Dionysus in Dixie: Studies in Southern Modernism

Dionysusin Dixie: Studiesin Southern Modernism Mark Royden Winchell Ashley Brown and Frances Neel Cheney, eds. The Poetry Reviewsof Allen Tate, 1924-1944. Baton Rouge: LomsianaState University Press, 1983.214 + xii pp. RobertS. Dupree. Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination. BatonRouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.247 +xv pp. WalterB. Edgar, ed. A Southern Renascence Man: Views of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: LomsianaState University Press, 1984.116+ xiv pp. RoseAnn C. Fraistat. Caroline Gordon as Novelist and Woman of Letters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.181pp. JamesA. Grimshaw, Jr.,ed. Robert Penn Warren '.s"Brother to Dragons": ADiscussion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.309pp. KatherineSnipes. Robert Penn Warren. New York: Ungar, 1984.195+ xi pp. SallyWood, ed. Foreword by Andrew Lytle. The Southern Mandarins: Lettersof'Caroline Gordon to Sally Wood, I 924-1937.Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 1984.218 + xxpp. According to Virginia Woolf, "in or about December, 1910,human character changed."1 Whether or not Woolf is correct, there can be little doubt that in the early years of this century many intellectuals felt the historical and metaphysical discontinuity to be greater than at any time since the rise of Christianity. With the sort of generational arrogance that comes with such anattitude, the artists of this era spoke of anesthetic "modernism." (As one mightexpect, this movement has been supplanted by "post-modernism,,, which willno doubt give way to even more revolutionary innovations-say, new waveor punk lit.) As dated as the term may seem, we are stuck with modernism torefer to the literary angst of the World War I era. When this angst afflicted such a traditional society as the American South, the melancholy was predictably greater and th~ response more desperate than in the more cosmopolitan outposts of the waste land. The one notable group response was made by a circle of friends who began meeting in Nashville in 1915to read and discuss their poetry. Although these poets,who called themselves Fugitives, ceased to function asa group after 1928, theirinfluence on modern American verse was substantial. Comparing them tothe more technically adventuresome lmagists, William Pratt writes: "if we judge style as character, meaning moral and intellectual qualities embodied inwords, then it is the Fugitives who have played the decisive role, for no Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17,Number 4, Winter 1986, 483-494 484 Mark Royden Winchell other group of American poets in this century has combined so much subtlety with so much certitude. "2 The seven books under consideration here provide varying perspectives on two of the major Fugitives, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, as well as on Caroline Gordon, a woman whose marriage to Tate placed her within the larger ethos of southern modernism. Born in the closing years of the last century (he in 1899, she in 1895),Tate and Gordon reached their maturity when modernism was coming into its fullest flower.Because their native South was not yet a cultural oasis (Mencken called it the "Sahara of the Bozarts"), they migrated to New York and, on occasion, to Europe, eking out a living from literary journalism and foundation grants. Theirs was the genteel poverty of the man and woman of letters trying to surviveindependent of the academy. To a large extent university departments of English were still dominated by old-line philological scholars who were deeply distrustful of creative writers and critics. One of the legacies of the literary modernism represented by the Fugitives (as poets and later as "new critics") was to open up the academy to people like Gordon and Tate, both of whom lived long enough to benefit from this change in sensibility. Until we have a full-scale biography of Gordon, scholars will have to content themselves with Sally Wood's selection from the letters Gordon wrote her from 1924-37.This volume takes us into the chaotic, bohemian Tate household (whether it was located in New York, Paris or Clarksville, Tennessee), and givesus personal glimpses of some of the legendary figures of early modernism. These include not only Tate's brethren from the Fugitive and (culturally reactionary) Agrarian movements, but also such luminaries as Katherine Anne Porter, Ford Madox Ford...