Donald Gibson lecture on Afro American writing from 1890 to 1920 at the University of Iowa, April 21, 1970

Speaker 1: The broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the department of English and the Afro-American Studies program at the University, presents a series of lectures by Black specialists as material for the University's course, Afro-American literature. The lecturer for this week is Donald Gibson, associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He will be speaking today on Afro-American writing from 1890 to 1920. Donald Gibson: First thing I want to say is I have some local information for you. You'll get your examinations back tomorrow, or papers, examinations. Okay. Thought you'd want to know that. Today, I want to talk about Paul Laurence Dunbar. I suppose that it might be a little difficult for you to read Dunbar. If you have difficulties with earlier poetry, that is, most students I've found don't like 19th century poetry, especially American poetry because it's generally not very good. It's not very exciting, with some exceptions, of course. But Dunbar, as I'll say here during the course of my talk, is from that perspective difficult to read, but I find it quite possible to read him, if I try to determine what he's doing with his poetry rather than attempt to take it to bed and read it before going to sleep or something like that or read it for relaxation. I read it and work at the same time. Donald Gibson: Well, I've been thinking about Dunbar for a long time, and I find him extremely hard to teach. I have, I've been told this, found him very hard to teach. There's certain things that are obviously to be said about him, but naturally, I wanted to say something about him beyond the obvious. After thinking about this for a number of years, I've come to certain conclusions about Dunbar, which seem to me to be of significance and of importance. Of course, you might infer from what I said yesterday that what to me is significant and important has, in large measure, to do with what I think a writer wants to do to me or for me, but as some writers, I think, don't like me, and some writers, I think, would like to do away with me, and I don't like those writers because I don't like people who try to do me in. Donald Gibson: So that has a lot to do with what I consider to be good and worthwhile. This lecture, I've called the Conservative Temper of Paul Laurence Dunbar, and you'll see why I called it that by the time I get to the end of it. Dunbar's second volume of poetry was called Majors and Minors, and it contained a poem, which is very frequently or relatively, comparatively frequently, comparative to two years ago, printed. The poem is called We Wear the Mask. It's a poem that was chosen for inclusion in Black Boices, and it's, I believe, in Dark Symphony, as well. It's a poem which I think many people consider to be Dunbar's best poem, and I suspect that they consider it to be... Or not his best, but one of his best poems, and I suspect that they do. I don't really know precisely why people feel this way, but I think that it has something to do with the fact that this poem is atypical. It's not like Dunbar's other poems in lots of ways. Donald Gibson: One of the ways in which it isn't like his other poems is that it seems to me that here, as in very, very few other places, Dunbar says something that is personal, something that is deeply felt and something that stemmed from his own experience and his own awareness. The poem is called, as I said, We Wear the Mask, and it goes this way. You probably know it anyway, but it goes, "We wear the mask that grins and lies. It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,- This debt we pay to human guile; with torn and bleeding hearts we smile, and mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise in counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us while we wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries to thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile beneath our feet and long the mile. But let the world dream otherwise. We wear the mask." Donald Gibson: Well, seems to me that this poem says something about Dunbar that's so very significant because it seems to me that Dunbar himself, personally, wears a mask. And I substitute in my reading of the poem in my mind, as I read it, pronoun I for we. Now, we know of, in a way, I think that we could look at that poem in relation to certain things that we know about he Black past, certain kinds of things that are described, for example, in Richard Wright's Black Boy where he talks about the necessity of doing something like wearing a mask, but is responding in the way that other people around him would expect him to respond, suppressing his own feelings and his own emotions, not daring, as a matter of fact, to say what he himself thinks, feels or believes. Donald Gibson: As a matter of fact, in my autobiography, you'll recall that every time he does say something he thinks, believes or feels, he gets into trouble. Well, I suppose Dunbar is talking about a mask of that kind, but it seems to me that there are all kinds of various degrees of wearing masks. There's a sense in which everybody wears a mask. There's a sense in which we wear a mask when someone says, "How are you?" And you say, "Fine. How are you?" There's a sense in which we very frequently, without necessarily consciously doing it, but there's sense in which we always, or rather very frequently, aware of the world around us and the requirements, the demands the world makes on us, and very frequently, we will be what we think that we should be in the face of the world. Donald Gibson: So if somebody says good morning to you and you don't feel good, you might feel like saying, "Go to hell." But you don't. Generally, one doesn't say that. Generally, one says, "Fine. How are you?" Well, Dunbar, it seems to me, in his poetry, wore a mask in so many ways. And when I say wore a mask, I think what I mean is clear by that. I mean that he so very frequently hid his own feelings. You can read this whole book of poems. I suspect there are about 350 poems in this book. You can read this whole book of poems, and you get very little sense of what the person was like who wrote them, very little sense of the man himself. Donald Gibson: Now, people who heard Dunbar read or who read his poems during his lifetime and the poems that most people were familiar with were the dialect poems, did not believe or did not know that they were staring in the face of a mask. They thought that they were listening to the man, to Dunbar, and he was telling it like it is. They felt that he was revealing his real self when he read these dialect poems, but to a discerning reader, meaning, I suppose, anybody's who's the least bit sensible and who knows something about Dunbar's biography, something about what the man was like, it's quite clear that this is obviously not Dunbar who's talking in these poems. Donald Gibson: There's a particular poem here that I want to read, a dialect poem, called The Party. I won't read all of it. I'll just read part of it because of a matter of time, but in this poem, it would seem to me that you can distinguish between the voice of the author and the voice of the narrator of the poem. Dunbar's dialect poem so frequently did so well because he used a narrator, a narrative voice, a persona, someone to speak instead of him. In this particular poem, The Party, goes, "Dey had a gread big pahty down to Tom's de othah night. Was I dah? You bet! I nevah in my life see sich a sight. All de folks f'om fou' plantations was invited, an' dey come, Dey come troopin' thick ez chillun when dey hyeahs a fife an' drum. Evahbody dressed deir fines'- Heish yo' mouf an' git away, Ain't seen no sich fancy dressin' sence las' quah'tly meetin' day; Gals all dressed in silks an' satins, not a wrinkle ner a crease, Eyes a-battin', teeth a-shinin', haih breshed back ez slick ez grease; Sku'ts all tucked an' puffed an' ruffled, evah blessed seam an' stitch; Ef you'd seen 'em wif deir mistus, couldn't swahed to which was which. Men all dressed up in Prince Alberts, swaller-tails 'u'd tek yo' bref! I cain't tell you nothin' 'bout it, y' ought to seen it fu' yo'se'f." Donald Gibson: And he goes on for a few pages, more pages of description. "Wish you'd seed dat colo'ed preachah cleah his th'oat an' bow his head; One eye shet, an' one eye open, - dis is evah wud he said: 'Lawd, look down in tendah mussy on sich generous hea'ts ez des; Make us truly thankful, amen. Pass dat possum, ef you please!'" Now, it seems to me quite clear that there is a disparity between the voice of the speaker here and Dunbar's own attitude. That is, the speaker is a person who is participating in the event and who does not look at it critically. He simply narrates, that he's kind of camera, but it's quite clear in that poem that Dunbar, the poet, is condescending to the thing that he's describing, but as he intends you to, you're supposed to read this, and you're supposed to laugh at it because you're supposed to see it at such a great distance. Donald Gibson: It's in the tradition of the minstrel in a certain sense. This is a poem that, say that last verse that I read, it's something like the kind of what they used to call the "darky joke", which is an anti-Black joke, which is intended to amuse whites and which emanated so much from the minstrel stage. Well, that's what Dunbar is doing there, but my point is that in writing the poem as he does, you do get the sense of condescension. You do get the sense that he is distant from the people he's writing about, and he feels superior to the people that you're writing about, but you also are aware, I'm aware of the fact, that he removes himself from the poem and from the situation. Donald Gibson: Now, his non-dialect poetry is, it seems to me, just as impersonal as the dialect poetry. There's various reasons for this. Some of them are these, partly because he's imitative. Dunbar knew the poets of the past. He'd read them, and he'd read them very, very well. He knew the American and the English poetic tradition. He knew them so well that you can often hear echoes of Byron and Keats or Shelley or of 17th century poets or of the Victorian poets. You can often hear lines that are echoes of the lines of these poets. He used a poetic diction, which most poets at the time were using. That is, at the time, it was only around the turn of the century that there began to be a different perspective by the writers, on the part of writers about language and about he possibilities of language, but most writers around the 19th century were writing from a literary language, and they felt that only certain words were suitable for literature, only words of a certain level of usage. Donald Gibson: From the store of poetic diction, Dunbar, for the most part, chose the words for his poems, but the effect, of course, is again to remove the poet from the poem. The forms that he uses are all forms of the past, forms that he learned from Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and so forth, and from some of his contemporaries, for that matter. And you find a good deal of sentimentality in his verse, characteristic of late 19th century poetry, but the effect is, again, to remove the poet from the poem. This particular poem, which I'm reading for the sake of demonstrating sentimentality and by sentimentality, I mean that the poet intends to illicit a response greater than that occasion by the situation. Donald Gibson: There's a certain kind of exaggeration in this poem, a certain kind of untruth, even. The poem is called A Summer's Night. It contains the best line that I think Dunbar ever wrote, but the poem, you have to read through a lot before you get to that line. The poem's called A Summer's Night, and it goes this way. In a way, I feel kind of funny about reading it because it's a little silly. "The night is dewy as a maiden's mouth." Well, that doesn't stand up very well, does it? Well, how dewy is a maiden's mouth? Is a maiden's mouth more dewy than the mouth of a female who isn't a maiden? Well. Donald Gibson: "The skies are bright as are a maiden's eyes." Well, I guess if this were true... What am I saying? Okay. In any case, obviously, what he's doing there, he wants to get the notion of purity. So he thinks, "Ah, purity. Maiden. Virgin." And then he wants to say something complimentary here about bright eyes. So he connects the two ideas. It's kind of an unfortunate juxtaposition. "Soft as a maiden's breath, the wind that flies..." Again. I'm sorry. "...flies up from the perfumed bosom of the South. Like sentinels..." The poem gets better as it goes on. "Like sentinels, the pines stand in the park. And hither hastening, like rakes that roam, with lamps to light their wayward footsteps home, the fireflies come staggering down the dark." Donald Gibson: That seems to me to be a good line. I won't argue about it, but in any case, those first few lines of the poem, which are so obviously false and artificial, again hope to remove the poet from the poem. Now, the dialect poems that he wrote are in the so-called plantation tradition. I don't know whether my predecessors have talked about the plantation tradition, but at the risk of repetition, let me say some things about it. The plantation tradition is represented, I suppose, primarily by such writers as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page and Irwin Russell. These were people who wrote short stories, poems, novels for the sake of creating a picture of the Antebellum South that they felt was more desirable than the actuality. Donald Gibson: These are people who wrote in defense of the pre-Civil War South, people who were in large part responsible, now, they had some help, I must say, in large part responsible for the picture of the South that you get in something like Gone With the Wind. They are responsible in large part for that whole myth of the South, the notion of the master sitting on the veranda of the huge mansion sipping mint julep while the slaves worked happily, singing in the fields. Obviously, such a situation was not true, and we know, for example, that there were relatively few slaveholders who held large numbers of slaves, but thousands of slaves were held by people who had very little, who found it necessary to work in the fields, as well. So most people who owned slaves did not live in big houses, and we certainly know that the conditions that these writers described are not the conditions that prevailed. Donald Gibson: They, for example, present the picture that the historians, by the way, many, many historians, most historians until relatively recently confirmed. I myself remember, there happens to a person here who went to the same high school I went to in Kansas City, Missouri, and I wonder if the textbook we used in American History has changed because I remember that in that textbook was a picture, a lithograph of a cabin, and outside there were slaves. One was playing the fiddle, and the other was dancing, and they were having a gay old time, and that was the implication, you see. Donald Gibson: Well, one of the stories that these people wrote, I think it was Joel Chandler Harris, wrote a story called Free Joe, and in that story, he shows a former slave who bought his freedom, and he shows how badly off he is as a free man. He shows in the story that he would be better off or he was better off when he had a master and had someone to regulate his life. Well, this was the whole point of this writing, and Dunbar joined in on it, sad to say. He did indeed. He wrote poems that show slaves who were very, extremely sad because their masters had died. He wrote about the gay times that occurred during times of slavery, about the dances and parties and feasts and so forth. He wrote about the great burdens that freedom imposed. He wrote about the quaintness of Black dress and speech. He often used stereotypes, often treated these things sentimentally. Donald Gibson: Now, he actually, again, because he was doing this, because he was working in somebody else's tradition, still there is little of the man himself in the dialect poems. His novels have the same problem. He wrote four novels. Three of the novels are primarily about white characters, and in one of those novels, The Uncalled, where he wrote about something that seems to me, he was very, very much interested in, involved, he removed it from himself by casting it in a white mold by writing about the problem through white characters, which, from my perspective, it seems to me that this was one way that he had of hiding from himself and hiding from the rest of the world. Donald Gibson: He wrote in that novel about a young man's relationship with his mother, and that, obviously, quite clearly, it seems to me, it's clear from Dunbar's biography, though his biographer I don't think knew it, but from what she says, it's quite clear that he had great problems breaking away from his mother and establishing his own identity. He writes about this in one of these novels. Well, instead of writing about it in a direct way, he goes about it in the most indirect way possible. Very often, he wrote about distant themes and subjects, things that did not reveal anything about personality. Now, a lot of the things I'm saying were characteristic of other poets, as well, but it seems to me that this is very much consistent with a number of other things that Dunbar does with his life and so forth. Donald Gibson: This particular poem is called Sunset. "The river sleeps beneath the sky, and clasps the shadows to its breast; the crescent moon shines dim on high; and in the lately radiant west the gold is fading into gray. Now stills the lark his festive lay and mourns with me the dying day,--" Well, it's a nature poem. Lots of little nature poems like that, but that poems is a poem that might have been... You'd never identify the writer of that poem unless you just happen to know the poem. There's nothing distinctive about it, not even stylistically, nothing that makes that poem Dunbar's poem other than its being between these two covers. Donald Gibson: Now, why'd he write like that? This man, it seems to me, was potentially, not only a very, very good poet and novelist, but potentially a very great poet and novelist. He was a master of technique. In studying other poets, he learned his lesson very well. He has a fantastically good ear, and you can tell that from his rhymes, and you can tell that from the rhythms of his poems. He knew how to use language. I never looked at all of the poems from this perspective, but I don't ever remember noticing his using a word wrongly or making a mistake in the choice of a word. He knew language very well. Donald Gibson: He also knew that those dialect poems that he was writing and those short stories, which paralleled the poems, about the same kinds of things, he also knew that those were not true. Now, his biographer and other people who have written about him feel that he learned those stories from his mother. His parents were slaves, but he didn't learn those stories from his mother. I don't think so. His mother was from Virginia, or was it Maryland? I think it was Virginia, but in any case, she apparently led a life quite different from the life of a majority of slaves. She was very well-treated, and she learned to read, for example. She remembered her owner reading stories to her and so forth and so on. So if he would have gotten his picture of slavery from her, then he would have gotten a different picture from the picture that someone who was a slave in Georgia might have drawn or in Louisiana or in the deep Mississippi or in the deep South. Donald Gibson: It seems to me that it's a little ridiculous to account for these by saying he learned these stories from his mother. Didn't have to do that. For one thing, he did read Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page and so forth and so on. Now, once you see what their themes are, if you want to write like them, you don't have to have... Were their mothers slaves? Where did they get their material from? It came out of their heads. Well, this came out of his head, too. Suppose you decide that that theme that I described in the story Free Joe that Joel Chandler Harris wrote, that you want to show in a story that the Black man is better off as a slave than as a free man. Well, any one of us can make up a story right now just off the top of our heads. Donald Gibson: Okay, there's this person, you see, and he becomes free because the man who owns him... I haven't thought about this before. I'm just making this up right here. It's true, I guarantee you. Whether it'll be a good story, I don't know. But the man who owns him dies, and in his will, he set free. He's always wanted to go North, and so he begins north. He has a number of difficulties because people keep trying to capture him and return him to slavery, but he finally goes north. He goes to Chicago. He can't get a job, can't support himself, marries, can't support himself or his family then, decides that he was better off in the South, goes back south and goes to someone and asks him if he can be his slave. Donald Gibson: Okay, well, my mother wasn't a slave. The point it, obviously, that those things come out of one's head. Now, he felt that his non-dialect poems were his best poems. In that book Majors and Minors, that means the major poems are the non-dialect poems and the minor poems are the dialect poems. He wrote a poem about this very matter, and he called it The Poet. Here he evaluates, comparatively, his poetry. "He sang of life serenely sweet, with, now and then, a deeper note, from some high peak, nigh yet remote, he voiced the world's absorbing beat. He sang of love when the earth was young, and Love, itself, was in his lays. But ah, the world, it turned to praise a jingle in a broken tongue." Donald Gibson: So that would suggest, to me, that he didn't like those dialect poems very well, and I would suspect that we could extend that to the fiction, as well. There's other evidence, as well. He actually speaks of this in a letter that he wrote that's contained in his biography. He wrote, "I am tired, so tired of dialect. I send out graceful little poems suited for any of the magazines, but they are returned to me by editors who say, 'We would be very glad to have a dialect poem, Mr. Dunbar, but we do not care for a language composition.'" So clearly, he knew that the dialect poems were false or artificial, and he probably even knew that he was doing something that was antithetical to the wellbeing of Black people, generally. Donald Gibson: But still, he continued to write in this way. He continued to write novels that paralleled his non-dialect poetry and short stories that paralleled the dialect poetry, [inaudible] the short stories that were supposedly about the life and character of Black people, but which were written really so that white people could laugh at Black people. That's what he was doing. So again, you wonder why would he do such a thing? I ask myself again. Why would he do such a thing? Why does he write in that particular way that he writes? Donald Gibson: Well, let me say a few things about his life because I think that part of the answer lies there. He was born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, and he grew up in Dayton, Ohio. He didn't know the South until later on after he became successful. He frequently made tours into the South. He visited many of the Black colleges in the south, for example, but he grew up. His sensibility was born in Dayton, Ohio. He was the only Black student in his high school class, which says something about the aspirations of his parents. His father had, I believe, died by this time. I'm sure that other people, other kids his age, were working. Their parents, other Black kids were working. Their parents didn't have the aspirations that his parent had. He did not lead a very easy life. His parents were very poor. His mother took in washing, as a matter of fact, and he speaks of delivering it. So we know very well that back in the 19th century, that he and his family had a very hard time, and that there was quite a sacrifice for him to finish high school. Donald Gibson: Okay, well, this I think says something about some things that I'll say later on. He was, if we can believe him and see no reason not to, he was very popular in his high school class, partly I suppose because he was the only one. He wrote poems, and these poems were published in the high school newspaper. Eventually, he graduated. By the way, it's just a matter of interest, he happened to be friendly with Wilbur and Orville Wright, with the Wright Brothers, for what that's worth. He eventually graduated. He couldn't find a job. In that day, consider what, for him, graduating from a northern or midwestern, I suppose, midwestern high school. He was relative, compared to the educational levels of most Black people at this time, he was far ahead. Donald Gibson: So people in town recognizing this gave him a job as an elevator operator. He wrote poems while he was working, while he was driving his elevator up and down, and he began sending these poems out to newspapers, and a few of them were published. Some in local newspaper, and some in distant newspapers, and he began to be encouraged by a few local people who were sympathetic to his aims and aspirations. Their support was moral, not economic. So people said keep writing those poems. That's very good. That's very good. Keep writing these poems. Every time that you have some time between running the elevator, write some more poems. Donald Gibson: So he eventually was asked by one of his former teachers to read a poem at a meeting of the Western Associate of Writers, which was being held in Dayton in 1892. So on the day of the reading, he left his elevator and ran over to the convention and read his poem and ran back to the elevator. That's true, he really did. Then later, afterwards, some of the people at the meeting came over to the hotel and told him what a very good poet that he was. Then they let and went back to their homes, and he ran his elevator. Donald Gibson: In that same year, he decided that he was going to get his poems published. Now, he knew he wanted to be a writer, and that in itself I think says something about his aspirations. Here he is growing up in Dayton, Ohio, 1870s and '80s, and he wants to be a poet. Okay, well, so he's going to put a lot of effort and energy into this. So he does. He gathers a number of poems together, poems he considers his best and decides to have them printed privately. There's a printing firm in Dayton, Ohio. He finds out it will cost $125 for him to have his poems printed. Donald Gibson: He doesn't have $125, and doesn't see where it's coming from from his salary as an elevator operator. Here, someone did indeed help him, I must say in all truth and honesty. The business manager of the firm, who was white, did indeed advance him the $125 for the sake of his... It was a loan, but nonetheless, he gave it to him. He underwrote the cost of having the book printed. Now, the book came to the attention of a Toledo lawyer named Charles Thatcher and a physician named Dr. Toby. These people became Dunbar's lifelong patrons. That is, they arranged for the publication of Dunbar's second volume of verse, The Majors and Minors that I mentioned before. They themselves went around selling copies to their friends and to all the people that they knew. Donald Gibson: One of these fell into the hands of the actor James A. Herne, who was a friend of William Dean Howells. William Dean Howells was probably the foremost literary critic around the turn of the century, during the 90s and afterward. William Dean Howells read the poems, reviewed them in the North American Review, and Dunbar, at that point, that was a national publication, and at that point, that was Dunbar's takeoff point. After that, he began writing more. He gave lots and lots of lectures. Well, you know that during the 19th century, this was one form of entertainment, lectures. People, Mark Twain, the Wildlife Journey. So Dunbar would, I say lecture, he would actually read, and apparently, he had a very effective reading voice. People loved to hear him read, especially his dialect poems. Donald Gibson: So that's one. He eventually was able to do that, and was really the first Black professional writer. He was the first Black writer to be able to support himself primarily by his pen. I mean, he had other things. He was given a position at Washington D.C. at one time. I forgot what the office was, but it was a patronage job to help him support himself. So from there until the time of his death, he was able to support himself and his mother and a wife, a wife whom he married under rather peculiar circumstances. It seems to me very peculiar in the way it might just be interesting, I guess. Donald Gibson: Also, it's very romantic. He read a poem, and it was by a Black lady. He read the poem and immediately fell in love with the person who wrote the poem. And he began corresponding with her, and decided he was going to marry her. So he did. That seemed very peculiar to me, but I'm a rather practical-minded person. I knew my wife two weeks before I asked her to marry me. But in any case, again, what I'm getting at is why did he write as he did? Why did he write these poems that were... He hated the poems. He said the jingle in a broken tongue. Why would he write the poems feeling like they're not good poems? Why would he write the poems knowing full well the effect that these poems were having on the attitudes of the majority of the society on Black people? Why would he write poems he knew the stereotypes were doing? Donald Gibson: He knew that what he was telling wasn't true. He knew that he was leaving out a great deal. You see, when I say leaving out a great deal, I don't mean to say that there weren't times and circumstances during slavery during which the enslaved Black people did not have a good time. That would be ridiculous. It would be as ridiculous as to say that people in jail never laugh. So obviously people who are in prison do laugh. I would suspect that some great jokes go around prisons, and I would suspect that there are times when people sit around and talk and really enjoy themselves. You see that in Cleaver when he talks about this learning experience with the teacher. He loved that! Donald Gibson: Well, so it would be a little ridiculous to say that... I mean, on the other hand, we wouldn't say, would we, that let's all go to prison to have a ball because things are happy. Obviously there were good times, but if when you talk about prison in an attempt to describe it in any kind of adequate way, then one should probably say that for the most part it's better not to be there than to be there. And one would seek good times elsewhere. His conversations be more selective about the people he talks to, or at least have the potential of selecting who he wants to talk to. Donald Gibson: So Dunbar was doing something he obviously knew was false. Now, Benjamin Brawley, a critic, talks about this matter, and he has several ways that accounts, or rather, he was one way primarily that he accounts for this. This is something that a number of critics who have looked at Dunbar's work, and there's not that many, by the way. There are very few that had, in fact. The question I'm asking is a question that seems to have arisen in the minds of most people who've thought about Dunbar. Now, Brawley says this, I know the rise is because you feel the... Well, it's a problem to be dealt with, but I won't go into that further. Brawley says this, he accounts for the character of Dunbar's writing in this way. "The burden still rested upon the Negro to prove that he could do what any other many could do in America. That meant to use the white man's technique and meet the white man's standard of excellence. It was to this task that Dunbar addressed himself. This was the task that he felt he had to satisfy." Donald Gibson: Well, that's one interpretation. Vernon Loggins, who's book The Negro Author in America: His Development to 1900, which is a book that you should probably know because it seems to me to be the most significant single work of criticism in scholarship yet done by anybody in relation to Black writers. It was published in about 1930, I think, and is a monumental job of scholarship and criticism. I've seen absolutely nothing that touches that, even my own work, I'm sorry to say, but nonetheless it's true. Loggins agrees in part with Brawley, in large part. He says essentially the same thing in a somewhat different way. Brawley, in fact, might have got this from Loggins, but I don't have the dates here. I don't remember which came first. Donald Gibson: Loggins says, "The Dunbar, who in the obscurity of Dayton, had produced lyrics of lowly life and folks from Dixie," one volume poetry, the other volume short stories, "now felt called upon to write for a wide public, made up mainly of whites who are curious to know what a Black man of letters could accomplish." Now, this says something of the same thing, I suppose, as what Brawley said. But again, that seems to me to be only partly true. I can't imagine that is knowing... I guess, maybe I'm just projecting or knowing myself as I do or knowing human beings as I think I do. I couldn't imagine anybody sitting up writing 350 poems, and in every case, writing them to prove something to the white man. I mean, maybe 348, but not 350. Donald Gibson: I just can't imagine. Then in the novels and the short stories, as well. I would think that if he felt differently at some time or another, and the very, very few times that it does happen, he would've said what he really felt. Well, Dunbar himself wrote about this matter, wrote things or said things pertaining to this matter. He said in a letter to one of his patrons, he said, "I write to as to be able to interpret my own people through song and story and to prove to the many that, after all, we are more human than African." Now, Dunbar is either lying or being inconsistent. Donald Gibson: I think what's happening is that I think he's talking to Dr. Toby. He's talking to this patron. He's talking to this white man, and I think he puts on a mask. I think he says what he thinks the man wants to hear because after all, he said, "Ah, the world had turned to praise a jingle in a broken tongue." And now he says, "I want to be able to interpret my own people through song and story." And also, he knew damn well he wasn't interpreting his people. He knew very well he was doing the same thing that Joel Chandler Harris was doing and the other in the plantation tradition. Donald Gibson: So that's patently false. He knew he wasn't doing that. So consequently, it seemed to me that that's where he... Often, apparently, he had the ability to say what people wanted to hear. His biographer says, rather innocently, she means this to be praise, but she says that Dunbar had the uncanny ability of the chameleon to blend with his surroundings. She means by that, that he could be whatever was required of him at any time. She meant that to be a high compliment, but it's very clear from that biography, by the way, it's by a woman named Lida Keck Wiggins, W-I-G-G-I-N-S. It's a very fascinating biography because she's one of the most racist, bigoted people imaginable. But she doesn't know it. So it makes fascinating reading, and also you can see sometime where Dunbar really puts her down in a very indirect way, but she doesn't know it. Donald Gibson: She talks in the biography about how lovely Paul Laurence Dunbar's little Black mammy wa". She says that in the book. I wonder what Dunbar felt when he read that. Well, in any case, a very interesting book. I mean, she was nice lady who wanted to do good. She says things like Dunbar shows that they can do if they really try and so forth and so on. Now, in the biography, the person writing the biography, Mrs. Wiggins, asked him why he writes, and he says, "Why do I write?" He says, "'Why do I write?' He asked, as though surprised at the query. 'Well, I write just because I love it.'" Now, those two things are not mutually exclusive, of course, but if he could write in order to be able to interpret his own people, and he could write because he loves it at the same time. Donald Gibson: However, again, let me leave you in suspense since the hour is over, I still haven't answered the question, have I? Okay. I'll go on tomorrow with the intention of answering the question why, it seems to me, Dunbar writes as he does. Speaker 1: That was Donald Gibson, associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut with today's lecture. This series of programs is presented by the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the department of English and the Afro-American Studies program at the University as material for the course, Afro-American literature. Today's presentation originated as a live broadcast at 1:30PM, April 21, 1970 from Shambaugh Auditorium and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.