Quote of the Day (Ellen Glasgow, on Meanness, ‘A Fatal Inheritance’)

“And though excellence may be seldom or never handed down in the blood, meanness, as his mother had warned him, is a fatal inheritance.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and feminist Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), In This Our Life (1941)

Roughly 30 years ago, while visiting Richmond, I toured Hollywood Cemetery, a kind of Valhalla for Virginia’s most illustrious. It’s not just two American Presidents who are buried here (James Monroe and John Tyler), but also many of the most prominent figures in the Confederate government and military: Davis, Pickett, Maury, Anderson, Mason, McGuire, and Fitzhugh Lee.

Nearby one of the most famous of these, General “Jeb” Stuart, is Ellen Glasgow—born eight years after the surrender at Appomattox, but, unlike so many of her generation, detached from and even skeptical of the Lost Cause mythology that distorted Southern life for a century.

While others wrote of moonlight and magnolias, she described an uneasy regional transition from an agrarian to industrial economy—and suffragettes’ refusal to accept a patriarchal society.

When adapted for the screen in 1942 by John Huston as a Bette Davis-Olivia de Havilland vehicle, In This Our Life was unusual at the time for its frank treatment of racism. The film, like the novel, showed how desperately clinging to anachronistic and even false codes of conduct could spiral into what James Baldwin called “the white descent from dignity.”

Though feminist literary scholars have somewhat revived interest in Glasgow, she has never fully recovered the popularity she experienced while alive.

But we should certainly pay renewed attention to her warning about meanness. Events are proving all too well that it can be carried in the DNA of a nation as much as in a family. The only cures for this fever are charity and a Glasgow-like independence of intellect and spirit.