(An edited version of this essay first appeared in the July 2024 edition of the Charleston Mercury)
Visions of Order in William Gilmore Simms: Southern Conservatism and the Other American Romance
By Masahiro Nakamura
Hardcover 222 pp.
$39.95
(University of South Carolina Press, 2009)
I had a difficult time finding the home William Gilmore Simms passed away in. The record says 13 Society Street; and yet, as I walked the length of it, I could find no house bearing the address. I figured by way of cynicism that it was likely torn down, as 18 Society is now an under-construction apartment building across from the grocery store. Another casualty of growth and development, another historical erasure—time to gather the signatures.
Intuition or persistence, I don’t know which, forbid me to be convinced. I asked around and was given an address by Professor Kibler, previously reviewed in this paper and likely the most accomplished scholar of Simms today. After much discussion and exchange of messages, I can say with a high degree of confidence the house Simms passed away is now 51 Society Street, next to the old high school at 55 Society—there being no 53 Society, only a driveway.
On a call, Professor Kibler described the house as one where a most significant artist in American literature spent his last days. There, living with his eldest daughter and her children, in the pain and agony of cancer, Simms fixed the holes from artillery shells with portraits. He would take one last boat ride into the harbor, to see Charleston from its most spectacular angle.
I am fortunate to have these contacts. Few have them.
There is no marker for the home where, according to Edgar Allan Poe, the best novelist America ever produced at that time passed. There has been no update to the online record to reflect the current address. It is a mystery, total and complete, yet sitting in plain sight.
This explains not only the place of his death but also his position in the American canon. He is omitted consistently for either breaching the modern pieties or for his supposed lack of aesthetic merit. To rebut the latter, Masahiro Nakamura wrote Visions of Order in William Gilmore Simms: Southern Conservatism and the Other American Romance.
Nakamura is much indebted to Professor Kibler, as he acknowledges in the book. Not to belabor the point, but Professor Kibler provided for this review much intimate knowledge. Nakamura was a survivor of an atomic bomb, a thousand suns igniting upon a split atom and vaporizing entire cities—and with it a world few now once knew. It is generally taken as a compliment to have the foreign look upon one’s habits and ways as something positive, even ideal—to find within it something universal, something not strange but an aspect familiar to the culture of a faraway land. It also provides an eye unblotted by the stigmas, the ordeal of civility we endure. Perhaps Nakamura saw in that blinding light what the Southerner in the mid-19th century witnessed, steering him to fondness for the extirpation of a way of life—however sordid or amoral it was.
But not to dwell on motives, Nakamura admirably and interestingly takes the subject of Simms and his Border, Revolutionary, Spanish, and Colonial Romances, along with Martin Faber, and attempts with great degree of competence to reestablish them in the canon of American literature. What Nakamura describes is a whole picture of the man through an academic treatment of his works bolstered with personal information.
To call Simms a man of multitudes would likely annoy him, as he was no admirer of Whitman. But what unfolds in Nakamura’s treatise is just that. Simms was ever wary of “the grand and unceasing struggle after perfection which is the great business of the ages,” that being the progress of American civilization. His father moved West after the death of his mother and established a plantation, leaving Simms in Charleston. Simms would often go out to the frontier, providing ample material for his fiction and poetry.
Though a great patriot of the American cause, Simms’s Revolutionary Romances are laced with ambivalence. Nakamura explains this wariness can be seen in the ending of Woodcraft: a plantation retaken by its rightful owners, yet only males with no issue reside within. We are led to ponder revolutions, though possibly noble, may be spiritually impotent.
For the Colonial Romance, The Yemassee, Nakamura differentiates Simms from James Fenimore Cooper. Many critics compare the two, and always seem to find Simms lacking when measured against his counterpart. Nakamura’s analysis of Simms goes on to say he is nothing less than progressive: “that America makes a marked advance toward stability despite inconsistencies at variance with its ideals.” Yet Nakamura goes further when he explains Simms as an admirer of the Natives, though that admiration is qualified—Simms believes it best not to conquer them with arms, but with culture. It is the allegedly misguided paternalism Simms and often the South had towards non-whites.
Simms, in his Border Romances, “deviate[s] from the beaten track of romance; a hero, expelled by his civilized society owing to the supposed loss of love, pushes brokenheartedly into the frontier for adventure.” Simms instead is realistic. It is a more sophisticated approach Simms takes. He mocks the sentimental cliches and gives the reader a truer view of the frontier—violence and bloodshed amid cloying rhetoric.
There is one oddity in this book: Nakamura mentions briefly Simms suffering from the millenarian, Whiggish, approach to history as opposed to the Hellenic cyclical thesis. Nakamura does not treat this thought in any larger sense, it is mentioned only briefly. Yet, as noted above, Nakamura posits Simms was wary of the American project of expansion. If there was an evolution in thought, it is not explained. It could have made for interesting analysis of Simms’s work: how could Simms seem to be so unconvinced of the march of progress in his fiction yet not elsewhere? However, Nakamura describes without needless imputation Simms and his opinions of how society is to be structured: not all level, as that “would result in the necessary forfeiture of names to things, and all barriers of present distinction would be broken down.”
Nevertheless, Nakamura makes a sturdy argument for Simms to be thought of again as an American writer of import and complexity. Simms, though a patriot, did not believe in the innocence of the American project—his Revolutionary Romances are “‘submerged in hatred, revenge, and cupidity.’” His Border Romances subvert the genre and put on display the great conquest that it was. He is undoubtedly one of the great writers of the first half of the 19thcentury.
With all that said, the house on Society Street could at least get a plaque.