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Irving Howe

The South and Current Literature

(October 1948)

Source: American Mercury, October 1948.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

It is interesting that the liveliest centre of literary work in this country during the past few decades has been in the South. The term ‘Southern writing’ has become an accepted descriptive in literary discussions, though it has often been so used as to suggest little more than the work of a writer born below the Mason-Dixon line or a novel with a Southern locale. More recently, it has been used to refer to the work, not so much of well-known writers like Caldwell and Faulkner, but of a group of writers, centred around the now defunct Southern Review and its successor Sewanee Review, of whom the most representative figures are Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom.

Here at hand are six books – three novels, two short-story collections and an anthology – in which one can observe the distinctive ‘Southern quality’. For the reviewer they represent a considerable problem. How, in a few thousand words, is one not only to report on the matter in each book, but also to risk a more ambitious fraction of the critic’s job: the definition of the cultural trend of which these books are part and the evaluation of both these specimens and the trend itself? Under the circumstances, an obviously impossible task; and hence, what follows may be taken merely as notes for a not-yet written critical analysis of Southern fiction.
 

I

Erskine Caldwell’s latest novel, This Very Earth [1] is so bad that one wonders how both author and publisher could have been so indifferent to critical standards as to permit its publication. To be blunt: the novel is a catastrophe. In the past, Caldwell’s major gift has been his grotesque comic sense, his weird but fruitful readiness to treat with harsh humour situations that other writers might find merely pathetic or repugnant. The very incongruity of his creative perspective became a shrewd strategy for edging into tragic perceptions that he could not render directly. Through his crude but high-spirited obsession with the sub-human, he made significant imaginative observations about human existence in the South.

Caldwell was especially talented at writing precisely recorded dialogue in which he employed the corrupt poetry of Southern folk rhetoric: its uneasy blend of obscenity and sentiment, its rural coarseness conveyed through wonderfully fresh nature images, and its gnarled, fugitive rhythms – as distinct from the ‘official’ Southern rhetoric, with its flowing periods and sustained elocutionism.

In This Very Earth, however, there is not an echo of his former talents. The novel is a report on the disintegration of a town family prematurely uprooted from the soil: the father a lazy idler; one daughter a bitch who sells herself to a politician; another daughter a simpering masochist killed by a brutal husband. This situation, for the early Caldwell, might not have been impossible. But This Very Earth is written in a glazed, cataleptic prose in which there is not the slightest modulation of tone or change of pace for emotional effects, not the slightest shaping of dialogue to the psychological contours of the characters. It is as if the author were writing in a trance and stuttering out a denuded précis of his usual materials. There is here neither tragedy nor comedy, neither emotional statement nor climax; the prose is as colourless and neutral, as unworked, as an Army document. Since there has always been a streak of cheap sensationalism in Caldwell’s work, the present loss of his major redeeming gift – his use of Southern folk rhetoric in incongruous patterns – results in a novel that not many pulp magazines would accept if its author were unknown.

How to explain this spectacular disintegration of Caldwell’s talent? The influence of Stalinism with its totalitarian habits of mind? A desire to cash in quickly while the cashing is good? Or some more subtle and treacherous internal collapse of his creative impulse, already observable in his recent book; some perilous self-dispersal of talent? Frankly, I cannot say, and at the moment it hardly matters, for the sheer fact of the collapse is itself so overwhelming. It is as if one could see nothing but an endlessly barren desert piled with bleached and ugly bones ...
 

II

When we come to William Faulkner’s new novel, Intruder in the Dust [2], we are in the presence of an important, if imperfect, work of art. We have before us the labour of a writer who has refused all the beckoning stereotypes and instead gone along his own, and as he might describe it, intractable way. Unlike most of the American writers who reached their fame in the early twenties or late thirties, Faulkner has continued to enrich his talent, restlessly experimenting and exploring the Gothic recesses of his imagination.

Intruder in the Dust is, as a narrative, simpler than most of Faulkner’s previous novels. It is concentrated on one central symbolic event, a lynching which never quite materialises – certainly an appropriate symbol for a novel that aspires, as this one does, to be an encompassing fable of Southern society. (A more appropriate and dramatic symbol, incidentally, than an actual lynching; for the terror of Southern life is in its possibilities rather than its infrequent climaxes.) The novel’s central figure is a Negro, Lucas Beauchamp, one of the most powerful characters in contemporary American fiction: ‘solitary, kinless and intractable, apparently not only without friends even in his own race but proud of it’. Lucas has some white blood in him, but actually he belongs neither to the whites nor the blacks; he neither accepts white society nor rebels against it; he neither cringes nor defies; he rather gives it its ultimate due: he ignores it. Powerful and slow, suggesting a natural dignity that leaves the whites sullen and irritated, carrying himself like a man whose foci of attention are, properly enough, the earth and himself rather than society, Lucas Beauchamp is a symbol of what Faulkner considers the Negroes’ greatest quality: their endurance. In one of his stories, The Bear, Faulkner has written of the Negroes:

Because they will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are aped from white men or what white men and bondage have taught them ... And their virtues – endurance ... and pity and tolerance and forbearance and fidelity and love of children ... whether their own or not, or black or not.

This is the theme, then, that is carried into and further developed in Intruder in the Dust.

As counterpoint to Lucas there is a sixteen-year-old white boy, Charles, who as a child had once been helped by Lucas and has since then held ambivalent feelings towards him. He admires the Negro’s power and dignity, his sheer independence of environment; but at the same time he feels vaguely dispossessed by Lucas of his budding but not quite secure sense of racial superiority.

The story comes to a boil when Lucas is accused of having murdered a white man under circumstances that seem to leave no doubt of his guilt. A lynching is expected soon; the Negroes go into hiding; Lucas alone remains stolidly indifferent, for all they can take is his life; but the white boy, still not fully pressed into the adult mould of hatred, hopes that Lucas will be saved, even as he feels a subterranean pleasure in the thought that the proud Negro may tomorrow be burned in gasoline. But on a hint from Lucas the boy goes off on a wild chase, disinterring the body of the murdered white man and thereby helping to prove that Lucas is innocent.

Faulkner has never created better, more multi-dimensional, more reverberating characters than in this novel. There is almost no trace of his previous strained caricatures and sentimental idealisations (Sanctuary and Sartoris). And the meanings of the story, complex and criss-crossed, are beautifully designed into its narrative fabric. On one level the story is about a boy’s initiation into experience: his struggle to break out of the innocence in which his fond family holds him and to approach the sinister areas of adult experience (his illegal nocturnal exploration of coffins, the possible lynching, Lucas’ seeming guilt). On another level the story is a tribute to the Southern Negro, the fixed point around which Southern white society excitedly fluctuates. And on still another level the story is an exhortatory fable of Southern life: the union of the old and patient Negro with the young and innocent white boy not yet corrupted in the ways of his fathers, Faulkner seems to be saying, will cleanse the land of its bloody and evil heritage.

This symbolic pattern is developed by a subtle narrative technique that few other American writers can employ. The story moves along three narrative channels: the bare events frugally reported; the white boy’s involvement in and reaction to those events; and, most important of all, a loping rhetoric reverie which is probably the voice of Faulkner himself and which covers the bones of the narrative with a thick, twining tapestry of language and reflection.

Intruder in the Dust brings to a climax a number of tendencies in Faulkner’s work. In terms of characterisation, it is at least the equal of anything he has done. Though not so brilliant an experiment in polyphonic plot devices as The Sound and the Fury, it is not nearly so thin or sensational an allegory as Sanctuary. Its importance for Faulkner’s total achievement seems to me to lie in two directions: rhetoric and politics.

Here is the most gargantuan proliferation of the rhetoric which, from book to book, has swollen into an ever richer, more gorgeous and more uncontrolled flood of language. His sentences run for pages, with complex parentheses and intrusions. His elaboration of what I have called the ‘official’ Southern rhetoric (as distinct from Caldwell’s rhetoric which is the poor-white’s modification of the ‘official’ kind) is full of echoes of Ciceronian orations to state legislatures and of decayed Shakespearian-Melvillian poetry – all shaped into a legitimate aesthetic means by Faulkner’s overpowering creative energy. This is not the rhetoric of a moonstruck schoolboy like Thomas Wolfe; it is the rhetoric of an unbearably intense and involuted imagination, a fallen and grieved mind which knows the inner springs of all that is evil in man. One may ultimately reject this rhetoric – I confess that it often leaves me wearied and sated – but one cannot dismiss it as insignificant or callow.

At its worst, of course, it can be very bad:

... closed the last carborundum-grooved door upon their own progenitorless apotheosis behind one clockless lock responsive only to the last stroke of eternity ...

But at its best, it creates these magnificent lines about the Negro:

... you just didn’t see them – a sense a feeling of their constant presence and nearness: black men and women and children breathing and waiting inside their barred and shuttered houses, not crouching cringing shrinking, not in anger and not quite in fear: just waiting, biding since theirs was an armament which the white man could not match nor – if he but knew it – even cope with: patience... this land was a desert and a witness ... of the deliberate turning as with one back of the whole dark people on which the very economy of the land itself was founded, not in heat or anger nor even regret but in one irremediable invincible inflexible repudiation, upon not a racial outrage but a human shame.

And then the politics. In no book has Faulkner been more explicit about his solution to the twisted mess of Southern life:

I only say the injustice is ours, the South’s. We must expiate it and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help nor even (with thanks) advice. We owe this to Lucas whether he wants it or not.

Once, says Faulkner, the South has freed the Negro, ‘together we would dominate the United States’. (What for?, one wonders, and on what common basis?) As a political idea, this seems to me rather feeble, to put it mildly; it is further evidence, if any were needed, that Faulkner’s imagination is more fertile than his intellect. But since the idea itself will be discussed later, suffice it here merely to note the interesting fact that as Faulkner’s idea of the South has become more explicit his rhetoric has become denser. What this relationship means remains to be seen. Finally: it would be impossible to leave this novel without saying that anyone interested in American writing, the real American writing that manages to poke its way through the weeds of commerce and deceit, cannot let it go unread.
 

III

Though Caldwell and Faulkner are the two best-known Southern writers, neither has been directly associated with the literary regroupment which has taken place in the South under the leadership of Tate and Ransom. This latter group has produced no first-rate novelist on a par with Faulkner or the earlier Hemingway but it has given us a considerable poetic production of high quality and an intense, burrowing criticism. For this group, Caldwell and Faulkner occupy sharply contrasting positions: the former has been repudiated and the latter is a revered ancestor.

The Southern writers have worked in terms of several loyalties: they have combined a hot-house classicism in criticism, borrowed from T.S. Eliot; intense exercises in the Donne manner in poetry; agrarianism in political philosophy; and allegiance to the Southern Myth as a central source of historical, or supra-historical, inspiration. To understand Southern fiction, our main subject here, we shall have to glance briefly at the latter two: agrarianism and the Southern Myth.

During the thirties the Southern intellectuals produced two political anthologies, I’ll Take My Stand [3] and Who Owns America? [4], in which they argued eloquently against the evils of corporate industrialism and called for a return to a small producers’ economy based on independent farmers and artisans. ‘All great cultures have been rooted in free peasantries’, wrote Allen Tate, the most powerful Southern polemist.

As an actual political programme, the Southern intellectuals well knew, agrarianism was a lost cause, since it tried to block the unavoidable development of technology and ‘machino-facture’ on which modern society is based. The critics of agrarianism pointed out, and I think correctly, that the problem was not how to return to a small producers’ society from an urban industrial society, but rather how to use the machine to gain the maximum possibility for a decent life for the largest number of people. But the agrarianism of the Southern intellectuals is, I think, merely an aspect of a larger belief: their faith in the Southern Myth. Just what this myth is one cannot say too easily, even after reading the Southern writers. But that it functions as a powerful influence in the minds of these writers, from Faulkner down, is indisputable.

In his Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas [5], Allen Tate has written that ‘The South clings blindly to forms of European feeling and conduct that were crushed by the French Revolution.’ Where else, he asked, ‘outside of the South, is there a society that believes even covertly in the Code of Honor?’ For those who might sceptically wonder how this Code manifests itself in the South, it should be remembered that the Southern intellectuals feel the Southern Myth to be a fragmentary tradition of aristocratic forms and moral nobilities rather than a description of actual life in the South today. On another occasion, Tate wrote in the Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1945) that ‘the Southern subject is the destruction by war and the later degradation of the South by carpetbaggers and scalawags, and a consequent lack of moral force and imagination in the cynical materialism of the New South’ – as well as, it might be added, in its aping of the ways of the industrial North.

In a recently published anthology, A Southern Vanguard [6], there are several essays that further elaborate the Southern Myth. One of them, oddly enough, is by a plantation aristocrat from Manitoba, Canada, Herbert McLuhan, who writes with the unmodulated zeal of a convert. He begins with several fantastic statements about the ‘New England mind’, whatever that might be: ‘The essential impatience and rebellion of the New England mind disqualifies it for political and artistic functions.’ And ‘the trouble with the New England mind has always been its ignorance of its own history’. (Shades of Hawthorne, Melville, Henry Adams!)

The South, on the other hand, has had ‘no curtailment of the full Renaissance flavour of the gentlemanly code’. For ‘one main condition of aristocratic life was present in the South and not in the North – personal responsibility to other human beings for education and material welfare’. (Is this, by chance, a reference to chattel slavery?) Since the Civil War, the South has adopted the ethics of the industrial North, of the ‘little sub-men, the Hollow Men, of Dos Passos, Fitzgerald and Hemingway’.

Another essayist, Louis Wright, claims that the so-called Negro problem would have long ago been solved had not Northern trouble-makers interfered by demanding a drastic solution. (It is perhaps easier for Mr. Wright to be patient about this matter than for Negroes.) Here, it should be noticed, is the same notion that we found in Faulkner’s novel.

In a more subtle vein, Robert Heilman insists that Southern intellectuals are critical of the South, but that they do not want it to bite into the Northern ‘apple of (industrial) conformity’. Heilman finds the Southern ethos based on ‘an aristocratic stability’ superior to Northern wage labour and big city mass culture.

Now one does not, cannot, argue with a myth, for it is deeply embedded in a people’s life and beyond rational persuasion. But of the intellectual defenders of a myth it is appropriate to ask a few questions.

Is it not likely that the aristocratic tradition they so admire was inseparable from chattel slavery, which they reject; that is, that the aristocratic virtues, such as they were, could be cultivated by plantation owners only because the labour of slaves granted them the requisite leisure?

Why should so intelligent a man as Mr Heilman assume that the critics of Southern institutions necessarily approve of Northern evils? Is conformity, Northern or Southern, the only ‘apple’ to bite into?

If, as both Wright and Faulkner claim, the full liberation of the Negro is the job of the South alone, why has the South not done so, if only once and for all to call the bluff of ‘Northern troublemakers’?
 :

IV

It is precisely this latter feeling – a tense ambivalence towards the Southern Myth, an ingrained acceptance and cultivated doubt – that seems to run through Robert Penn Warren’s fiction and lift it to a level of excitement few other Southern novelists can reach. His first, and probably best, novel, was published nine years ago and inadequately received; now reissued, Night Rider [7], seems to me one of the few genuinely dramatic novels written in recent years.

Warren has chosen as his subject a rebellion of Kentucky tobacco farmers at the turn of the present century. Desperately squeezed financially, the farmers form an association to force the tobacco companies to pay more for their crops. The struggle is bitter: some farmers refuse to join the association; violence breaks out; a secret society of ‘night riders’ is formed to burn the crops of recalcitrant farmers; the ‘night riders’ march into towns to dynamite tobacco warehouses; finally, troops are called in and the farmers defeated, as was inevitable from the very beginning.

In the midst of this tense and exciting story there gradually emerges a guiding thematic line which greatly enriches the meaning of the novel. Its hero, Percy Munn, is a mild lawyer who, never quite knowing why or how, becomes involved in the association and then becomes one of the ‘night riders’. The remarkably passive Munn is wafted along by the momentum of events, constantly asking himself who he is, why he acts as he does. His is a quest for identity and meaning, a centre of resolution which might give significance to his heroic but distraught acts. It is also, perhaps more important, a quest for a solution to the problem faced by all intellectuals and men of feeling: how to meet the need of participation in large social movements while still attempting independently to define their personalities. But Munn cannot find the answers he seeks; he drifts into despair, is alienated from all his normal life ties and ends as a hunted fugitive, still seeking for the confidence and ease ‘in that inner world’ which might sanctify his death. Told in the book’s last scene that ‘a man never knows what he is’, Munn mutters, ‘I do know. I’m nothing.’

Munn’s indecision and weakness prevent Night Rider from rising to the level of genuine tragedy, which is unrealisable without an active hero. But perhaps it is impossible, in any case very difficult, to write an honest novel these days with a hero who moulds history rather than one who is moulded by it. With that limitation in mind, I think Warren has done a great deal in Night Rider to restore the novel to its true function: the portrayal of dramatic conflict.

There are many beautifully executed things in the book, the most remarkable of which is the barely noticeable but always working change of atmosphere through which Warren suggests the emotional meanings of his story: the gradual shift from images of daylight to images of night, from the early aroma of warmth to the final sense of desolation and cold. Warren handles the English language, when writing about concrete things, with something approaching mastery:

Mr Munn, ever since he had grown up, would see the great flocks of grackles, on bright days in the fall, sweeping across the blue sky, from horizon to horizon, or fountaining upward and outward from a tree or a grove where they had been disturbed, or splaying from the air wantonly over the wide expanse of a field, like bright, black seeds flung from a sower’s liberal hand ...

When viewed against the background of Southern writing as a whole, Warren’s novel shows two interesting weaknesses. The first is his use of language. When he writes concretely, as in the above passage, he is superb; but he seems almost always to feel some uneasy and pressing need to define in abstract terms the significance of the events he is rendering well enough as it is, to use a kind of synoptic language that is unavoidable in literary criticism but generally unnecessary in fiction. He is not at peace with the fiction itself; his rhetoric, an odd blend of Southern usage and literary jargon, is the rhetoric of pretension, of straining towards something his dramatic structures do not seem to him to yield.

Now is it not quite possible – I should think it rather likely – that in Percy Munn Warren has created a symbolic extension of his own difficulties of commitment with regard to the Southern Myth? I do not mean to suggest that Munn is a self-portrait, since Warren obviously is more self-conscious and sophisticated. I would suggest, however, that Munn’s problem of commitment is not unrelated to Warren’s, and that much of the rhetorical strain is due to Warren’s wrestling with Munn’s relation to the ‘night riders’. This view seems to jibe with the remarks of a critic in A Southern Vanguard, William O’Connor, who writes that Warren has a ‘mind in which tradition and the forces destroying tradition work in strong opposition to each other... The more basic set of pulls in Warren’s poetry is that between his work as a provincial artist and an aware modern.’
 :

V

Once, however, the tension slackens and the Southern writer falls into either sentimental reveries or self-conscious distance from his materials, then the fiction seems to suffer. I think this is rather evident in our last two volumes of Southern fiction: Robert Penn Warren’s collection of stories, The Circus in the Attic [8], and the stories of his protege, Peter Taylor, A Long Fourth. [9]

In his short pieces Warren seems unable to exploit his genuine gift for dramatic writing. Those stories which contain dramatic possibilities are too bare to come through. Some have lovely things in them: warm feeling and direct observations of nature, a conviction that the land is the only clean thing in life, an ironic interplay of tradition and reality. But when Warren tries, as he does in about half the stories, to write nostalgic pieces about rural life, we can see how much better Sherwood Anderson did a similar sort of thing. For Warren is an intellectual, which Anderson was not; Warren cannot identify himself as lovingly and unquestioningly (he has to persuade himself to make the identification) with rural simplicities and nostalgic atmospheres. Here his tension is slacker than at the peak of Night Rider; the result is ‘soft’ idealisation and self-conscious recollection.

Of Peter Taylor’s stories, little need be said. They are competent; he has gone to school with the Southern teachers. They show an awareness of the tension and irony to be gained from examining the contradictions of Southern life, but they do not project the life-situations from which such an awareness should flow. Young and knowing, Taylor lacks the primary passion of his mentors; he is a bit too sophisticated, too assured, too unwilling to take chances – and hence, too pallid. Here the tension has disappeared.
 :

VI

What follows from these notes is admittedly schematic, and like all schematic hypotheses both too much and too little for the matter at hand. But if it provides a useful way of looking at Southern literature, a clarifying perspective, as I think it does, then its use is legitimate.

The basic problem of the Southern writer is his attitude (a word which, of course, puts the matter too much on the plane of aware consciousness) towards the Southern Myth, which sustains and devours him. From the tensions that encase these attitudes, Southern writers create their versions of human experience, which, of course, if worth anything at all, have a relevance far beyond their regional locale. Simultaneously the dislocations of feeling, the deficiencies and excesses of perception, that arise from the Southern writers’ attitudes towards their myth, find expression in rhetoric, the most congenial literary mode for one brought up in the Southern environment. In Caldwell’s case the rhetoric is used for grotesque comedy; remove it, as in his latest novel, and there is nothing left. Faulkner, as in his last novel, extends ‘official’ Southern rhetoric to an extreme, while his version of the myth has led him to the cul de sac of simultaneous love and hatred for the South. Warren, as a knowing intellectual, represents the generation which cannot help being tied to, just as it cannot help drifting away from, the Southern milieu and its myth. Taylor, a young man, writes ‘as’ a Southerner, but actually he is no longer of the South. The hold of the myth is weakening.

* * *

Notes

1. Erskine Caldwell, This Very Earth, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1948.

2. William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, Random House, New York, 1948.

3. Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, Harper, New York, 1930.

4. Herbert Agar (ed.), Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1936.