Keeper of the Flame. - Review - book review

National Review, May 14, 2001 by Scott Morris

The difficult Lowell wasn't the only writer to benefit from Tate's guidance. The equally difficult Hart Crane did as well. Like Lowell, he moved in with Tate and made a nuisance of himself. But he too found the help that he was looking for-Tate provided extensive editorial and emotional assistance while Crane was working on The Bridge. And when no one else in American publishing thought Vladimir Nabokov worth a try, it was Tate (working at Holt) who first published Bend Sinister. Tate even wrote a blurb for the novel, which Nabokov would later say was the best he'd ever received.

Tate's judgment as a critic and mentor was equaled by his talent as a writer. Though he wrote until his death, the turbulent years that Underwood recounts in this first volume were among his most prolific. "To hear the night, to crave its coming, one must have deep inside one's secret being a vast metaphor controlling all the rest: a belief in the innate evil of man's nature, and the need to face that evil, of which the symbol is darkness, of which again the living image is man alone." This justly famous passage from The Fathers makes clear that Tate had attained both wisdom and mastery of craft.

Tate was a fighter, and he didn't miss out on many of the cultural brawls of his time. In an era far more skeptical than our own, Tate, who would later convert to Catholicism, heralded the supremacy of a theological outlook. He and his fellow Agrarians challenged Communism throughout the 1930s, when Marxist and socialist ideas were ascendant among the intelligentsia. V. F. Calverton, the Marxist editor of the Modern Quarterly, Granville Hicks, literary editor of the New Masses, and the critic Waldo Frank-among others-were beginning to evaluate contemporary literature according to its social content, while Tate took up arms to keep art safe from politicization. Long before the dawn of modern conservatism in the 1950s, Tate and his brethren were fighting against collectivist and secularist agendas with all their considerable might.

Aside from these battles, Tate continued to write poetry, and would always consider writing poetry the most important thing he did. He recognized that in order to win what is nowadays referred to as the culture war, one must be an active participant in one's culture. He furthermore understood that such participation must be for artistic rather than political purposes. "I confess that the political responsibility of poets . . . irritates me because the poet has a great responsibility of his own," Tate stated in his essay "To Whom Is the Poet Responsible?"

Anyone wondering why Tate has been neglected need look no further than those words. Far more than Tate's political conservatism, it was his forceful defense of the belief in a pre-political life-which is to say a realm that both precedes and transcends political concerns-that has caused left-leaning academics to wish Tate could be made to go away. Raising above politics the concerns of marriage and family, art and literature, and piety and loyalty toward one's home is anathema in the highly politicized environment of today's academy.