Reconstructing Southern Literature

Inventing Southern Literature By Michael Kreyling. University Press of Mississippi, 1998

Robert Penn Warren: A Biography By Joseph Blotner. Random House, 1997

Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism By Mark Royden Winchell. University Press of Virginia, 1996

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence Edited by James A. Grimshaw, Jr. University of Missouri Press, 1998

The Literature of the American South Edited by William L. Andrews, Minrose C. Gwin, Trudier Harris, and Fred Hobson. Norton, 1998

1

When I was a senior at Vanderbilt University in 1979, I fi nally got around to taking Professor Thomas Daniel Young's course on Southern literature. Young was near retirement and may have been past his prime, but his course, taught to generations of students, was legendary, and even undergrads knew that the professor was one of the leading scholars in the field. It was Young more than anybody else who kept alive at Vanderbilt the memory of the miraculous moment, during the 1920s and 1930s, when John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and others had converged on our campus to revolutionize, in quick succession, modern poetry (by publishing The Fugitive magazine), American social thought (by writing I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition [1930]), and literary study (Understanding Poetry [1938] and many other founding documents of New Criticism). All of these heroes were long gone, but with Dr. Young around it was hard to forget them. Here was a man who had drunk toddies with William Faulkner and traded stories with "Red" Warren, a living link with the age of giants; your experience at Vanderbilt was incomplete until you took his course.

It remains vivid in my mind because of one moment, the morning Dr. Young was late to class. There were maybe 40 of us waiting; we gradually grew restless and, after 10 minutes or so, had begun gathering our books to leave when someone glanced out the window and spotted our professor, walking slowly across the quad. We sat down again and waited. Dr. Young entered, apologized for his lateness, and explained that he had just come from the Vanderbilt Hospital, where his friend Tate had died that morning. We'd been studying Tate just a week or so before, but hadn't covered the poem Dr. Young now read aloud, the late work "Farewell Rehearsed" (1977), wherein the aged poet bids an imagined good-bye to his young wife and children. Our professor let silence hang for a minute, then dismissed the class. I walked out with my head spinning, touched emotionally but also startled to have found my world coinciding, briefly, with the one represented in our textbook, The Literature of the South (1952), edited in part by Dr. Young himself.

This seemed notable because that world usually seemed so remote from my own. The textbook itself was nearly 30 years old, originally a product of the pre-Brown-decision South, and though it had been revised several times, it still ended with a period called "the Southern Renascence," whose dates were noted as "1918 to the present." That was getting to be a long stretch by the late 1970s, and even I knew that the "renascence" was generally thought to have ended and that we now inhabited a different, and presumably diminished, literary moment. And of course Southern literature as represented in our text bore an imperfect resemblance to the South I lived in: Southern literature, for example, apparently included only two African Americans, Booker T. Washington and Richard Wright. I don't say that any of this bothered me at the time; young readers quickly learn how to ignore the disjunctions between books and experience. But it was startling nonetheless that the two realms were now intersecting. On the page Tate seemed as remote as anybody else we were studying, but his death had given me, personally, a free morning in February 1979. I spent it reading his poetry, not because I...