Southern Writers
THE Southern Literary Renaissance, although wrongly named—since Dixie had never before been troubled with literature, except for the effects of Uncle Tom's Cabin—was a remarkably impres- sive movement which has left a lasting mark not only on contemporary American literature but on writing, especially critical writing, in English generally. The headquarters of the movement was Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, where, in the early Twenties, a poetry magazine called The Fugitive was published. The famous claim of Allen Tate—`so far as I know there was never so much talent, knowledge and character accidentally brought together in one American place in our time'—can readily be accepted. The group which became known as 'the Fugitives' in- cluded, as well as Tate himself, two masters, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren, the respected critic Cleanth Brooks and a numerous and productive body of followers. The group was strongly and variously influenced by Mr. Eliot, and in the Depression years that influence took a poli- tico-economic form; the 'fugitives' of the early Twenties became the 'agrarians' of 1930. The `agrarian' attitude of mind was, in the strict sense, reactionary—Tate indeed was proud to call him- self a reactionary—and agrarian writing con- tained strong elements of Luddism, Confederate nostalgia, romantic authoritarianism and similar whims. Some of the agrarians—notably Andrew Lytle, who wrote a book to glorify the Ku Klux Klan—could fairly be described as fascistoid, but the leaders of the movement were no more fascist than Yeats or Mr. Eliot himself. When fascism did come to the South, it came not in any pastoral form, but in the plebeian and progressive person of Huey Long, and it was a 'fugitive,' Robert Penn Warren, who was to write the story of Long in All the King's Men, without benefit of romantic or other illusions. The fugitives have long since been,disbanded; the agrarian programme is rightly forgotten. But the individual influence of Warren and Ransom, at least, is probably greater now than it was in the days of the manifestoes.
Mr. Bradbury's book is a work of serious scholarship in the sense that it has a twenty-page bibliography and is not open to the charge of being well written. Its tone is that of the class- room : 'Tate's fondness for fatuity and for nega- tiVe involution is amply demonstrated in this passage. In eschewing the direct epithet, he achieves a somewhat specious complexity. At the same time, he is often accomplishing an economic elision of concepts and percepts.' The reader whose curiosity is not too soon blunted by this kind of comment will find, scattered through the pages of The Fugitives, a considerable amount of informa- tion, not easily available elsewhere. Mr. Bradbury's criticisms, although always heavily worded and too often aimed at the pass pupils, are not lacking in intelligence. But he has failed to convert into a book, what really remains a series of lectures. `Ransom as Poet,' Tate as Critic,' and so on. For such a book to have any core of unity, it would have been necessary for the writer to ask some questions about the South, since the one common and distinguishing quality of the group is its conscious `Southernness.' As the common and distinguishing quality of the South is its propen- sity for the organised humiliation of Negroes, it would have been necessary to say something about that. The pieties of a good Southern writer are charged, to an exceptional degree, with guilt or cruelty or both. And Confederate loyalty has a more strictly contemporary relevance than has, say, Mr. Eliot's monarchism. Mr. Bradbury avoids any general discussion of this kind. 'Tate; he tells us, 'is never concerned with the Negro as man.' How, then, is Tate concerned with the Negro? As animal? As thing? DONAT O'DONNELL.
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