Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought

By Rod Ellis and Steven M. Stowe

The history of thought and thinking in the American South is now alive with curiosity and poised for a new maturity. Thanks to the efforts of a growing variety of critics, the region is increasingly understood as a cultural habitat comprised of flows of ideas and sensibilities that originate both inside and outside traditional boundaries. This volume of essays uniquely combines perspectives from historians and literary scholars to explore a wide spectrum of thought about a region long understood as distinctive, yet often taken to represent "American" culture and character. Contributors first engage with how southern thinkers of all sorts have struggled with belonging--who is an insider and who is an outsider. Second, they consider how thought in the South has over time created ideas about the South. The volume capitalizes on an interdisciplinary synergy that has come to characterize southern studies, exploring current creative tensions between classic themes in southern history and the new ways to approach them. Region and identity, intellectuals and change, the South as an idea and ideas in the South—these continue to inspire the best new research as showcased in this collection.

Contributors are Michael T. Bernath, Stephen Berry, John Grammer, Michael Kreyling, Scott Romine, Beth Barton Schweiger, Mitchell Snay, Melanie Benson Taylor, Jonathan Daniel Wells, and Timothy J. Williams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469663579

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

SARAH E. GARDNER AND STEVEN M. STOWE

IN 1963, Richard Beale Davis was very cautious when he framed his now-classic intellectual history of post-Revolutionary Virginia. He tied his book to a great man—it was a history of Jefferson’s Virginia—and not to all of the writers and institutions that his innovative study in fact considered. His first words of introduction went past modesty to the very rim of doubt. Intellectual life? Readers should not expect his book to put forward an essential southern mind. His study, he said, is in large part an assemblage of evidence filled with minutiae and details about thinkers who admittedly have left no great impression in the history of American literature.¹

Misgivings like this about the local texture of intellectual life, and about the number and variety of texts where the life of the mind may be found, have long since passed away in the field of intellectual history. In fact, the volume before you, Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought, takes these features of thought as both starting point and destination, and it aims to show the intellectual history of the South as alive with curiosity and poised for a new maturity. The authors here, historians and literary critics, take it as a given that knowing about ideas in the southern past means knowing about people of all sorts who wrote or used texts to express themselves with conviction and experiment; the authors themselves do much the same thing. Knowing the intellectual past means finding out how thinkers became writers and readers and how this shaped their ideas. It means exploring how ideas were replanted in material as well as in intellectual worlds in the South—and how this in turn generated new words with which to solve the past or imagine what is to come.²

The present moment of vibrant interest in the South’s intellectual history is marked by a resurgence of intellectual history more broadly. There is new work on European intellectual life in the modern era, as well as work taking the measure of global intellectual history. Scholarship on the intellectual past is easy to find in the programs of major historical societies and associations. On the American scene, professional groups specific to the American intellectual past are now well established and multivoiced, including the Society for U.S. Intellectual History and the African American Intellectual History Society. A leading journal of modern thought acknowledged not long ago that a watershed has been reached in terms of how American intellectual history is conceived and written. As if to seal the moment, two new collections of essays have since arrived on the scene, each serving to bring forward questions that inspire—and perplex—the history of thought and thinking.³

For all of the newness, though, much of the work in U.S. intellectual history circles back to a certain turning point in the field some forty years ago. This juncture has become a touchstone in the narrative of U.S. intellectual history as a field, the ancestor in the room where today’s intellectual history takes shape, including Insiders, Outsiders. Toward the end of the 1970s, a rising interest in social history promised exciting new visions of ordinary Americans and the fullness of their lives. Intellectual history—then inscribed as the history of elite men—began to seem a little pale. It stood apart from the wider world and from the historical struggles to define social reality. Alarmed for their discipline, a group of intellectual historians gathered in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1977 at a Frank Lloyd Wright house commonly known as Wingspread to size up the moment and decide what to do.

In the volume that resulted from the conference, New Directions in American Intellectual History, contributors agreed that intellectual history’s fading vitality might be countered by shifting the focus from the history of certain covering concepts (the idea of freedom, for instance) to ideas in history. This meant looking at the past as a cultural whole where intellect is drawn from a context of values and practices that saturate people’s lives. Cultural anthropology is prominent in New Directions; Clifford Geertz receives a large number of citations. Intellectual historians such as Quentin Skinner and Thomas Kuhn also are invoked, and future path breakers of a broadly defined field receive notice, Natalie Zemon Davis, Raymond Williams, and Robert Darnton among them. The contributors were much occupied with making the practice of intellectual history a collective scholarly concern, self-consciously shared, although the collective represented by the volume (with one exception) consisted entirely of professional historians. Surprisingly, there were no literary critics among the contributors, despite the fact that American studies had been bringing historians and critics together for two decades. John Higham, in his introduction to the volume, seemed almost puzzled by his essayists’ relative indifference to literature.⁴

Looming large in all this was the figure of Arthur O. Lovejoy and his forty-year-old study of a cross-cultural idea (the Great Chain of Being) that had persisted across vast expanses of space and time. Lovejoy’s vision of this idea’s journey across the centuries now seemed airless in the Wingspread group’s view. Lovejoy’s work deserved respect, but its hypnotic timelessness was exactly intellectual history’s problem. Contributors to New Directions wanted to be free of the impoverishing quest for the consistency of established ideas. They wanted studies that showed how changes in intellectual life have changed the questions that matter. The idea of a great chain of being has indeed traveled over time, David Hollinger wrote, but a new intellectual history would recognize that disregard of the distinctive contexts of an idea fatally diluted its historical meaning. The Wingspread volume’s essays are organized in a way that exactly mirrors the challenge and the proposed solution: an initial definitions section followed by History of Ideas and History of Culture. Be critically self-aware; bring culture in.⁵

There is no Arthur O. Lovejoy figure or unified approach to be surmounted by contributors to the two recent collections of essays in American intellectual history, though both volumes take note of what now seems to be the tentative, even mechanical, way of relating ideas to culture in the Wingspread volume. Both argue that it is once again time to take the measure of the present moment in the field’s profile and accomplishments. Gone is the fear that intellectual history has become mummified. Instead, there is excitement about how to map its liveliness. In both The Worlds of American Intellectual History and American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times, the essays are rooted in clear social contexts and explore modes of thinking as well as established thought. Essays grow directly from authors’ research, testimony to a self-confident, expanded field. Worlds sees the structure of the field in terms of intellectual vantage points that map domains of thought, varying from the functional (frames, method) to the topical (justice, secularization). The Labyrinth volume aims to capture why ideas matter in terms of how they do their cultural work. Both volumes cover a wide range of intellectual life, from formal thought to what one essayist in Worlds terms the free-range ideas of popular thought.⁶ It is clear from both volumes that scholars in the field have spent much time since 1979 thinking about class, gender, and race and about the critical value of seeing American thought in shared rather than exceptionalist terms. Particular intellectual roots or forebears are harder to find than they were in 1979, but the intellectual arena is much larger, more struggled over, and more heavily peopled. (Strangely, though, as in New Directions, literary critics are missing.) Scholars in both volumes agree that the best work in intellectual history puts questions about values up front and refreshes past ideas by letting us see them alive in the present.

The essays in Insiders, Outsiders flow from these intellectual waters, though with a southern rhythm that arises from how the history of the South has diverged in telling ways from the American mainstream. For one, the much longer persistence of human bondage in the South, along with the racial violence and segregation that fueled the Civil War and outlived it, created an amorphous but powerful atmosphere encompassing who was (or is) inside the South and who was not. For another, the self-awareness of being southern, in its myriad forms and complications, raises historical questions of who belongs inside and who does not and where the threshold is (or could be, or should be). Indeed, the context—and the convergence—of insiders and outsiders in the South is a key theme of southern difference across the board but not in a simplistic way marked by either the South’s departure from national norms or its congruence with them. Instead, southern difference is seen playing out over time in the region’s particular experience of regional identity, national belonging, and global relevance.

The slave South was first beheld—and written about—as a distinctive region in the nineteenth century when social and cultural forces bent on stability were stirred up and overwhelmed by the huge national debate over human bondage. It took the Civil War and the downfall of the Confederacy to make the South an object of academic study, although southern intellectual history did not have its own niche until the 1960s, some would say the 1970s. Prior to that, the history of southern thought mostly circulated through two main channels: the history of politics and political ideas, and the development over time of a distinctive southern literary tradition. Politics was the fuel of the history wars that broke out over why the Civil War came, whether it was inevitable or induced by extremists, and whether the South was culpable. Beginning immediately after the conflict, debate over political organization and ideology dominated scholarly exchanges that zigzagged between the empirical and the polemical. The political South was the white South, and the thinkers who mattered were those intellectuals (largely insiders to the South, and male) who formulated the political and constitutional arguments for or against slavery, secession, and Reconstruction. Well into the 1960s, it was political ideas and thinkers who continued to define much of what counted as substantial intellectual debate.⁷

The other stream of interest in southern intellectual life, the South’s literary tradition, developed alongside but apart from political history. Sometimes writing as historians of literature, literary critics became important interpreters of southern life and mind, a tradition that continues in Insiders, Outsiders. While the history of the South’s political ideas moved into the twentieth century still weighed down by the Civil War, its literary history attempted to ease past the war, or to look for intellectual dimensions in or beyond it. From the 1890s into the mid-twentieth century, literary scholars established distinctive southern canons of literature—the plantation romance, the Southern Renaissance, antimodernism, southern local color—that grew from the study of individual authors who had made their marks on the national scene: William Faulkner, most notably, but many others, from Kate Chopin to Thomas Wolfe and Zora Neale Hurston. Critics linked an interest in southern imagination and style to a fascination with the noirish reaches of southern experience and how southern novelists and poets seemed to speak easily to audiences far beyond the South, even beyond the United States.⁸

Since the 1980s, developments in the intellectual history of the South mirror changes in many fields of historical scholarship. While Insiders, Outsiders is not a survey of this scholarship, widespread interest in gender, class, and race in southern society and culture has yielded a huge crop of fresh work in which intellectual historians have participated. The same is true for how study of the South has been aired out in the last three decades with insights from social theory and cultural anthropology.⁹ Multicultural perspectives and a vision of a global South have cracked open older ideas about what, even where, the South was and is.¹⁰ In short, views of the South’s intellectual past have become more exploratory and nuanced and at the same time more rooted in a wider range of specific events and people.

Literary scholars, too, have continued to challenge assumptions about southern exceptionalism within the nation as well as essentialist modes of thinking that have propped up the idea of a unified southern literary canon. This is particularly true of the New Southern Studies, a body of literary and cultural scholars who see the South as not a discrete, objectified place but a cultural habitat, an imaginary, made from ideas and sensibilities that come from both inside and outside the South’s geographic bounds. Indeed, whether the South exists at all is up for debate. That certain groups—academics, editors, journalists, politicians, enslavers—had a vested interest in maintaining the reality of the South, however, remains unquestioned, as essays in Insiders, Outsiders show.¹¹

Creative ties between New Southern Studies scholars and intellectual historians are a distinguishing feature of where we are now in the study of southern thought. Yet Insiders, Outsiders is not an overview or synthesis of current conversations between critics and historians. Instead it taps into exchanges that are creatively unstable in the best sense, open-ended and unguarded. Authors speak from their respective disciplines but with the awareness that disciplines overlap. Intellectual approaches change, but they are not erased. The essays fall into two groups. The first, in part 1, highlights an array of past occasions and places for thought in the South. Here historians step forward but with the awareness of how distinct settings for intellectual life in the past always raise questions about how historical texts are not simple repositories of historical meaning. Rather, in both their form and content, they make meaning. Part 2 takes up modes of thinking about the South. Here literary scholars predominate but in ways that keep the focus on how structures of meaning recombine, but never shed, the historical particulars that gave them birth.

The essays in part 1 thus explore aspects of intellectual life understood as growing from southern ground and negotiating its time-bound material as well as its intellectual features. Shared visions among southerners of the life of the mind appear here, as well as individual struggles to believe and to know. Stephen Berry takes in hand the shape-shifting Edgar Allan Poe—a southerner or not?—to suggest that literary passions mix uneasily on the provincial stage where Poe put himself. The writer’s destiny is fame or death (or fame and death) and how he echoes less literary folk who are clearly southern. Michael T. Bernath relates a kind of story known in many southern neighborhoods in the late antebellum years—a tale of Yankees let inside the community who become a danger to slavery and everything in white society that rested upon it. But a tale of outing the outsiders turns into a story of a community fracturing from the inside out. Beth Barton Schweiger explores how readers made books in the nineteenth-century South. Renowned for being book starved, readers in the South were in fact much more than accessories to the productions of authors and publishers. A readers’ culture tossed books around, put new words into people’s mouths, and embraced books as malleable things that transcended themselves in the making of intellectual life. Worldly energies like these seem foreign to the postwar, introspective writing of novelist Edwin Fuller. But as Timothy J. Williams shows, Fuller’s novel Sea-Gift reads as a subjective counterpoint to the grandiose plans afoot among ex-Confederates reeling from defeat. In the pages of his novel, Fuller cast the white South’s fantasy of a powerful nation into intimate emotional terms of yearning and imagined completeness. Mitchell Snay takes up a very different sampling of writers in the South after the war: politicians and journalists who contested what the Civil War had done to change race, labor, and the chances for southern economic recovery. Their debates over immigration as a solution to the South’s needs were piecemeal and partisan but all the more powerful for it, framing questions of who belonged in the South, and who did not, in the coming decades.

Insiders, Outsiders’ second interpretive path, in part 2, traces modes of thinking about the South. The perspective here partakes of a bit more cultural distance on the South, often with a close eye for how it is or has been (or might be) conceptualized and inscribed. Melanie Benson Taylor explores the idea of the Anthropocene and its proposition that we live in a geologic time essentially shaped by human beings—humans and their stories. The concept of the Anthropocene is immense, but it is, after all, a narrative—of the crisis we are in now, of history, and of how we place ourselves in time. Southern writers, in a sense, have for a long while taken up such themes, and their creative unease tells its own story. A crisis of a different sort—of race, civil rights, and journalism—is explored by John Grammer in his look at a trio of southern writers who defined a southern turn in the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Willie Morris, Marshall Frady, and Larry L. King each found themselves drawn to the unfolding civil rights movement in the South, with its unavoidable moral urgency and its ripening political demands. As southerners, these writers were drawn to the movement as insiders. As white men, they stood outside some of the danger stirred up by race and power. Grammer shows how the person-centered New Journalism, with its emphasis on scenes and its challenge to the ideal of journalistic objectivity, supplied this trio with the means to write about the South as a homeplace made startlingly new. In his essay on the Civil War–era writer Edward A. Pollard, Scott Romine suggests how we might rediscover Pollard by taking seriously his own rediscoveries of what it meant to be a white southerner living inside the Lost Cause. The inconsistencies and revisions in Pollard’s writing are most richly seen not as flaws but as Pollard reinventing for himself the meaning of the new postwar South. If complex, sophisticated writers and texts are the subjects of traditional intellectual history, Pollard is rewarding as a subintellectual intellectual, whose thought we approach through the provisional realities of his thinking. Jonathan Daniel Wells’s essay shows how ideas about southern insiders and outsiders influenced the critical judgment shaping The Library of Southern Literature in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Despite their desire to have southern writing included within the charmed circle of American literary excellence, LSL editors promoted regional assumptions, especially about gender and race, that privileged white men and, increasingly, white women. Whiteness, not gender, was the marker of inclusivity. In this way, the LSL emerged as a new literary creation—but one with the aspect of a memorial to the South’s Confederate past. Writing intellectual history is an elusive pursuit in any case, Michael Kreyling suggests, a hunt without a clear trophy. The metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog—one knowing many things, the other one, big thing—is a playful-serious shorthand for the practice of writing history. Through the work of two pace-setting modern historians, Tony Judt and Michael O’Brien, Kreyling suggests that writing intellectual history means seeking an all-enveloping story but only from within the subtleties that belong to individuals in the past. History thus grows from the friction arising from different ways to combine these approaches. In the end, we are all hedgehogs and we are all foxes.

Taken together, this volume’s two parts show how pursuing the South’s intellectual history makes all of us insiders and outsiders, at one time or another if not all at once. It is hardly place of birth that inclines one toward knowing the South, as many immigrants comfortable in the South have found out—and as many born southerners have discovered in the relief of leaving their native land. Identity and belonging pose questions never quite answered. New thought means circling back in one way or another to what has come before.

NOTES

1. Richard Beale Davis, foreword to Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, 1790–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964).

2. The once-obscure intellectual history of the South now easily generates panels at the annual meetings of the Southern Historical Association and in professional associations whose scope goes beyond the South. In 2004, Michael O’Brien’s study of intellectual life and the antebellum South won the Bancroft Prize and much other recognition. The Journal of Southern History, as well as the larger southern state journals such as the Georgia Historical Quarterly, regularly publishes new research in the history of thought in and about the South. The Southern Intellectual History Colloquium’s annual meetings have taken place nationally and internationally and mark their thirty-third robust year in 2021. Civil War history and the history of African American thought have recently seen new volumes of intellectual history relevant to the southern past. See Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, eds., The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage, eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

3. See Thomas Bender, Forum: The Present and Future of American Intellectual History; Introduction, Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 1 (April 2012): 149–56. The two recent volumes are Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O’Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, eds., The Worlds of American Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Raymond Haberski Jr. and Andrew Hartman, eds., American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018). As part of this recent, generous moment in intellectual history, see Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); and Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

4. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), quote on xvii.

5. David Hollinger, Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals, in Higham and Conkin, New Directions, 48. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936). Thomas Bender, a participant in the Wingspread conference, much later recalled participants’ urgent desire to avoid a march-of-ideas approach, agreeing, wrote Bender, that they had to either find a way out of the ‘American-mind’ model or prepare the field for death. Bender, Forum, 150.

6. Sarah E. Igo, Toward a Free-Range Intellectual History, in Isaac et al., Worlds, 324–42.

7. Two early works of political history that gave attention to political ideas are Frank Owsley, State Rights in the Confederacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925); and Jesse Carpenter, The South as a Conscious Minority (New York: New York University Press, 1930). John Hope Franklin’s The Militant South, 1800–1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956) was a path breaker in linking intellectual history directly to the institution of slavery. The first survey of intellectual life in the South that went beyond politics and the war in substantial ways is Clement Eaton, The Mind of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964). Politics still matter, of course, but the ways in which historians of ideas have written about southern political thought have changed. See, e.g., Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Joseph Crespino, Atticus Finch: The Biography; Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

8. The one major work of journalist, philosopher, and tale spinner Wilbur J. Cash, published in 1941, was for many years a kind of bridge between literary scholars and the historians who ventured into the history of southern intellectual life in the 1950s and ’60s. Cash’s volume was secondary source and primary source rolled into one. He was compelling not only for how he captured a dreamy-violent, self-obsessed South but also because his tortured identity as a southern white man recapitulated his sense of a Romantic southern mind. Race is nearly invisible in Cash and slavery even more so. See W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941).

Authors of studies published before the 1980s who set the modern tone for southern literature in a historical setting include Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 1607–1900 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954); Lewis P. Simpson, The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975); and Louis D. Rubin Jr., William Elliott Shoots a Bear: Essays in the Southern Literary Imagination (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975). The work of Michael O’Brien has been unparalleled among more recent scholars of the intellectual South for critically bringing together historical and literary studies. For samplers, see his two volumes of collected essays: Michael O’Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); and Michael O’Brien, Placing the South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). For an overview of this trajectory, see Sarah E. Gardner and David Moltke-Hansen, The Transformation of Southern Intellectual History, in Reinterpreting Southern Histories: Essays in Historiography, ed. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020): 534–62.

9. See, e.g., James L. Peacock, Grounded Globalism: How the South Embraces the World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).

10. James L. Peacock, Harry L. Watson, and Carrie W. Matthews, eds., The American South in a Global World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, eds., Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: American Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

11. See esp. Jon Smith, Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013); and Scott Romine, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). Additional recent scholarly works in southern intellectual history may be found throughout the essays in Insiders, Outsiders.

PART ONE

IDEAS IN THE SOUTH

THE INSIDER’S OUTSIDER

Edgar Allan Poe and the Art of Self-Destruction

STEPHEN BERRY

He was altogether a strange and a fearful being, and a true history of his life would be more startling than any of the grotesque romances which he was so fond of inventing.

—CHARLES FREDERICK BRIGGS (1849)

THE MOST famous poem in American history has its origins in an actual, individual bird. Following the runaway popularity of The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens settled into work on Barnaby Rudge, a book that would prove a troubled labor and a mixed success. With part of the manuscript written, Dickens began publishing Rudge in serial installments in his own short-lived magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock. He quickly became bogged down, however, not least because his wife was in the midst of a difficult pregnancy. Sitting at his desk for hours and staring with an appearance of extraordinary interest at the same page of a book, Dickens occasionally got restless and rambled down to his stable where he kept a pet raven named Grip. The bird had a propensity for biting children on the ankles and burying Dickens’s pocket change in the yard, but Dickens wrote off such behaviors as mere play; mostly he found the bird’s movements and mimicry hypnotizing. Grip’s accomplishments [have] been daily ripening and enlarging for the last twelve months to the increasing mirth and delight of all of us, Dickens said to a friend.¹

For whatever reason, Grip’s bouncing about seems to have leavened Dickens’s spirit and inspired him with the idea to immortalize Grip in prose. Writing his illustrator, George Cattermole, in late January 1841, Dickens asked: "I want to know whether you feel ravens in general, and would fancy Barnaby’s raven in particular. Barnaby being an idiot, my notion is to have him always in company with a pet raven who is immeasurably more knowing than himself. To this end, I have been studying my bird, and think I could make a very queer character of him. With that Dickens was off and running. By February he could proudly proclaim: I have