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8 Speaking for the South In 1930, Pinckney’s career again intersected with that of Donald Davidson when she reluctantly agreed to make her first foray into expository writing. Howard Mumford Jones, her friend from Chapel Hill, invited them both to participate in a symposium on the South. With a working title of “Civilization Below the Potomac,” William T. Couch of the University of North Carolina Press envisioned a volume roughly constructed along the lines of Harold Stearns’s Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans (1927) in which representatives of the younger generation of artists, intellectuals, and activists would comment on a wide range of subjects from politics to religion. He wanted a public expression of the modern temper as manifest in the South (the states of the old Confederacy) since World War I.1 Pinckney immediately regretted her decision. She found she was the only woman among fourteen participants, and she bristled at her assigned topic, “the southern social scene,” an unchallenging task that evoked images of brides’ luncheons and bridge clubs. Subverting Jones’s intent by taking the social science approach rather than the teacakes and white gloves definition, Pinckney hurled herself into a flurry of extensive research on southern society. She considered her essay a continuation of her quest for truth about the South that engaged her as a poet. Of course, she consulted Davidson as “one of the few people I know in the South from whom I can expect a detached point of view.” He was dragging his heels on his own chapter on trends in southern literature. His professional career was not going very well either, and he worried that he was much too “skeptical ” and “pessimistic” about the direction of the South and southern writers for the optimistic book Jones imagined. He was frankly “scared” by the responsibility of making definitive statements about the controversial and tendentious issue of southern culture.2 Consumed with the “inexhaustible topic of the South,” Pinckney fired off a series of questions about southern society to Davidson that revealed her own uncertainty about the region’s inherent distinctiveness. She speculated with a bold iconoclasm that “much of what we think of as Southern,” such as the “clannishness ” of family groups or the cultivation of manners and personal relationships, were merely throwbacks to the nineteenth century, “habits left over from a leisurely , horse drawn society.” She even ventured that “southern” might merely be a synonym for “unprogressiveness.” If so, she extrapolated, the days of southern distinctiveness were doomed by the modern tide of development and industry poised to engulf the region. Over the years, she had watched the regional charm of New England destroyed and wondered if the South was next.3 For all their mutual admiration, Pinckney and Davidson actually talked past each other when speaking of the South. Pinckney, a well-traveled cosmopolite, saw the South as a multifaceted jewel with some conspicuous flaws. Davidson was turning inward, and in his search for an intellectual home began to imagine a South of an organic, almost mystical, unity, a prelapsarian paradise corrupted by industrialism. Technology had robbed Tennessee’s tall men of their power.4 In contrast to Pinckney, who developed a skeptical, probing modern sensibility as she matured and traveled, Davidson had submerged his own ambivalence about the South in a romantic haze. He had begun constructing his concept of southern nationalism by imagining southerners as a distinct ethnic group impervious to change. “The South is pretty much the same everywhere, in spite of local diversities. It is just more so, here; and less so, there,” he wrote Pinckney.5 Lying beneath the talk of a different civilization, however, was his yearning shared by many southern traditionalists for a moral community bound by a common faith. Thinking he was perpetuating the southern tradition, Davidson had actually begun generating a new mythology for the modern age, since so much of the past had already faded away. Pinckney saw something different when she surveyed the southern past and present. Unafraid to ask difficult questions about the aristocratic tradition, she was among the first to acknowledge that the quality of life that southerners enjoyed, their famous “hospitality,” was made possible by large corps of black domestic help. Despite their leisure, wealthy southerners displayed a stunning lack of interest in philosophical and ethical speculation. Why was it, she asked Davidson, that “the South’s contributions to human knowledge appear so small,” and “why [do...

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