{"id":82258,"date":"2010-10-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/ransom-co-revisited\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:15:37","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:15:37","slug":"ransom-co-revisited","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/ransom-co-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"Ransom & co. revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/font>n his new anthology of essays, The Southern Critics<\/i>, which features the likes of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, Glenn C. Arbery claims that the Southern Critics \u201chave been neglected\u201d and I agree.[1]<\/a> When they have been noticed, he says, \u201cthey have usually been faulted for not having the sensibilities that are now de rigueur, or they have been located politically in a strain of American conservatism that Eugene Genovese calls \u2018the Southern tradition.\u2019\u201d Arbery\u2019s aim is \u201cto bring their writing before a new generation of readers who can see them afresh and judge for themselves.\u201d But it is hard to see them afresh, now that their formative writings are nearly a century old: they must be seen historically. I\u2019ll try to suggest how this might be done by concentrating on the \u201cAgrarians\u201d and, in particular, on John Crowe Ransom, whose career was exemplary.<\/p>\n

T. S. Eliot spent the academic year 1932\u20133 at Harvard, as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. His lectures were published in November 1933 as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England<\/i>. After his year at Harvard, he journeyed to Charlottesville\u2014making his first visit\u2014to give the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia. These were published in 1934 under the title After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy<\/i>. They have not been reprinted. Eliot soon came to believe that he was a sick soul when he wrote them. But there is no reason to think that he disowned everything he said in Charlottesville.<\/p>\n

In the first lecture, he referred to his essay \u201cTradition and the Individual Talent\u201d (1919) and said that he did not repudiate anything he had said in it. He addressed his audience at Charlottesville on the assumption that they retained some sense of \u201ctradition\u201d and the forms of life the word implied. He evidently held that a tradition is operative only where the same families live for generations in the same place:<\/p>\n

You have here, I imagine, at least some recollection of a \u201ctradition,\u201d such as the influx of foreign populations has almost effaced in some parts of the North, and such as never established itself in the West: though it is hardly to be expected that a tradition here, any more than anywhere else, should be found in healthy and flourishing growth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He then mentioned a book by a group of southern critics:<\/p>\n

I have been much interested, since the publication a few years ago of a book called I\u2019ll Take My Stand<\/i>, in what is sometimes called the agrarian movement in the South, and I look forward to any further statements by the same group of writers. May I say that my first, and no doubt superficial impressions of your country\u2014I speak as a New Englander\u2014have strengthened my feeling of sympathy with those authors: no one, surely, can cross the Potomac for the first time without being struck by differences so great that their extinction could only mean the death of both cultures. I had previously been led to wonder, in travelling from Boston to New York, at what point Connecticut ceases to be a New England state and is transformed into a New York suburb; but to cross into Virginia is as definite an experience as to cross from England to Wales, almost as definite as to cross the English Channel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eliot didn\u2019t describe the differences, but he said that \u201cthe chances for the re-establishment of a native culture are perhaps better here than in New England\u201d:<\/p>\n

You are farther away from New York; you have been less industrialized and less invaded by foreign races;\u2014and you have a more opulent soil.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some members of Eliot\u2019s audience may have been taken aback by his reference to Virginia as \u201cyour country\u201d rather than \u201cyour state\u201d or \u201cyour region.\u201d They may even have been troubled by his describing the presence of immigrants as an \u201cinvasion.\u201d<\/p>\n

T<\/font>he book to which Eliot referred with such sympathy, I\u2019ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition<\/i>\u2014the title comes from the song \u201cDixie\u201d (\u201cThen I wish I was in Dixie, hooray! hooray! \/ In Dixie Land I\u2019ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie\u201d)\u2014was published in 1930. It was a collection of essays \u201cby twelve Southerners\u201d in defense of an agrarian South, compiled in the shadow of the Crash of 1929, at a time when the ideology of Wall Street could be questioned with some hope of persuading readers to listen. It was also a time when a common attitude of the North to the defeated South was one of contempt. Henry Adams expressed such a sentiment in 1905 in remembering his classmate at Harvard\u2014Class of 1858\u2014\u201cRoony\u201d Lee, son of Colonel Robert E. Lee:<\/p>\n

He was simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal, the Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground. . . . When a Virginian had brooded a few days over an imaginary grief and substantial whiskey, none of his Northern friends could be sure that he might not be waiting, round the corner, with a knife or pistol, to revenge insult by the dry light of delirium tremens<\/i>. . . . No doubt the self-esteem of the Yankee, which tended naturally to self-distrust, was flattered by gaining the slow conviction that the Southerner, with his slave-owning limitations, was as little fit to succeed in the struggle of modern life as though he were still a maker of stone axes, living in caves, and hunting the bos primigenius<\/i>, and that every quality in which he was strong made him weaker.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The first chapter of I\u2019ll Take My Stand <\/i>is an unattributed \u201cIntroduction: A Statement of Principles,\u201d to which \u201cevery one of the contributors in this book has subscribed,\u201d though Arbery attributes it quite reasonably to Ransom:<\/p>\n

The authors contributing to this book are Southerners, well acquainted with one another and of similar tastes, though not necessarily living in the same physical community, and perhaps only at this moment aware of themselves as a single group of men. . . . All the articles bear in the same sense upon the book\u2019s title-subject: all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus<\/i> Industrial.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On Ransom\u2019s reasoning, the Industrialism of the North was a gross deviation from the European, more particularly the English, principles of the Founders.<\/p>\n

The following chapters were written by Ransom, Donald Davidson\u2014the poet, not the philosopher\u2014Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Gould Fletcher, Lyle H. Lanier, Allen Tate, Herman Clarence Nixon, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, John Donald Wade, Henry Blue Kline, and Stark Young. It was agreed that after subscribing to the Statement of Principles, each writer would be free to write as he wished on his chosen topic, including education, Progress, religion, economy, and Individualism. The essays differed widely in emphasis and tone. Tate\u2019s essay\u2014not one of his best\u2014on the religion of the South was the most representative piece, at least in its interests. Davidson\u2019s was the most die-hard, unless it was exceeded in that regard by Lytle\u2019s. Ransom\u2019s was the most urbane. All the writers agreed in denouncing the Industrialism of the North and in warning the South not to be seduced by its charms. Ransom maintained that \u201cthe South is unique on this continent for having founded and defended a culture which was according to the European principles of culture; and the European principles had better look to the South if they are to be perpetuated in this country.\u201d On that reasoning, the Industrialism of the North was a gross deviation from the European, more particularly the English, principles of the Founders.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll Take My Stand<\/em> was not the beginning of the Southern critics\u2019 association. In 1914, Ransom joined the English Faculty at Vanderbilt University, Nashville. Soon after, a discussion group was formed, composed mostly of junior faculty, invited students, and local intellectuals: all of them poets who came together to read their poems and discuss them in a critical and analytic setting. Discussion ranged, too, over philosophic and aesthetic questions. There were many comings-and-goings, but over the years the most formidable members of the group were Ransom, Tate, Davidson, and Warren. In the first years, recitations and commentaries were enough, but from April 1922 to December 1925 the group also published nineteen issues of a magazine they called The Fugitive<\/i>, in which the members printed group-approved poems and occasional essays and editorials. The first issue included a cheeky \u201cForeword\u201d:<\/p>\n

Official exception having been taken by the sovereign people to the mint julep, a literary phase known rather euphemistically as Southern Literature has expired, like any other stream whose source is stopped up. The demise was not untimely: among other advantages, The Fugitive <\/i>is enabled to come to birth in Nashville, Tennessee, under a star not entirely unsympathetic. The Fugitive<\/i> flees from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South. Without raising the question of whether the blood in the veins of its editors runs red, they at any rate are not advertising it as blue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This left open the question: what do you not flee from? The New South could hardly be approved.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the question was postponed. The poets would stick to poetry and criticism. The second issue carried a \u201cCaveat Emptor\u201d:<\/p>\n

The Editors of The Fugitive <\/i>are amateurs of poetry living in Nashville, Tennessee, who for some time have been an intimate group holding very long and frequent meetings devoted both to practice and to criticism. The group mind is evidently neither radical nor reactionary, but quite catholic, and perhaps excessively earnest, in literary dogma. The writers sign their work with assumed names for the present, with special reference to the local public, on the theory that the literary issue must not be beclouded with personalities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pseudonyms were used in the first two issues, but proper names thereafter. In later numbers, congenial poems from outside the circle were published, notably from Robert Graves, Witter Bynner, Laura Riding Gottschalk, and Hart Crane. The issue for December 1925 contained an announcement:<\/p>\n

With this issue The Fugitive<\/i> suspends regular publication for an indefinite period. This action is taken because there is no available Editor to take over the administrative duties incidental to the publication of a periodical of even such limited scope as The Fugitive<\/i>: The Fugitives are busy people, for the most part enslaved to Mammon, their time used up in vulgar bread-and-butter occupations. Not one of them is in a position to offer himself on the altar of sacrifice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Considerations of money did not arise: subscriptions\u2014a dollar a year, for a promised boon of four or five issues\u2014and a reliable patron removed that problem. Though the magazine did not have a named Editor, normally two or three of the Board of Editors\u2014often Ransom and Warren\u2014stepped up to do the work for a year: \u201cThe Fugitives choose annually from their membership an Editor and an Associate Editor, who work according to policies formulated by the group.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Agrarians\u2019 most severe terms of rebuke were \u201cindustrialization,\u201d \u201cmaterialism,\u201d \u201cconsumerism,\u201d \u201cProgress,\u201d \u201cPositivism,\u201d \u201cApplied Science,\u201d and \u201cMarxism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The group discussions continued till 1928. But there were quarrels. The most wounding one was in The Literary Review<\/em> in July 1923 when Ransom refused to regard Eliot\u2019s \u201cThe Waste Land\u201d as a poem and Tate rushed into print to scold him. There were also in-house disputes about editorship and acknowledgment of work done. From 1928 to 1935, communications were mostly by letter and essay among the writers who now thought of themselves as Southern Agrarians. I\u2019ll Take My Stand<\/em> was the result. The nature of the book can be indicated by listing its good and its bad words. The highest terms of praise were \u201cagrarian,\u201d \u201ctraditional,\u201d \u201cconservative,\u201d \u201creligious,\u201d \u201cnatural,\u201d \u201cregional,\u201d and \u201caesthetic.\u201d The most severe terms of rebuke were \u201cindustrialization,\u201d \u201cmaterialism,\u201d \u201cconsumerism,\u201d \u201cProgress,\u201d \u201cPositivism,\u201d \u201cApplied Science,\u201d and \u201cMarxism.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In 1930, Ransom also published God without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy<\/i>, a book not easily compatible with his contribution to I\u2019ll Take My Stand<\/i>. The gist of his argument was acceptable enough: \u201cA Copernican universe requires a God just as much as a Ptolemaic one.\u201d But there was a problem in reflecting on the divine, especially for Agrarians:<\/p>\n

We respond sympathetically to a myth only if it suits us racially and culturally. We are now living in cities, for the most part. Not only do we not live in an agricultural society, but the agricultural life has come to be held in a certain scorn. We could not therefore, probably, if we were perfect creatures of our age, accept with relish as the appropriate symbol of omnipotence a mere Rain-God, or a God of vegetation. We have no longer any particular relations with the beasts, and we could not care for totemism, or a myth which defined God as an animal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He maintained, however, that \u201creligionists are almost invariably agrarians rather than industrialists\u2014they find a God readily when they make contact with the elemental soil, and with more difficulty as their habitations and occupations increase in artificiality and in distance from the soil.\u201d And yet:<\/span><\/p>\n

The modern American city or industrial district is certainly the most impressive transformation of natural environment that has yet appeared on this planet. It is no wonder if it tickles its inhabitants so pleasantly with the sense of their ruthless domination of nature, and the ease with which they can manage its God.<\/p>\n

But any city, even a small city of the old Jewish world, approaches this degree of transformation. Its effect is to insulate its inhabitants against observation of a fact which it is well for the realist to take always into account: the infinite variety of nature. The agricultural population is constantly aware of this fact, and accordingly its temper differs from the temper of industrialists and city-folk: it is humble, religious, and conservative. Its God is inscrutable. The nature it knows is not the nature that the city-folk think they have mastered.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I<\/font>n the remainder of the book, Ransom urged the following conclusions, which he regarded as worth the italics:<\/p>\n

With whatever religious institution a modern man may be connected, let him try to turn it back towards orthodoxy.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Let him insist on a virile and concrete God, and accept no Principle as a substitute.<\/p>\n

Let him restore to God the thunder.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Let him resist the usurpation of the Godhead by the soft modern version of the Christ, and try to keep the Christ for what he professed to be: the Demigod who came to do honor to the God.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After 1930, Tate had in mind bringing out a sequel to I\u2019ll Take My Stand<\/i>, wider in range, less beset with the South, and a more explicit endorsement of the \u201cdistributive state\u201d advocated by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc according to which every man would have \u201cthree acres and a cow.\u201d Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence<\/i>, edited by Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, was published in the spring of 1936. The editors evidently hoped to influence the general election of that year and to turn Roosevelt in a better direction than the New Deal. Unwisely, Agar and Tate invited most of the Agrarians to write essays: the contributors included Lanier, Owsley, Tate, Davidson, Ransom, Lytle, Wade, Warren, and Cleanth Brooks.<\/p>\n

Ransom wrote one of his most dispirited pieces, \u201cWhat Does the South Want?\u201d The answer to his own question was prejudiced from the start by the concession that \u201cthe unitary South has passed; not even in a bare electoral sense is the South solid any more.\u201d The South might still be \u201ca valuable accession to the scattering and unorganized party of all those who think it is time to turn away from the frenzy of Big Business toward something older, more American, and more profitable.\u201d Meanwhile, the government should help the small farmer in the South to survive: by reducing if not abolishing land taxes, providing good roads, good education, good houses with space for privacy, and \u201celectricity delivered cheap at his door.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who Owns America? <\/i>made no impact on the election or on public opinion. The Agrarians began to break up. In 1937 Ransom left Vanderbilt to teach at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio and to edit The Kenyon Review<\/i>, which had its first number in the winter of 1939. By then, he had lost interest in the Agrarian movement and in the effort of addressing a large audience on public issues. He turned his attention to teaching, attracting some remarkable students including Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Peter Taylor, while he edited the Review<\/i>. He also started the Kenyon School of Letters, wrote many essays on poetry and the theory of poetry, and tinkered with his old poems, often to damaging effect.<\/p>\n

In 1945, writing in The Kenyon Review<\/i>, he made his retirement from the Agrarian fellowship explicit; he thought it \u201cphantasy\u201d:<\/p>\n

For without consenting to a division of labor, and hence modern society, we should have not only no effective science, invention, and scholarship, but nothing to speak of in art, e.g. reviews<\/i>, fine poems and their exegesis. . . . The pure though always divided knowledges, and the physical gadgets and commodities, constitute our science, and are the guilty fruits; but the former are triumphs of muscular intellect, and the latter at best are clean and wholly at our service. The arts are the expiations, but they are beautiful. Together they comprise the detail of human history. They seem worth the vile welter through which homeless spirits must wade between times, with sensibilities subject to ravage as they are. On these terms the generic human economy can operate, and they are the only terms practicable now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He added, as \u201can irony at my expense,\u201d that \u201cthe judgment just now delivered by the Declaration of Potsdam against the German people is that they shall return to an agrarian economy\u201d:<\/p>\n

Once I should have thought there could have been no greater happiness for a people, but now I have no difficulty in seeing it for what it is meant to be: a heavy punishment. Technically it might be said to be an inhuman punishment, in the case where the people in the natural course of things have left the garden far behind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ransom remained at Kenyon for the rest of his life. By 1968, long after all the fuss of restoring to God the thunder, he somewhat wanly called his faith Unitarian. Davidson stayed at Vanderbilt, but Tate went North, turning like Ransom to teaching poetry and criticism. So did Warren, but he revisited Kentucky, Tennessee,
\nArkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana to write Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South<\/i> (1956) and Who Speaks for the Negro? <\/i>(1965).<\/p>\n

S<\/font>o far as I know, the last occasion on which the Agrarians reconsidered the question of the South was in 1952 when the editor of Shenandoah<\/i> invited them to take part in a symposium on the subject. Ransom noted the fact that \u201cthe South is evidently determined upon the course which in these times will give it wealth and power, and that is by way of industrial capitalism.\u201d The first hopeful sign he saw in the South was \u201cthat there has been continued emigration of its Negro population into other States, so that the high ratio of Negroes to total population continues to decline everywhere in the South.\u201d A further sign was \u201cthat I sense as something very real the improvement of race relations in the South\u201d:<\/p>\n

I do not like to see the Federal government trying to enforce civil rights in the South, especially in view of the rapid improvement already going on; this is what I say to my Northern friends. To my Southern friends I must say: Go just as fast as you can towards giving the Negro his full complement of rights after his centuries of slavery and low caste.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tate said he didn\u2019t retract anything he had written in I\u2019ll Take My Stand<\/i>,\u00a0but he saw things now \u201cin a very different perspective.\u201d I think the new perspective was impressed upon him by Jacques Maritain and by Eliot\u2019s recourse to him in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism<\/i>, especially when he quoted Maritain\u2019s assertion that \u201cby showing us where moral truth and the genuine supernatural are situated, religion saves poetry from the absurdity of believing itself destined to transform ethics and life; saves it from overweening arrogance.\u201d Tate had little to say at the Shenandoah<\/i> gathering, but that little included his belief that \u201cthe possibility of the humane life presupposes, with us, a prior order, the order of a unified Christendom\u201d:<\/p>\n

If there is a useful program that we might undertake in the South, would it not be towards the greater unity of the varieties of Southern Protestantism, with the ultimate aim the full unity of all Christians?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Davidson, predictably, did not yield an inch.<\/p>\n

T<\/font>he first section of Mr. Arbery\u2019s anthology, \u201cIn Dixieland,\u201d has four essays from that contentious place by Ransom, Tate, Lytle, and Davidson. The second part, \u201cThe Case of Poetry,\u201d presents the work of these writers and their associates in literary criticism: Ransom, Tate, Davidson, Brooks, and Warren. The final section, \u201cThe Sacramental South,\u201d extends the range of the Southern Critics beyond its normal scale. We have two of Tate\u2019s best essays, \u201cOur Cousin, Mr. Poe\u201d and \u201cThe Symbolic Imagination\u201d (on Dante), an essay by Caroline Gordon, \u201cSome Readings and Misreadings,\u201d and one by Flannery O\u2019Connor, \u201cThe Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.\u201d<\/p>\n

These last additions extend the definition of \u201cthe Southern Critics\u201d a little beyond reason. Neither Gordon nor O\u2019Connor was a critic after the manner of the others: Gordon brings up Joyce, Graham Greene, Bernanos, Faulkner, and Mauriac in a Christian context and O\u2019Connor\u2019s essay is a meditation on the Catholic novelist in the aptly named Bible Belt, which holds that in the South \u201cbelief can still be made believable, even if for the modern mind it cannot be made admirable.\u201d Mr. Arbery probably had in mind extending considerations of the Southern critics beyond the rather narrow circle in which they began. I wish the anthology well.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\n

[1<\/a>]The Southern Critics: An Anthology<\/i>, edited by Glenn\u00a0C. Arbery; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 353 pages, $22.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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