NATIVE SYMPATHIES: NEW ANTHOLOGY REVEALS MULTICULTURALISM OF WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — According to a University of Arkansas researcher, one of the first and most prolific writers to portray American Indians in literature shared their fate of disenfranchisement. But a new anthology celebrating these writings may garner some mainstream attention for both.

Politics cheated William Gilmore Simms, and the Southeast Indians he wrote about, out of their rightful place in history, says John Guilds, UA professor of English. While the Native Americans lost their land and heritage, supposedly for being inferior to whites, Simms lost his place in the canon and his literary reputation, supposedly for being racist.

"Simms enjoyed one of the finest reputations of any 19^th century writer, and it was well deserved. Following the Civil War, however, he was branded a racist and slaveholder, and his works have since fallen into neglect," Guilds said. "It’s true Simms owned slaves, but no other writer of his time portrayed black and Indian characters with as much sympathy or realism as Simms did."

In "An Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms" — published this month by the University of South Caronlina Press — Guilds collects more than a hundred essays, stories and poems that reveal the author’s fascination with Native American culture. Written between the 1820s and 1870, the majority of these works rarely have been seen in print since the 19^th century, and some have never before been published.

Guilds, a noted scholar of Southern literature, has devoted more than 40 years to the study of Simms and the preservation of his works. In 1992, he wrote the award-winning biography "Simms: A Literary Life." He knew that Simms was a prolific writer — producing 82 books in his lifetime, more than any other American before the Civil War. But Guilds had never noticed the breadth of Simms’ Indian writings until 1996, when he served as the William Gilmore Simms research professor at the University of South Carolina.

Envisioning an anthology of these works, Guilds enlisted the help of anthropologist Charles Hudson, an expert on Native American tribes of the Southeast. Hudson read and annotated each piece of literature, noting where Simms’ portrayal of Indians diverged from ethnohistorical fact.

"Simms believed that the advantage of the poet or novelist over the historian was that, when they encountered gaps in their knowledge, the poets were privileged to fill those gaps with imagination," Guilds said. "Sometimes people who read his writings praised parts he’d invented as authentic, and Simms got a chuckle out of admitting he’d made it up. Hudson’s input was invaluable in sorting that out."

Indeed, Simms exercised considerable artistic license in some of the stories. For example, claiming to have learned some of the Choctaw and Creek languages, Simms "translated" a war chant for one of his works. According to Hudson, Simms likely fabricated the chant, limiting its historical value. But Guilds points out that such works still hold literary value — the chant essentially becoming a poem that attributes motives and emotions to the Indian character who sings it.

Acknowledging the intellect and individuality of characters — even black and Native American characters — was a trademark of Simms’ writing, Guilds said. Other writers of the time, most notably James Fenimore Cooper, included minority characters in their works, but these characters were presented as flat and stereotypical in comparison to the dynamic, white protagonists.

"Simms never made that mistake. His portrayals, whether historically accurate or not, show Indians as individuals — artistic, cultured, capable of intense emotion and complex motives. In my opinion, that signifies a form of respect," Guilds said.

If such fairness to his characters does constitute respect, then Simms’ reputation for racism seems even more unfortunate and undeserved. Adding further fuel to the debate, Guilds notes that several Simms stories feature no white characters whatsoever — an unprecedented practice for a 19^th century writer but typical of Simms’ multicultural focus.

"Simms wanted to be characterized not as a Southern writer but as an American writer. And as a writer, he tried to capture all facets of the development of our nation. Necessarily, that included portraying all the people involved — the Indians, French, British, Spanish, slaves and frontiersmen," Guilds said. "Today we’d call that multiculturalism, but for Simms, that was simply American."

For more information about "An Early and Strong Sympathy," visit the University of South Carolina Press at http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/2002/3441.html.