Odd Leaves From the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor.

KIBLER, JAMES EVERETT

Odd Leaves From the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor, by Henry Clay Lewis, with introduction by Edwin T. Arnold. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. xi-xlvii, 21-203 pp. $24. 95.

Henry Clay Lewis ("Madison Tensas") is a powerful writer who also had the gift of a light and urbane touch. His vision encompassed joy, humor, and extreme darkness. He provides yet another example of high Southern antebellum achievement. In reclaiming him to the canon, we also deepen and broaden the understanding of that achievement.

Lewis, of Jewish descent, was born in 1825 in Charleston. When fourteen, he moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi, and remained six years. Here at age nineteen, he published his first sketch, "Cupping on the Sternum." He attended medical school in Louisville, Kentucky; and from 1846 until his death in 1850, he was a country doctor on the Tensas River in Madison Parish, Louisiana, where he wrote his "Swamp Doctor" stories. When Lewis was twenty-five, he collected these into his only book, Odd Leaves, published in 1850, a work that can stand unashamed in the company of the best American works of the decade, so often called the era of the "American Renaissance." In that same year of publication, young Lewis died of drowning at the age of twenty-five while attending a patient. It is remarkable that Odd Leaves would have issued from the pen of one so young; and his death without doubt ended what may have been the most promising literary career in America.

Edwin Arnold's introduction makes a strong case for the volume's "definite structure" created by recurring themes and images, yielding an "organized text which has its own ambitious and unique identity, shape, and movement." Arnold convincingly places Lewis's "dark world" with Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Writes Arnold: "That we fail to associate writers like Lewis with these better known authors is at least in part due to our unwillingness to believe that such seriously conceived literature could arise from the forests and swamps on the outskirts of civilization." Of course, such was also the case for a long time with William Faulkner. This geographical elitism seems to be a now congenital problem of the American literary establishment--fortunately now in disarray in its decadence.

Arnold wisely continues that Lewis is indeed a serious writer whose Odd Leaves" remains a book to be reckoned with. We should and surely will laugh at its humor, but if we fail to recognize the human truths, tragedies, and terrors it also portrays, then we will have missed the heart of a very important work." That "dark side" delineates "the disturbed, the deformed, and the dispossessed, the physical and psychological `monsters' who inhabit the borderlands between solid earth and liquid swamp, and between the rational world and the world of madness." Hence Lewis enters the Southern continuum of the gothic and grotesque, as drawn in a line from Byrd and Simms and Poe to Faulkner, O'Connor, and Crews.

An essential aspect of Odd Leaves's achievement is its symbol and image patterning. As one example, Lewis portrays the swamp as a psychological realm depicting the deceptive nature of the world. This will remind us of the same depiction in Simms in works like Woodcraft, Eutaw, and The Forayers, all written after Simms reviewed Odd Leaves in 1850. In one of his stories, Tensas rides into the swamp on a horse named Chaos and takes the "devious path" of the swamp.

Arnold reckons that in the final analysis Odd Leaves is "writing of the first rank, thoughtfully conceived and executed," writing that "poses those basic questions of personal identity and self-determination, of body and boundary." Arnold's is a splendid, sensible introduction that provides excellent context for Lewis and sound provocative criticism of the text itself. Even more importantly, this work gives added proof for the ever-growing case that the combined achievement of the antebellum thinkers and writers of the South will take no secondary position on the Continent.

JAMES EVERETT KIBLER University of Georgia