The faithful heart. . - book review

Modern Age, Wntr, 2003 by Christopher Clausen

Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance, by Mark Royden Winchell, Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000. 386 pp.

DONALD DAVIDSON, who died in 1968, is now an almost forgotten figure in American literature, but from the 1930s through the 1950s he was known for two reasons. First, he was an important member of the Fugitive poets, the group of Southern writers who had clustered around Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and included Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and a number of lesser figures. Davidson was arguably as good a poet as any of these better-remembered three.

The second reason for his onetime fame ironically helps explain the eclipse of his literary reputation. Alone among significant Southern writers, Davidson defended not just a general notion of the agrarian Old South but segregation and white supremacy, as vociferously as he knew how, when these issues exploded like Roman candles in the national sky. Like other white supremacists, most of whom lacked anything approaching his talents and intellectual sophistication, Davidson found himself increasingly isolated even in the South. Today few anthologies of American poetry include any of his work. Insofar as he has any reputation at all today, it is as a minor Fugitive and a crank.

Mark Royden Winchell, a professor at Clemson University whose many previous biographies include a 1996 one of the Southern literary critic Cleanth Brooks, tries hard to remedy the neglect of Davidson with this handsome, ambitious work. The book is somewhat defiantly dedicated to the late Melvin Bradford, a student and disciple of Davidson whose own expressions of Southern patriotism made him too controversial to be confirmed as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities during the Reagan administration. As the subtitle indicates, the main focus is on Davidson as an embattled defender of a Southern way of life that was melting away before his disapproving eyes. The result is about as enthralling a story as the life of an English professor can reasonably be.

At least by implication, the story is as much about the South since the Civil War as it is about Davidson. "From the very beginning," the first sentence of the book declares, "the South was two nations. One was a land of planters and aristocrats--a group that included the original leaders of this country and the first noteworthy southern writer, William Byrd of Westover." The other South, in this dichotomy, consisted of frontiersmen, usually Scotch-Irish by descent--"uncouth, violent, and frequently illiterate." It was from the latter group that Donald Davidson's family descended. The first group, however, constituted the ideal that Southern patriots, at least intellectual ones, have usually adhered to the Old South of which Mount Vernon and Monticello represent the chief architectural monuments and Gone with the Wind the most popular literary reflection.

One could plausibly observe that there have always been two other Souths, the Old and the New, and that both are constantly changing. The Old South of history and legend is by no means the same as it was when Davidson was born in 1893. Its social and political significance has altered repeatedly to preserve its continuing relevance as an idealized contrast to the succession of New Souths that have come into being since 1865--from the Georgia newspaperman Henry Grady's first New South of piety and textile mills and segregation, to the Newer South of the civil-rights movement, to the prosperous Newest South whose shopping centers and high-tech industries make it seem much like the rest of the country.

Less than four decades after it ceased to be solidly Democratic, this latest land of Dixie has become the geographic base of the Republican Party. Even at the end of his life Davidson would not have recognized a South in which a Democratic presidential nominee from his own Tennessee, while splitting the national vote with the Republican candidate, gained not a single electoral vote in the old Confederacy. Nor, in all likelihood, would he have recognized a Democratic Party that was unambiguously part of the occupation force against which the 'resistance" of the book's subtitle was directed.

Because so much of Davidson's life was that of a Vanderbilt student and professor, as well as book editor of the Nashville Tennessean (he needed the money), Winchell necessarily ekes out the story of his life with a lot of background and information on related subjects. When Davidson goes off to college, his biographer gives a brief history of Nashville, followed by one of the Vanderbilt English program. Actually, both of these small digressions are useful, given the two bases of Davidson's reputation noted above. We need to know what his various environments looked and felt like before we can understand how he reacted to them.

Likewise the most outwardly eventful episode in Davidson's life, his service as an infantry lieutenant in the First World War, is explained in some detail and illustrated with a long extract from his diary of the time. As literary movements make their appearance in the story, Winchell explains them also in detail. When Davidson becomes a teacher at the Bread Loaf School of English, the history of that venerable summer session is narrated with the same thoroughness. There are also many photographs of Davidson's forebears and comrades in arms at various stages of his life.