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Allen Tate and the Contradictions of Modernism
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15033 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1988 |
3,550 Words |
| Author
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J.O. Tate
J.O. Tate is professor of English literature at Dowling
College. He has contributed to a number of journals and
magazines, including the Southern Review, the Flannery
O'Connor Bulletin, the Armchair Detective, and the National
Review. |
Can it already be nearly ten years since Allen Tate (1899-1979) died? His figure and his model still have for some the authority they did in life. But nowadays there may not be much left of the literary values he represented, or indeed of the culture he embodied; nor can we say--alas- that many of his generation of writers remain. Why, even some of his most prominent pupils are gone: Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman.
Looking back at Tate's various works, at the history of his reputation, and indeed at the cultural confusion of the United States, we may perhaps see him a larger perspective or in a broader field of vision than special pleading, and stereotypical resentment have hitherto allowed. Occasionally a fierce partisan, particularly about points of personal honor, Tate's opinions and provisional remarks sometimes obscured the merits of his considered judgments. Refusing to knuckle under to conventional pieties, he was conservative enough to be radical.
Tate's career illustrated a familiar paradox we knew from Henry Adams and T.S. Eliot which is sometimes called "weak modernism"--an antimodern modernism that is usually based on an assumption (now called a myth) of recent cultural decay and decline. We find that quality displayed throughout Tate's works, as indeed we can also find therein a continuity of awareness of Adams and Eliot. But it may be useful to start with some later reminiscences of early confrontations, as gathered in his Memoirs and Opinions, 1926-1974 (1975). The old man not only had an old man's point of view--a sort of conservative radicalism--but could also remember a young man who had pretty much the same mindset. For example, we find the memoir "Miss Toklas’ American Cake" a confrontation with “strong modernism," as ponderously personified by Gertrude Stein. Stein's rudeness to Ford Maddox Ford provokes Tate's righteous contempt; he much preferred the aesthetic or antimodern modernism of his friend Ford. He declares Ford's novel the Good Soldier to be the masterpiece of British fiction in this century. And the survivor does not hesitate to declare--after remembering Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and John Peale Bishop -- "These trivia have survived a world that is dead for the entertainment of a world that is dying."
The Radical Conservative
Included in the Memoirs is Tate's "Homage to T.S. Eliot," which was written in 1966 when Tate edited a memorial issue of The Sewanee Review devoted to one of his two masters--John Crowe Ransom was the other. But by 1966, the old modernist was ready to
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