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The Mississippi Delta and the World: The Memoirs of David L. Cohn
No one knew the Mississippi Delta more intimately or told its story more eloquently than did David L. Cohn (1894-1960). Between 1935 and 1960 he produced ten books including his best known, God Shakes Creation, later expanded into Where I Was Born and Raised -- and scores of articles and essays, including more than sixty such pieces in the Atlantic Monthly alone. One of his greatest frustrations, however, was not finding time to organize and prepare for publication the memoir he began in 1953.
James C. Cobb discovered Cohn's memoir in 1985 in the David L. Cohn Collection at the University of Mississippi. Struck by its richness and convinced that it should be published, he undertook the task of arranging and editing the material. What Cobb has brought forth is an immensely valuableand entertaining work of both literary and historical significance that plots one extraordinary man's course through the changes of the twentieth century.
Cohn was in essence a "cosmopolitan provincial," an observer who realized that the problems and circumstances of the Delta were at the same time unique and universal. A native of Greenville, he was educated at the University of Virginia and Yale University Law School. A brief but highly successful career in business allowed him to pursue his dream of being a writer. He traveled widely but remained faithful to his Delta roots, counting among his close friends both William Alexander Percy and Hodding Carter. He was intensely interested in politics and served as speechwriter for Democratic party leaders, including Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, and Lyndon Johnson.
Lamenting the trend toward overspecialization, Cohn did not shrink from expressing his views on a wide array of race and religion, free trade and internationalism, technology and culture, and materialism and matrimony, among others. Southern to the marrow and an almost zealously patriotic American, he was also a Jew, and he managed a harmonious integration of all three identities rather than the separation or suppression of any one.
In his Introduction, Cohn describes his memoir as "primarily an evocation of persons and places... the physical and spiritual terrain of my youth," a period that takes him from birth through approximately 1934. Cobb picks up the thread in a concluding essay, surveying Cohn's later life and analyzing his literary career in light of his southern origins, racial views, ethnic ties, and internationalist perspective. Perhaps better than any other single work by Cohn, The Mississippi Delta and the World reveals that he was a truly learned commentator on the human condition, one who benefited enormously both from his travels and from his determination to maintain his ties to the place where he was "born and raised."
James C. Cobb discovered Cohn's memoir in 1985 in the David L. Cohn Collection at the University of Mississippi. Struck by its richness and convinced that it should be published, he undertook the task of arranging and editing the material. What Cobb has brought forth is an immensely valuableand entertaining work of both literary and historical significance that plots one extraordinary man's course through the changes of the twentieth century.
Cohn was in essence a "cosmopolitan provincial," an observer who realized that the problems and circumstances of the Delta were at the same time unique and universal. A native of Greenville, he was educated at the University of Virginia and Yale University Law School. A brief but highly successful career in business allowed him to pursue his dream of being a writer. He traveled widely but remained faithful to his Delta roots, counting among his close friends both William Alexander Percy and Hodding Carter. He was intensely interested in politics and served as speechwriter for Democratic party leaders, including Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, and Lyndon Johnson.
Lamenting the trend toward overspecialization, Cohn did not shrink from expressing his views on a wide array of race and religion, free trade and internationalism, technology and culture, and materialism and matrimony, among others. Southern to the marrow and an almost zealously patriotic American, he was also a Jew, and he managed a harmonious integration of all three identities rather than the separation or suppression of any one.
In his Introduction, Cohn describes his memoir as "primarily an evocation of persons and places... the physical and spiritual terrain of my youth," a period that takes him from birth through approximately 1934. Cobb picks up the thread in a concluding essay, surveying Cohn's later life and analyzing his literary career in light of his southern origins, racial views, ethnic ties, and internationalist perspective. Perhaps better than any other single work by Cohn, The Mississippi Delta and the World reveals that he was a truly learned commentator on the human condition, one who benefited enormously both from his travels and from his determination to maintain his ties to the place where he was "born and raised."
312 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1995
About the author
James C. Cobb
31 books18 followersJames C. Cobb is Spalding distinguished professor of history emeritus at the University of Georgia.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 7, 2022
Greenville, and Mississippi, has produced an inordinate number of quality writers, and David Cohn is just another neglected writer from a deep bench. These memoirs are cut from the same cloth as Will Percy's Lanterns on the Levee. Both memoirs have a similar style and feel and both are filled with timeless observations. To offer a few representative passages:
On lawyers: "I had planned [after attending law school at the Univ. of Virginia] to be a county-seat practitioner in Greenville, yet following the plan would have been ruinous to the serenity that I sought. In my youthful, perhaps over-romantic imagination, I had pictured the lawyer as a fierce individualist, ideally as the learned rebel. I soon saw, however, that most lawyer were neither learned nor rebels but were unlettered tame technicians. It became apparent even during my college days that lawyers were increasingly becoming fetch-and-carry boys of business. 'This is what we want to do,' said the corporate executive to the lawyer. 'You find a way to do it.' . . . They would have regarded you as naive to the point of feeblemindedness had you suggested that traditionally the lawyer was an 'officer of the court,' one whose profession was charged with a public responsibility. . . I felt that it was one thing to be the servant of a king, a cause, or even of one's vices, but it is another thing to be the servant of a shadowy entity that is a person only by a fiction of the law."
On education and discipline: "They were unaware that if we were kept from doing whatever popped into our (to us dear little) heads, the effects of restraint would ultimately prove disastrous. Nor did they believe that the fostering in us of anarchic individualism prepared us for living in an ordered society. . . We had not yet become so prosperous that our girls had to work outside the home to keep prosperity inside the home, while our superintendent of education, Mr. E.E. Bass, clung to the quaint belief that education was a training for the mind and spirit rather than the marketplace."
On the old-fashioned Delta breakfasts: "In the days before American--including Deltans--had begun to take their food on the run like escaping convicts; before the omnipresence of tin cans, ready-to-serve frozen messes in mass-produced by distant, anonymous corporations, and drugstores where men east standing up like horses . . . ; when eggs were a dime a dozen and the Diligent Housewife had not yet become the Domestic Engineer--in that dear, dead time Deltans sat contentedly down to their old-fashioned breakfasts…The observer of American life is saddened by a melancholy phenomenon of our national existence. As the nation has expanded in powers and riches to stupendous power and incomparable wealth, so have the living dimensions of its citizens shrunk.”
On lawyers: "I had planned [after attending law school at the Univ. of Virginia] to be a county-seat practitioner in Greenville, yet following the plan would have been ruinous to the serenity that I sought. In my youthful, perhaps over-romantic imagination, I had pictured the lawyer as a fierce individualist, ideally as the learned rebel. I soon saw, however, that most lawyer were neither learned nor rebels but were unlettered tame technicians. It became apparent even during my college days that lawyers were increasingly becoming fetch-and-carry boys of business. 'This is what we want to do,' said the corporate executive to the lawyer. 'You find a way to do it.' . . . They would have regarded you as naive to the point of feeblemindedness had you suggested that traditionally the lawyer was an 'officer of the court,' one whose profession was charged with a public responsibility. . . I felt that it was one thing to be the servant of a king, a cause, or even of one's vices, but it is another thing to be the servant of a shadowy entity that is a person only by a fiction of the law."
On education and discipline: "They were unaware that if we were kept from doing whatever popped into our (to us dear little) heads, the effects of restraint would ultimately prove disastrous. Nor did they believe that the fostering in us of anarchic individualism prepared us for living in an ordered society. . . We had not yet become so prosperous that our girls had to work outside the home to keep prosperity inside the home, while our superintendent of education, Mr. E.E. Bass, clung to the quaint belief that education was a training for the mind and spirit rather than the marketplace."
On the old-fashioned Delta breakfasts: "In the days before American--including Deltans--had begun to take their food on the run like escaping convicts; before the omnipresence of tin cans, ready-to-serve frozen messes in mass-produced by distant, anonymous corporations, and drugstores where men east standing up like horses . . . ; when eggs were a dime a dozen and the Diligent Housewife had not yet become the Domestic Engineer--in that dear, dead time Deltans sat contentedly down to their old-fashioned breakfasts…The observer of American life is saddened by a melancholy phenomenon of our national existence. As the nation has expanded in powers and riches to stupendous power and incomparable wealth, so have the living dimensions of its citizens shrunk.”
July 28, 2017
David Cohn wrote essays and articles for The Atlantic Monthly and wrote ten books of his own, the most famous being, God Shakes Creation. He wrote about many things but his favorite subject was the Mississippi Delta where he was born and raised. It was David Cohn who first wrote the phrase "The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg", although it has been attributed to many other writers, especially William Faulkner. He began his memoir in 1953 but was never able to finish it and James C. Cobb found the material in the Archives at the University of Mississippi and compiled it to make this wonderful book.
Almost two generations separate Mr. Cohn and I but things move slowly in the Delta. While he was raised in Greenville, Ms in the middle of the Delta and I in Memphis on its rim, many of the scenes he relates were still familiar to me. Cotton was the main crop and gins dotted the landscape though the cotton was brought by trucks and not by mule drawn wagons. In Memphis, the bales still lined Front Street around the brokers' buildings waiting to be graded and priced. Barges, not steamboats took it up river to the Ohio or downriver to New Orleans and on to the world's ports. For a few months, all was lively with carnival, parades, and parties and then everyone slowly settled back into the cycle of planting and waiting on the next crop and worrying over how good or bad it would be.
It is obvious in every word that Mr. Cohn loved his land, its people and the way of life. Some of it is idealized in ways none of us today would accept. The race relations of his time and of my own were only good on the surface and sometimes had an undercurrent of violence. People were kind, yes, but could also be terribly cruel. It was, after all, a place where a third of the people benefitted from the labor of the rest. Yet it was and still is, a place of great beauty, lovely manners and kindness mostly practiced. It continues to get better and will one day live up to the beauty of its landscape as described so lovingly by David Cohn.
Almost two generations separate Mr. Cohn and I but things move slowly in the Delta. While he was raised in Greenville, Ms in the middle of the Delta and I in Memphis on its rim, many of the scenes he relates were still familiar to me. Cotton was the main crop and gins dotted the landscape though the cotton was brought by trucks and not by mule drawn wagons. In Memphis, the bales still lined Front Street around the brokers' buildings waiting to be graded and priced. Barges, not steamboats took it up river to the Ohio or downriver to New Orleans and on to the world's ports. For a few months, all was lively with carnival, parades, and parties and then everyone slowly settled back into the cycle of planting and waiting on the next crop and worrying over how good or bad it would be.
It is obvious in every word that Mr. Cohn loved his land, its people and the way of life. Some of it is idealized in ways none of us today would accept. The race relations of his time and of my own were only good on the surface and sometimes had an undercurrent of violence. People were kind, yes, but could also be terribly cruel. It was, after all, a place where a third of the people benefitted from the labor of the rest. Yet it was and still is, a place of great beauty, lovely manners and kindness mostly practiced. It continues to get better and will one day live up to the beauty of its landscape as described so lovingly by David Cohn.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews