Conjure Man

Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches. Edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz, III, and Jesse S. Crisle. 596 pages. Stanford, Cal: Stanford University Press, $69.00. 

These days, authors are routinely "rediscovered" decades after their deaths. It is unusual, though, for the editors of that work to shine as fresh a light on a writer as Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz, III, and Jesse S. Crisler manage with the lesser-known work of Charles Waddell Ches-nutt, whose nonfiction is collected here for the first time. Essays and Speeches contains 77 pieces, 38 of which have never been published before, written over five decades.

Born in 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio, Chesnutt was an African-American who lived in a white man’s world, "a transracial product of a culture he admired. Afro-centrists will find no ally in Chesnutt." A successful attorney, stenographer, and court reporter, Chestnutt espoused a capitalist impulse that was part and parcel of his quest for excellence and "the rightful monetary rewards thereof."

Despite his sometimes tenuous position as a man who straddled two distinct cultures, Chesnutt delivers his essays and oration with a logic and disarming grace that is universal. The essays offer an opportunity to appreciate Chesnutt’s talents outside his fiction—his The Marrow of Tradition, The Conjure Woman, and "The Sheriff’s Children" stories have become staples of American literature survey courses in the last decade.

McElrath, professor of English at Florida State, brings his capacious knowledge of turn-of-the-century American literature to bear on this project. Only someone as intimately aware of the social contexts that colored our nation could take on the challenge of introducing Chesnutt’s nonfiction and, in the process, "make available the means of taking the full measure of the man."

A Life of
the Mind

Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present. By Neil Jumonville. 328 pages. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, $49.95. 

The name is vaguely familiar, but many of us would be hard pressed to rattle off any substantive facts about Henry Steele Commager. Despite not being a household name for much of the post-"baby-boom" generation, Commager was America’s most influential teacher, scholar and intellectual in the middle part of the century. He was also a pragmatist who stuck to his guns when many other intellectuals were distracted from the goal of protecting democracy from the various attacks that have threatened America in this century.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1902, Commager was a rough contemporary of fellow Pittsburghians Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley. His good fortune in self-discipline and an encouraging grandfather, Adam Dan, allowed him to study at some of the world’s finest institutions of higher learning.

As a young man, Commager studied for a time at the University of Gottingen and traveled in Europe. Still, he longed to return to the United States, where his grandfather and mentors at the University of Chicago had instilled in him the importance of learning not only as an exercise in scholarship, but as a way of effecting change.

In response to the Welt-anschauung that would draw him back, always, to the States, Commager eventually committed himself to the life of the intellectual. The distinction between the scholar and the intellectual is an important one to make in this study, and Jumonville is careful to limn the boundaries between the scholarship of many of Com-mager’s colleagues and the intellectual activism of Commager himself.

In a career that spanned over seven decades, Commager involved himself in most of the major events that shaped the 20th Century: Roosevelt’s New Deal, World War II, McCarthyism, and the Vietnam War. He had strong, often unflattering, opinions of the policies of four presidents.

As Jumonville makes clear, the importance of Commager’s story is not necessarily his eventful life, which is described in an engaging and readable narrative, but what those events can tell us about our society and ourselves. Above all, we are left to wonder if America could ever breed another intellectual like Commager, whose concern for the country and its people might be untenable in a society that has become increasingly cynical (and conservative) about such things.