American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South

The War between the Tates (Allen Tate)

The War between the Tates h In 1949, when he turned fifty, Allen Tate published an essay called “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe.” In that essay, Tate confessed that as a boy of fourteen he had stared for hours at “the well-known, desperate, and asymmetrical photograph” of Edgar Allan Poe, which he hoped that he “should some day resemble.” This wish, as portraits of Tate attest, was granted. But Tate’s main point in the essay was not to claim some literal kinship lost in the sands of genealogical time somewhere between the vowel shift from “Allan” to “Allen.” He argued, instead, that Poe, perennial butt of jests and put-downs (like T. S. Eliot’s suggestion that Poe might read better in French translation), deserved a place at the table. “For Americans, perhaps for most modern men, he is with us like a dejected cousin: we may ‘place’ him but we may not exclude him from our board.” This seems to me roughly our present relationship to Allen Tate. Tate is always and everywhere “placed” as a reactionary southern critic and minor poet who played ‹rst ‹ddle (Tate actually played the ‹ddle) in a band of poet-critics called the Fugitives during the twenties, the Agrarians during the thirties, and, augmented with fellow travelers from England and California, the “New Critics” thereafter. These are the straw men of current academic literary criticism, the dejected cousins drinking bourbon in the corner, placed but no longer read. While there is some truth to the jibes directed their way (just as the strictures against Poe are obvious to bright fourth-graders), the Fugitive-Agrarian–New Critic contingent was far more complex and interesting than it is now given credit for. Allen Tate’s achievement is both representa147 tive of their work at its best and ripe, like a distant cousin, for rediscovery . His distinctive poems, ‹ve or six of which seem permanent achievements; his impressive historical novel, The Fathers; his remarkable literary criticism, including some of the best essays ever written on Emily Dickinson and Edgar Poe—these won’t go away. Lately, there has been a steady trickle of publications related to Tate and his associates in what is sometimes called the Southern Literary Renaissance. (Tate, who admired only Poe and the poet Henry Timrod among earlier southern writers, suggested Naissance was more appropriate.) Tate’s Essays of Four Decades are back in print. Selected letters of his poet-critic friends Robert Penn Warren and Yvor Winters, in which Tate looms large as both correspondent and subject, are appearing in stages. And Thomas A. Underwood has published volume 1 of a projected two-volume biography of Tate. The ‹rst volume brings Tate to 1938, by which time, according to Underwood’s therapeutic perspective , Tate had published The Fathers and “had resolved many of his feelings of regional and personal orphanhood.” Though Underwood doesn’t say so, Tate, who died in 1979, had also published by 1938 most of the poetry and many of the strongest essays on which his reputation now rests. In volume 2, we can expect detailed accounts of Tate’s notorious womanizing— “most of Tate’s philandering occurred after 1938,” says Underwood . Tate’s conversion to Catholicism will, presumably, occupy a lot of space, along with the unfortunate injection of Jacques Maritain’s neo-Thomism into his criticism. Otherwise, apart from Tate’s many academic positions and honors, and his retreat from some of his most reactionary positions, it’s not clear what one might look forward to in Underwood’s second volume. Based on the ‹rst volume, however, Tate is lucky in his biographer . Underwood’s book is rigorously researched and sturdily written. While sympathetic to Tate and admiring of his achievements , Underwood has appropriate qualms about Tate’s devotion to so-called southern ideals. He explores in detail and un›inchingly Tate’s commitment until the 1950s to white supremacy (“the negro race is an inferior race,” Tate wrote in a notorious letter to Lincoln Kirstein in 1933); his distaste for socializing with black writers; his opposition to the “Liberal attack” on Christian values 148 in the Scopes trial; his ›irtation with fascism as a viable blueprint for the South (“we could side with a Fascist party”). The book is a defense of Tate’s fundamental seriousness, and of the historical importance of his stances and stands. A Freudian leitmotif is in place throughout, ‹rst sounded in the subtitle, “Orphan of the South.” Tate was not...