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VII The Loneliness Artist Robert Penn Warren ne morning a few years ago Charles East—the southern editor, journalist, and storyteller, an old friend and near neighbor in the Southdowns section of Baton Rouge—picked me up at my door, and we set forth on a selective journey into the literary past of Louisiana's capital city. Our specific purpose was to see the three houses Robert Penn Warren lived in while he was associated with Louisiana State University in the 19308 and early 19405. Accompanied by his first wife, Emma Brescia (always called by a nickname, Cinina), Warren came to LSU in 1934 from Vanderbilt, where he had taught for three years with the title "acting assistant professor of English." Now twenty-nine years old, he had behind him a varied experience. While at Vanderbilt as a precocious undergraduate in the early 19208, he had been a member of the Fugitive group. Later he had participated in the activities of the Agrarian group, including the publication of the 1930 manifesto /'// Take My Stand, although by the actual time of this event he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, where he received the B.Litt. degree in the same year. Earlier Warren had been at the University of California at Berkeley (M.A., 1927) and after that at Yale University as an advanced graduate student. All of this time he was serving a dedicated apprenticeship to writing. By the time he arrived in Baton Rouge he had, over a span of twelve years, published poems, critical essays and reviews, and a substantial short fiction, "Prime Leaf," from which his first novel, Night Rider, developed. Warren had also published his first book, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), a biographical study that announced his lifelong preoccupation with the tension between ideality and reality in American history. O 133 The Loneliness Artist During his stay at LSU, Warren solidified the foundation he had laid for his lengthy career as a man of letters. He not only became an editor of the Southern Review (with Charles Pipkin and Cleanth Brooks) but in the same year the magazine was established (1935) published Thirty-Six Poems, his initial volume of poetry. The next four years saw the publication of Warren's first textbook, An Approach to Literature (with Brooks and John T. Purser); his edited gathering of fiction, Southern Harvest: Short Stories by Southern Writers ; the first of the many editions of his classic collaboration with Brooks, Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students; and Night Rider. By 1942, with another volume of poems in print and his second novel nearing completion, Warren was being generally recognized as a prominent addition to the remarkable list of writers who had emerged in the South in the twenties and thirties. His success seemed to confirm the wisdom of his decision in 1932 to return to the South and stay. But Warren now suddenly reversed his decision and departed for the University of Minnesota. His intention was to leave the South for good. He reconfirmed his design when, after six years at the University of Minnesota, he became a member of the faculty at a major New England bastion, Yale University. Yet, although after 1942 he was not to be in the South again save as a visitor , and then for no extended stays, Warren continued to be preoccupied with the South, past and present. Until Charles East and I made our little journey, I had never quite appreciated the complex irony of this fact. It was a fine day with a blue sky. There was a hint of autumn in the air, the welcome intimation in a country where summer heat lingers on and on that we would soon have cooler days and could even begin to look for the minor miracle of fall coloring amid the perennial greenery of south Louisiana. Leaving my home, we had driven only about six blocks before we pulled up in front of the cottage Warren had rented at the time of his settlement in Baton Rouge. The oldest surviving dwelling in the Southdowns area of Baton Rouge, it is located on Hyacinth Avenue, a street known as Park Drive when Warren moved into Southdowns. Terminating at the edge of what was then the southernmost edge of Baton Rouge, Park Drive was not much more than a graveled country lane. Built in the late i88os, Warren's first home in Baton Rouge had originally been [18.117.107...

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