The faithful heart. . - book review

Modern Age, Wntr, 2003 by Christopher Clausen

Whether or not the historical Lee felt anything like this complex of hopes and emotions--historians generally depict him as a postwar peacemaker--the end of the poem is as powerful as anything any Fugitive ever wrote:

And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchiess

To flower among the hills to which we
   cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we
   flee
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children's children
    forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart.

Yet none of it ever came to pass. If God was waiting in 1868 or 1938, He is waiting still, and from the standpoint of Davidson's ghost, things have only gotten worse. Southern literature gained national recognition in the first half of the twentieth century because of writers like William Faulkner and the Fugitive poets, who depicted so effectively a defeated province in conflict with itself. Like a kaleidoscope the turbulent South of Davidson's later years, defeated for a second time, has given way in each succeeding decade to a new image, from the integrated, slightly maudlin Carter camp meeting of the 1970s to the savings-and-loan bonfire of the 1980s to the Arkansas slapstick of Bill Clinton and Whitewater in the I 990s--with the whole spectacle being given a patina of antiquity by rapidly growing numbers of Civil War re-enactors.

Today's South is fast blending into what I have elsewhere called post-cultural America, a society in which identity and behavior owe little to any ancestral past. As the Confederate flag comes down in more and more places, the peremptory loyalties that Davidson felt bound by seem increasingly incomprehensible, or worse, quaint. This liberation from the past has both good and bad sides, but it is on the whole a fact past arguing with. Insofar as he resisted these trends, Davidson's life ended in something like total defeat. The only hope for his future reputation, as well as the main justification for this affectionate biography by a man who never knew him, is the possibility that "The climate may be right for a sympathetic reassessment of Davidson's verse." Maybe, maybe not, but it would be pleasant to think so.

CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN is Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and author of Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-Cultural America (Ivan R. Dee, 2000).