The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South by Richard Gray, and: The Achievement of William Styron ed. by Robert K. Morris and Irving Malin (review)

Studies in American Fiction241 Gray, Richard. The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977. 377 pp. Cloth: $16.00. Morris, Robert K. and Irving Malin, eds. TheAchievement of William Styron. Athens: The Univ. of Georgia Press, 1975. 280 pp. Cloth: $12.00. The Literature of Memory is quite simply a major book. It covers a vast area, traversed again and again by historians and literary critics, in a new and exciting way. Richard Gray indicates in his preface an urgency about establishing a "relationship between literature, history, and historiography" (p. x); he manages this rather ambitious undertaking as well as a close and exacting look at a variety of works from John Crowe Ransom's poem "Antique Harvesters" through WiUiam Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. Gray seems able to accommodate himself to the demands of a given situation: he is quite as adept at doing a New Critical examination of. a poem or a passage from a novel (a la Ransom, Tate, or Warren) as he is at confronting the "idea of history" underlining a literary text. Gray offers a kind of history of the South and of Southern letters, with an intense, serious examination of the literature from the Agrarians and Faulkner on down through Flannery O'Connor and William Styron, and with backward glances at the 19th century. The Agrarians and Faulkner each receive separate chapters. Elizabeth Madox Roberts shares a chapter with Erskine Caldwell and Thomas Wolfe. Three women writers, who have in common a sense of "the old order," divide another chapter: Caroline Gordon, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter. The final chapter is mainly given over to Carson McCuUers, Flannery O'Connor, and William Styron. Other writers, like EUen Glasgow, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams, receive brief intermittent treatment. The Literature of Memory is artfuUy put together. The motifs of the "good farmer" and "fine planter" thread their way through Gray's narrative and offer a kind of scaffolding for his study. One is impressed by the tight controls and sure sense of design. Among the many high points of the book are Gray's close reading of "Antique Harvesters" (quite worthy of Ransom himself), his discussion of Caldwell's profound debt to the Southwestern humorists, his lengthy and loving examination of Absalom, Absalom! ("Faulkner's boldest excursion into the plantation mode and one of his seminal discussions of what it means to be a Southerner" [p. 253]), and his defense of The Confessions ofNat Turner. The last twenty-one pages of The Literature of Memory are given over to Styron and they are among the most brilliant and compelling in the book. Gray's treatment offers a fine antidote to such ill-tempered dismissals ofStyron's novel as the essays in John Henrik Clarke's edition of William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond or the various ripostes offered by the Marxist historian, Herbert Aptheker. I cannot resist quoting Gray's final two elegantly turned sentences: Without necessarily endorsing the aims of the Confessions, though, or sharing in the impulses that led Styron to write it, Faulkner and his contemporaries would, I believe, have understood the novel; they would have seen how it has grown out of their own work and, in growing, taken on a separate, distinct life of its own. The Confessions uses its given inheritance and then transcends it so as to present us with a broadly inclusive, yet cross-grained and self-evidently personal portrait of all our lives in history; and that, as Styron's 242Reviews predecessors would probably have recognized, is really the best that can be said about any Southern book (p. 305). What a splendid way to endl There is precious little to find fault with in The Literature ofMemory. Gray seriously underrates Tennessee WiUiams and Truman Capote. I think, for example, that In Cold Bhod (which the author handles in less than a paragraph) is better than the following sentence makes it out to be: "History may have become Capote's subject here, perhaps, but it is history recorded as a series of arbitrary occasions, lacking the determining force of myth; and as...