Robert Penn Warren: A Vision Earned (review)

Studies in American Fiction279 bianism in negative terms, or who engaged in relationships along lines of dominantsubordinate pairing, are pitied but not taken seriously. Some of the book's assumptions seem worse than naive to me. I cannot accept the repeated contention throughout the book that until the early twentieth century women were partial or fledgling human beings, only now beginning to realize their potential for full humanity. There is an extraordinary cultural chauvinism in this assertion, both in respect to the past and to other cultures than the American. I also find it regrettable that, when so many of her examples are literary women, Faderman has no interest in their artistic aspirations or achievements. She is interested only in role-models and life-styles. Nevertheless, the book is a good representation of the contemporary, moderate, lesbian-feminist point of view and worth reading for this perspective. Certainly, there have been deep and abiding friendships among women over the centuries, sometimes in conjunction with heterosexual relationships and sometimes not. These friendships have been ignored or belittled by critics and historians; this book provides a spur to scholars who might wish to correct the record. The book reminds us again that many of our assumptions about the sexes are cultural prescriptions and that many of our assumptions about sexuality itself are cultural phenomena with no necessary universal or biological resonance. Faderman's texts are chiefly English, French, and American. Among American authors briefly treated are Charles Brockden Brown, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, Djuna Barnes, Anias Nin, and writers of the current lesbian-feminist movement. The book is also a good quick source for plot summaries of many little-known lesbian novels written in this century. University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignNina Baym Walker, Marshall. Robert Penn Warren: A Vision Earned. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979. 279 pp. Cloth: $23.50. Marshall Walker's study is an energetic survey of all Robert Penn Warren's work as poet, short story writer, and novelist through 1977. It has the weaknesses and strengths of its method: it often (particularly for the poetry) lacks context, sufficient supportive explanation , and evidence for otherwise impressive assertions, and, less often, full enough development of arguments about the evaluation of particular works; but its comprehensiveness of treatment and coverage gives us the closest thing to a whole view of the creative Warren we have had so far. Let me survey the survey. A chronology lists the dates and facts of major developments in Warren's life and publishing history. The rambling introduction describes his style as "able to combine the swift pace of fiction with the intensity of poetry and to compass lyric passion, nervous tension and mythic resonance through a compounding of the formal and the colloquial" (p. 7), emphasizes his belief in art as a means ofshaping life, and designates his constant themes: the mix of fact and idea in the human enterprise , the search for "the patrimony of . . . crime and the gift of meaning" (p. 21), and "the effects of simplifying idealisms which would, catastrophically, rob the world of its 280Reviews complexity" (p. 22). Chapter 1 treads familiar ground without rehashing unnecessary detail, defining Warren's roots in regional and Agrarian senses of doubleness in the world, in their efforts to unite the self and the self and the world in political and literary theory, and in their tendency to irpnic tension or "impurity" as the method of imagining an organic life and literature. Themes and techniques thus generalized are specified in individual works in the chapters remaining. Chapter 2 covers the first three volumes of poetry and finds Warren developing his characteristic ideas, motifs, and methods: he discovers the inclusiveness of irony as principle and mode; he moves from naturalistic negativity to heavily qualified but real hope for self-knowledge, for resistance to false simplification, for the search for meaning , for the discovery of meaningful action; he develops the patterns of the return and of the accepted or rejected father; he moves from mannered imitation to ironic layering of several and opposing points of view and the use of precise imagery...