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Keeper of the Flame. - Review - book review
National Review, May 14, 2001 by Scott Morris
Allen Tate: Orphan of the South, by Thomas A. Underwood (Princeton, 429 pp., $35)
'I doubt," the novelist Malcolm Cowley once stated, "that any other poet in this country is a better judge of his contemporaries than Allen Tate." Literary critic R. P. Blackmur ranked Tate as an artist above Hemingway. T. S. Eliot considered him the best poet writing in America. More recently, George Core, editor of The Sewanee Review, argued that Tate "may well be the best American critic of our century."
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The quantity, quality, and diversity of the work Tate left behind is, indeed, remarkable. He was the author of two biographies, a memoir, eight collections each of poetry and essays, a novel, and over a hundred articles. He was an editor of and contributor to both The Fugitive and the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand, which remains an important work of political and cultural philosophy. As for awards and honors, Tate occupied the chair of poetry at the Library of Congress, served as president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and won prizes from the Academy of American Poets and other arbiters of artistic greatness. Three years before his death in 1979, Tate was given the National Medal for Literature.
Yet for all of his achievements, Tate has suffered curious neglect. The reasons will be discussed below, but for now the good news is that there are signs his reputation is being restored. In 1999, ISI Books published his Essays of Four Decades, making Tate's critical work available again. And we now have the first installment of a two-volume biography, which covers Tate's life from his birth in 1899 in Winchester, Kentucky, to the publication of his acclaimed novel The Fathers in 1938.
Precocious and with a cranium large enough to titillate a phrenologist, Tate was awkward and aloof as a child. But by the time he enrolled at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University, Tate had learned to play the enfant terrible. "If Jesus Christ should come upon earth and present me a poem I sincerely thought inferior, I would tell him just that to his teeth," the undergraduate once tenderly remarked. Though this comment betrays Tate's youthful hubris, it also speaks to his fearless commitment to art. Years later his dedication led Hemingway to conclude, "What it came down to was guts. And moral guts Allen had."
Even courage and genius need pruning, however, and happily for Tate he arrived at Vanderbilt just as the group of young thinkers who came to call themselves the Fugitives was beginning to coalesce. From this nascent movement would come the Agrarians and the New Critics. Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom are only three of the great writers nurtured by these remarkable gatherings.
A hotheaded advocate of modernism, Tate was publishing poetry in national magazines even as an undergraduate. Looking back on this period, he described himself as "a prig as disagreeable as you could possibly conjure up." But with the assistance of Davidson, Ransom, and the others, Tate matured and acquired intellectual discipline. When he moved to New York in the 1920s and met the poets and critics he had admired from afar-Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, and Malcolm Cowley-he was at last able to take the full measure of his Fugitive years. Though the young writers he met up north were great talents, they had little interest in the philosophical and aesthetic ideas that had captivated him and his fellow Fugitives. Having initially bridled at his mentors' old-fashioned rigor, he now saw that he had been given a valuable inheritance, one that served him particularly well as a participant in (as well as a critic of) modernism.
Tate's postgraduate years were marked by growing fame, relentless poverty, and great eccentricity. Underwood's biography abounds with lively anecdotes, providing a vivid primer on the American literary scene of the last century. We are informed, for example, that Tate and his future wife, the novelist Caroline Gordon, first made love in a Kentucky graveyard during a visit to Robert Penn Warren after Warren had tried to kill himself. (Gordon herself claimed that she had tried to commit suicide at the age of four.) We are also told of Tate's run- ins with various Left Bank expatriates, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Underwood offers a priceless encounter between Tate and Gertrude Stein, who one day remarked that no southerner could afford to know any history. Tate, who was then in the middle of researching a biography, shook his head and replied: "You ignorant old bi**h!" Thereby confirming once and for all his impeccable literary judgment.
Underwood also details the summer Robert Lowell came to live with Tate, "inaugurating one of the most powerful and volatile mentor-protege relationships in American literary history." Ford Madox Ford had been introduced to Lowell, who was then under the psychiatric care of the former Fugitive poet Merrill Moore. Ford, recognizing Lowell's intelligence, handed him the following advice: "Young man, go south and learn how to write." Ford himself then traveled to Tennessee to live with the Tates while working on The March of Literature, where he grew ever more corpulent and suffered from "a variety of physical ailments aggravated by the greasy Tennessee food." To everyone's surprise, Lowell pulled up one day, urinated on the side of the road, and pitched a Sears, Roebuck tent in Tate's yard. Though Lowell proceeded to drive everyone crazy, he emerged from the experience awestruck by Tate. "All the English classics," he recalled, "and some of the Greeks and Latins were at Tate's elbow. He maneuvered through them, coolly blasting, rehabilitating, now and then reciting key lines in an austere, vibrant voice. Turning to the moderns, he slaughtered whole Chicago droves of slipshod Untermeyer Anthology experimentalists."
