyday life of a Sinclair Lewis or a Sherwood Anderson. But its essential fidelity is the here and now. The dynamics of the story arise from the problems of caste and class, the human beings are portrayed a remarkable degree as they exist in everyday life. …