How the Late John Chandler Harris Came to Write the “Uncle Remus” Stories

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 12, 16 September 1908, Page 52

How the Late John Chandler Harris Came to Write the “Uncle Remus” Stories

TS /r ANY great works of genius, as /VB is well known, have been pro- / 1 duced by accident;* and an J, author is seldom the best judge of his own work. When Joel Chandler Harris wrote the first of his “ Uncle Remus ” stories, and presented it for publication, he did so, we are now told, “with a hundred misgivings.” He was not sure ■that his ventures in negro folk-lore would prove successful. He could not know that they would bring him worldwide fame. At the time we are describing. Mr. Harris was a young man of twentyeight, employed on the Atlanta Constitution. Sam W. Small, afterward a revivalist, who had been writing for the Same paper a popular column of negro story and dialect, had just resigned from the staff. The managing editor of ‘•The Constitution,” wishing to continue the feature, said to Harris one day: ‘■Joel, it seems to me that you could do that sort of thing to a tee. See if you can’t turn in something to-night.” The young writer’s memory flitted back to his early days on a plantation. 'All the quaint settings of negro life—• the little cabins, the fiddling darkey's, the wrinkled story-teller, the black “mammies,” the noisy corn-shuekings, the bob-tailed rabbits disappearing along the road—came hurrying from the past. Late that afternoon he turned in his copy. The next day his reputation was made. The author of “Uncle Remus,” says Ray Stannard Baker in “The Outlook,” “succeeded because he did not try.” Mr. Raker continues: ..“Here was a young, unknown, untravelled printer, of narroiv school advantages,,. il.hpugh profitably educated. in the b.estielassics, and pqssessqig besides,much curious knowledge of negroes, of dogs, of horses, of the way of the red stream in the swamp, and. of the .folk of the woods. He had some familiar old stories to tell—so old and familiar that no one had though them worth writing down—and he told them as quietly and as simply as he talked. ... His tales 6ue<;eeded far beyond his expectations, and’ for the same reason that made AEsop’s Fables an imperishable classic. For they were the slow fruitage of the wonder, the humour, and the pathos of a race of primitive story tellers. They were instinct with those primal passions which appeal to human nature, savage and civilised, the world over. They were by no means indigenous to American soil; no one knows for how many centuries they had been told in varying forms in the jungles of Africa. Slaves had brought them thither, and they had soon flowere-d luxuriantly in English, being cultivated with unconscious skill in the humble negro cabins of the cotton and cane fields.” Every Southern boy and girl listened to these stories from babyhood upward; they ware the richest prizes of the negro cabins; but “of all those who heard,” remarks Mr. Baker, “only one possessed the instinct that appreciated their literary value.” To quote further: “Mr. Harris was, however, in no sense a mere copyist. One has only to eomJ"”? 8 * Br’gr Rabbit story as told by any typical negro tale-teiler, or as it has been set down word for word from his mouth (and verbal truthfulness has been the sole claim to distinction of some of Mr. Harris' imitators), with the same story as Mr. Harris lias written it, to appreciate the hand of the master, craftsman. For the author of “Uncle Remus’ is a matchless writer of the spoken story—a difficult art indee'd. The original negro narrator has to aid him all the accessories of the voice—-ftnd there is.no voice more flexible and expressive than that of the negro. He may add the emphasis of changing facial expression and of gesture, and with what powerful effect may he interject his pauses. Moreover, there are those impressive stage-settings — night, the brightness of an open lire, Shadowy, fascinated faces, ready to express, the common thrill, Those are parts of the story as much as the spoken words, and it bus been the triumph of Mr. Harris’ art

to represent them all. His versions of the stories are closer to the real story than any verbatim copy coidd possibly be, for he has given us not merely a story about a rabbit and a fox, which ■night be dull enough, but he has given us, with lifelike reality, the negro who told it. and what he felt and thought about while he was telling it; he has shown us the people who listened to the Story, and we see how they are swept by superstitious fear, by laughter, by tears, by wonder.” Very soon Mr. Harris began to hear from the outside world. His “Uncle Remus” stories were reprinted first in England, and then in foreign lands. In 1883 they were publisned in book form and highly praised. “Such a success,” Mr. Baker remarks, “often sends a young writer flying to New York, where he is promptly petted, befooled, and gtir.._'~‘-

“Uncle Remus’ depth,” says a writer in the Atlanta Journal, “is that of a child’s sudden glance. He never sought to formulate life and its wonders. Thoughts came to him as pictures. Like St. Francis of Assisi, the wind was a brother to him, and every fluttering bird and a little sister. It was always ‘Good morning, Mr, Sun; good evening. Friend Moon!” He was the Hans Christian Andersen of America.” cd into an overproduction that shortly ends him.” But Joel Chandler Harris •was not to be beguiled from his old haunts, “So far from having his head turned l>y his successes, he looked upon the flurry of fame which his stories had brought him in the light of a joke—a lather unreal and somewhat annoying joke. He was not connneed that he was a genius, nor did lie begin to feel the responsibility of a great mission resting upon him. He continued to go down every day to the office of the newspaper which employed him, he wrote about so n.any editorials and other matter, and then in the evening he enjoyed sitting down with his family around him and writing a story. He never wrote because lie feared that unless he did people would forget him, for he was- not especially concerned whether he was remembered not. He never sent his manuscripts abegging; he waited, and presently ~<inio one wanted them very much. He never paid court to publishers nor to critics, and yet no writer was ever more favourably received by the critics. He had not one of the.disappointments and trials of the ordinary author. Most of the unhappinness of the world comes from trying to be what one is not, trying to do something for which one is in no wise fitted. It was Mr. Harris’s rare good fortune to know definitely his own capabilities and limitations, and it was his chief pleasure to be simply what he was.

to tell the best stories he knew, and not to worry. If the public wanted what he wrote, it was well; if not, he had already enjoyed the pleasure o.' doing the work. He made his channel and flowed quietly in it. “‘lf the greatest position on the round earth were to be offered to me,’ he oiice said, ‘I wouldn’t take it. The responsibility would kill me in two weeks. Now I haven’t any care or any troubles, and I have resolved never to worry any more. Life is all a joke to me. Why make it a care;’ ” It was in this spirit that Joel Chandler Harris laboured on to the end, becoming, in time, the author of twenty-six books and the editor of his own magazine. As a writer in the Atlanta “Journal” tells the story: “The thirty odd remaining years of his life were crowned with activity in the fields of story telling, verse and critical essays. A few months ago when Miss Katherine Wooten, of Carnegie Library, compiled a list of his writings it developed, to the amazement of Uncle Remus himself, that he had produced twentysix complete volumes, forty-one random tales and a goodly amount of verse. He was continually making stories simply because he was continually watchful of life, and because within him the impulse to write was as fresh and inevitable as that of a bird to sing. About cig.it, years ago he retired from newspaper work to the veranda and sitting-room and leafy garden of Snap Bean Farm, or as his charming West End home is sometimes called, ‘The Sign of the Wren's Nest.’ The final year of his life was his busiest and happiest. He wrote and sauntered and meditated surrounded by wife and children. In the earliest morning hours he could be seen working among his roses and in the evening he would sit for hours watching his friend, the moon, climb over the tree tops.” The New York “Nation” once paid to Joel Chandler Harris the high compliment: “His perception is subtler and more truthful than Bret Harte's. Both authors have keen insights, but Harris’ are the finer and deeper. Harte's characters are more picturesque and his incidents more thrilling, but Harris’ people wind themselves about our hearts and owe little to circumstance.” "