In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

{ 90 } I can hardly speak for others, but for John Ransom and myself, surely, the Dayton episode dramatized more ominously than any other event easily could, how difficult it was to be a Southerner and also a writer. It was horrifying to see the cause of liberal education argued in a Tennessee court by a famous agnostic lawyer from Illinois named Clarence Darrow. It was still more horrifying—and frightening—to realize that the South was being exposed to large-scale public detraction and did not know or much care how to answer. —Donald Davidson, quoted in Thomas Daniel Young, Waking Their Neighbors Up: The Nashville Agrarians Rediscovered For the Fugitive poets of Nashville, Tennessee, the experience of white southern identity began in the wake of the “cold Civil War,”1 when the Dayton evolution trial, according to Donald Davidson, “broke in upon our literary concerns like a midnight alarm.”2 During adolescence, acknowledged Allen Tate, “we knew we were Southerners, but this was a matter of plain denomination; just as we knew that some people were Yankees. . . . This was our long moment of innocence.”3 This midnight alarm, however, somehow catalyzed in the minds of these writers an awareness of the South’s alienated status within the nation as a whole. This recognition of southern “otherness,” of a South that has been defined in opposition to American culture, resulted in a skewed self-perception, muddying both the white southerner’s sense of regional identity and his or her American identity . Such inner conflict resulted predictably in an artistic regional culture that often proved resistive, frustrated, and self-absorbed. Though these writers and critics had the benefit of education and innate talent, they were not immune to the public criticism of the South. In fact, their awareness of historical precedent only deepened the wounds inflicted in Dayton. And the attacks, particularly H. L. Mencken’s, were not limited to religious fundamentalism, but spread to southern art and letters and culture in general. For these promising young writers , who thought they would rescue southern literature and put it on the map, the Scopes Trial criticism made them realize the depth of disdain for the South. chapter 4 fugitives captured the wasteland of southern identity Fugitives Captured { 91 In an unpublished essay draft titled “The South and the Nation: A Historical Essay, No. 2,” Davidson pointed to the repercussions of this historical awakening that transformed the Fugitives, locating in the 1920s’ public denouncement of the South a pattern reflecting the “days when abolitionism first began to be militant.” According to Davidson, in the War between the States and thereafter, “the South has repeatedly served as a stalking-horse for bagging game that in the last analysis had little to do with pious rewards and humanitarian reforms. Whenever the Northeast has felt a threat against its power or has wished to gain new power, the familiar story of the Southern ‘outrage’ begins to flood the press.”4 Thus, the experience of criticism in the 1920s seemed part of a unique regional heritage; one conflict seemed to merge into the next. The bloody clash between slaveholders and humanitarians, between high tariff and low tariff advocates, now snowballed to include the cultural collision of science and religion , industry and agrarianism, urban and rural, and, of course, North and South. The contemporary drama, for the Fugitives, now played out against the backdrop of its historical ancestry or heritage. Such damnation, concluded Davidson , not only served to “discredit Southern opinion, and prevent it from making headway in the nation, but it also indoctrinate[d] the South, under present conditions , with a feeling of its own inferiority and so divides the South against itself .”5 In order to appreciate fully the way in which negative identity construction transformed this group of writers, it is necessary first to understand what their collective intentions were in their first incarnation as the Fugitives and what motivated their efforts. Unlike the community in Dayton, the Fugitives expressed, in their correspondence and in their writings, their sense of alienation and their striving for recognition. Eventually, Davidson, Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren would go their separate ways, but for the decades of their collaboration, their aesthetic and political choices, in some measure, reflected a shared sense of inferiority and their struggle to overcome it and to secure acceptance and acknowledgment in the literary world. the circle forms Led by Sidney Mttron Hirsch, a professor of English and respected aesthete, this informal...

Share