Dining with Allen Tate

For a year I dined with Allen Tate, half a century ago in the Midwest. Then I went back to England and never saw him again.

It began by chance. Not yet thirty and eager to teach, I had arrived in the United States in 1959, the palmy days of Eisenhower’s second term. I knew little or nothing about teaching, though it seemed high time to find out; and, as for America, I knew what I had read and what Hollywood chose to tell. But, though full of self-doubt, I had no doubt other people were interesting—and other places. Such is the postadolescent mood known as the Provincial Young Man, and it precludes introspection. Any question of identity could be cheerfully postponed, and I postponed it so successfully that by now it hardly looks worth asking or answering at all.

New York, where I spent a week before flying to Minneapolis, was a supremely confident place, and it took for granted you were lucky to be there. It was a mood to fall in with. The words on the Statue of Liberty summed it up: I was a huddled mass yearning to breathe free; walking through Greenwich Village one hot evening made me feel like an immigrant, though it had never occurred to me to stay. A corner speaker startled me with a question from a podium: what did I think about the local Democratic committee? When I told him I was not an American citizen he looked disappointed. “Not a citizen yet?” The word yet cut like a knife.

It was no time to feel friendless, homesick, or anything but bemused. Cross-cultural shock, a psychologist explained. In England in 1957 the bomb rubble was barely cleared and food-rationing only recently abolished, and I had never seen the New York subway in the rush hour or the endless plains of the Midwest, or eaten pancakes for breakfast with maple syrup. I was too busy discovering where I was to wonder who I was or what I was doing.

The first meeting with Allen Tate, too, was unrehearsed. I had found a room in Minneapolis in a suburb near a lake and strolled into a neighboring coffee bar to cool off. Facing me across the counter were a mature couple arguing about the big issue of the day, which was the desegregation of schools and buses in the South. The lady had liberal views and turned out to be the Bostonian wife of a senior colleague; the dapper gentleman who completed his sentences and his paragraphs was Allen Tate.

The stranger’s syntax fascinated me; so did his accent, which was anglicized without being English; so did his suit, which could have been made to measure. I have never been prejudiced against affectation. It should be enshrined in the Bill of Rights that anyone has the right to remake his personality, and such choices are highly revelatory in themselves. I wondered idly if he were what was called a Southern Gentleman; but it seemed a long way north for that, and he showed no sign of being indolent or eccentric. He was making a carefully measured case for the southern whites: those who protested against desegregation had not been stirred by rabble-rousers, as the media were suggesting, and they did not need to be. It was what poor southern whites passionately believed. Populism was reactionary.

Eavesdropping is educational, and this instance was exceptionally so. An hour later I rang at a neighbor’s front door, armed with the address of an elderly colleague, and the lady herself answered it. She exploded in laughter. “I knew you were listening,” she said, “but thought how good you were at not showing it.” The dapper southerner, she explained, was her old friend Allen Tate, and for a year the three of them, including her husband, a respected Shakespearean, were my closest friends. I would cross the street for tea on Sunday afternoons, when Allen was there too. Often we dined together.

By chance Allen was between marriages and craved companionship, being divorced from the novelist Caroline Gordon for...