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112 5 “I AM THE LOST CAUSE” Queer History, the Southern Phallus, and the Quest for Medieval Timelessness in Robert Penn Warren’s A Place to Come To H istory—its weight and its gravity—underpins Robert Penn Warren ’s A Place to Come To (1977), as the protagonist Jed Tewksbury confronts the shallow fantasies of southern masculinity. Early in the novel, Jed ponders how the past determines the meaning of one’s life and concludes that “we are all stuck with trying to find the meaning of our lives, and the only thing we have to work on, or with, is our past. This can be a question of life and death” (15).1 The quest for life’s meaning begins in a person’s roots in history; to find the self, one must sift through the past. Warren proclaims this theme frequently in his fiction. In an interview with Bill Moyers, he succinctly posits the impossibility of a life without history: “I don’t know how you can have a future without a sense of the past.”2 Such a historically inflected consciousness dogs Jed throughout his journeys, with his past continually undermining his sense of historical agency and gendered identity. Similar to his protagonist in this regard, Warren was also haunted by history, and he sees in southern literature the abiding need to confront the region’s troubled past. In his analysis of Mark Twain’s relationship to southern culture, Warren argues that his literary forebear in many ways rejected the U.S. South but was unable to escape it: “Later [Samuel Clemens ] was to regard Sir Walter Scott as the source of the Southern disease whose contagion he had thus fled and was, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, to equate chivalry with the barbarous irrationality that the rational Yankee tries to redeem. But though the young Sam did repudiate the historical past, he did not, or could not, repudiate the personal past and for his doppelgänger Mark Twain, the story of that past became his chief stock-in-trade.”3 Warren’s words apply equally well to his own life and literature: the conflicted history of the U.S. South troubles yet  113 Robert Penn Warren’s A Place to Come To inspires his fictions, leaving a queer vision of conflicted masculinity unmoored from its ostensible cultural privilege. A Place to Come To, Warren’s final novel, depicts fictionally themes of deep importance to the author throughout his career and in many ways summarizes the evolution of his views on the U.S. South. When Jed Tewksbury proclaims, “I am the Lost Cause” (313), Warren unites his protagonist’s sense of beleaguered chivalric masculinity with the debilitating effects of southern history. A segregationist who later shifted his views and advocated for the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Warren asked men of the U.S. South to reevaluate their masculinity and their values ,4 and he derided the ways in which white southern men dressed up their masculinity with trappings of knightly chivalry to camouflage violently racist acts: “Even now, any common lyncher becomes a defender of the Southern tradition, and any rabble-rouser the gallant leader of a thin gray line of heroes.”5 The devolution of the chivalric ideal from masculine honor to racist violence troubled Warren, and he asked white southerners to study history in its complexity rather than to deceive themselves with bigotries and stereotypes derived from a mythologized past: “Discovering his past, the Southerner might find himself, and the courage to be himself; he might free himself from a stereotype which does violence to some of his own most deeply cherished values and to the complexity of his history. He might realize that the obscene caricatures of humanity who have made Philadelphia, Mississippi, newsworthy are scarcely the finest flower of Southern chivalry.”6 Warren’s reference to Philadelphia, Mississippi, alludes to the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers— James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—and these words also point to the ways in which southerners grappled with the twin legacies of masculine chivalry and horrific violence to reassess the meaning of southern history. For example, during the tumultuous years of the 1960s, many students of southern colleges, dubbing themselves the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), rejected the traditional values of their culture by titling their manifesto “We’ll Take Our Stand,” a rhetorical move spurning Nashville’s intellectual heritage...

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