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Cherishing an Image of the South
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12746 |
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Book World
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| Issue
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3 / 1987 |
4,367 Words |
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David Hallman
David Hallman teaches English at James Madison University |
So much has been speculated and written about the unique vitality and inspiration of modern Southern literature that it might seem redundant to dwell on that achievement now. Still, members of the elder generation of Southern writers like Andrew Lytle or Peter Taylor are gaining new popularity and critical recognition. And as their national reputation grows, one may legitimately ask what peculiar conditions created a cultural climate that could produce, in a financially deprived and socially recalcitrant region, a literature so rich in texture, theme, and stylistic virtuosity that its reputation is still growing today. Andrew Lytle, the real subject of this essay, provides an answer as a quintessentially Southern writer who uses his regional materials and experience to deal with universal themes.
The Southern Renaissance
By 1925 the world's literary capitals were Paris, London, New York and, arguably, Nashville, Tennessee--although few people in Nashville were aware of their distinction. Nashville, though known only to literary insiders, was a brooding hotbed of intellectual and literary activity that would become the intellectual core of what we now call the "Southern Renaissance" in literature.
Only five years earlier, H.L. Mencken had cleverly dubbed the American South the "Sahara of the Bozart," but there were even then things afoot that Mencken and other critics and apologists for the region could not have known about. William Faulkner would not publish his first novel until 1926; Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel appeared in 1929, and Katherine Ann Porter's first collection of stories in 1930. Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, Flannery O'Connor and others would come later, but the seeds of the Renaissance had been sown.
A remarkable group of writers--academics, students, and just plain amateurs who were in it for the fun--had gathered around Vanderblit University in the early 1920s. After World War I, under the leadership of elder faculty members like John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson, informal social occasions began to grativate to matters of philosophy and poetry. These occasions gradually attracted brilliant students like Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, and the Renaissance was under way. From 1922 to 1925, this group published a journal of poetry and occasional criticism called The Fugitive. Although it only lasted about three years, it became of the most important little magazines in American literature and influenced writers all over the Western world.
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