The Imprint of Alan Swallow: Quality Publishing in the West

3 Down Altitudes of Air

41 3 Down Altitudes of Air in a collection of essays, I’ll Take My Stand, published in 1930, Robert Penn Warren and eleven other young writers embraced to varying degrees the heritage of the Confederacy and denounced with equal fervor both American industrialism and Soviet communism. They marched under the banner of the Southern Agrarians, although one poet and critic who was also a part-time farmer derided them as agrarians who knew nothing about farming. The title of their book was derived from the Daniel Emmett song “Dixie,” with the refrain “In Dixie’s Land, we’ll took our stand, / To lib an’ die in Dixie.” (Emmett, writing for popular minstrel shows in which white men wore makeup to darken their faces, emulated incorrect grammar assumed to be characteristic of black slaves in the South.) Warren’s essay was entitled “The Briar Patch,” a phrase from Joel Chandler Harris’s condescending Uncle Remus stories. Warren had chosen, he said, to write “the essay on the negro.” The racial implications of both the titles and the works that appeared beneath them understandably stirred controversy throughout the 1930s and beyond. In Warren’s essay, he postulated a situation in which an African American man was turned away from a whites-only hotel, and 42 | The Impr int of A lan Swallow 15. As a young assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University , the future Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren awarded Alan Swallow honorable mention in a national poetry contest, declaring him “decisively ahead of the field.” In this 1937 photo, Warren is at the left with T. S. Stribling outside an LSU building where the visiting writer addressed students. Charles East Papers, Mss. 3471, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, LA. Down A ltitudes of A ir | 43 asked, “Does he simply want to spend the night in a hotel as comfortable as one from which he is turned away, or does he want to spend the night in that same hotel? A good deal depends on how this hypothetical negro would answer the question.” Warren, born and raised in the southern Kentucky town of Guthrie, clearly answered it in favor of the “separate but equal” doctrine that was then the law of the land.1 Other essays in the book dealt with economics, agriculture , the arts, education, philosophy, and religion from what the authors saw as the southern perspective. The literary critic and folklorist Donald Davidson wrote that the ascendancy of industrialism “will mean that there will be no arts left to foster; or, if they exist at all, they will flourish only in a diseased and disordered condition.” John Crowe Ransom attacked “the gospel of Progress,” which he said “never defines its ultimate objective.” His fellow poet Allen Tate, a recent convert to the Roman Catholic faith, said the religion of America was “a religion of the half horse . . . preeminently a religion of how things work.” The group started a magazine, called The Fugitive. In its initial issue in April 1922, Ransom said that the magazine “flees from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South.” Nevertheless the agrarian doctrine that presumably bound them together was perhaps most forthrightly stated by Andrew Nelson Lytle, a member of a leading family in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who had been a fellow student with Warren at Vanderbilt University. Lytle urged the farmer to reject well-meaning assurances of “how great is his deserving” and “keep to 44 | The Impr int of A lan Swallow his ancient ways and leave the homilies of the tumblebellied prophets to the city man who understands such things.” It is an understandable and defensible argument, and according to it Alan Swallow would have stayed on the farm.2 He did not. As editor of Sage, Swallow had met Gardner Kirk, a paper salesman who was in and out of University of Wyoming offices. Kirk was now studying at Louisiana State University, and wrote his Laramie acquaintance assuring him that he could get a fellowship for graduate study at the Louisiana school. There would be no farming or journalism for Alan Swallow. He and Mae were off for Baton Rouge, with a stop in Gerard, Kansas, so that Alan could see the Haldeman-Julius publishing plant, source of the Little Blue Books that had so fired his imagination at a Montana filling station. Inside, he looked...