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Allen Tate: A Recollection. - book reviews
National Review, Jan 27, 1989 by Clyde Wilson
Allen Tate: A Recollection, by Waker Sullivan (Louisiana State University, 117 pp., $16.95)
INFERIOR MINDS are interested in things. Average minds are interested in personalities. Superior minds are interested in principles. The lower categories are excluded from the higher, but the reverse is not true. A superior mind also exists in the worlds of things and personalities.
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Allen Tate's was a mind of the third category, but this Professor Walter Sullivan of Vanderbilt University, who was a member of Tate's "circle" from the 1940s until Tate's death in 1979, is concerned with the realm of personality. Tate's character flaws, weak moments, very active sex life, and senescent infirmities are graphically remembered in this unquestionably well-crafted and powerful biographical document. It is an example of the now familiar genre of revelation about the personal lives of authors, setting at naught Faulkner's dictum that the important thing about a writer is his work. The tone is established by a remark of Brainard Cheney, an intimate of most of the Agrarian-Fugitive group, in regard to Tate, as rendered by Sullivan: "He's a monster! Goddamn it, he's a monster! But I love him."
The central members of the Agrarian-Fugitive group-Davidson, Warren, Lytle, Ransom, and Tate-loom large in the creative literature and criticism of the twentieth century, and almost as large in social thought, as is testified by their ever-widening rings of disciples, now into a third generation, and by the continuing output of literature on them. Why this is so is not yet fully explicated, though the ultimate answer will probably lie in the region suggested by Tate himself in a few brief casual, and crucial essays on Southern literature as the product of a uniquely pregnant moment of transition from tradition to modernism.
The centrality of these writers to intellectual life in the West is an amazing phenomenon when you consider that they lived most of their lives and did most of their work (with the partial exception of Warren) in a world that was alien and inhospitable to them-in its prosperity, utilitarian manners, bureaucratization of art and scholarship, innocence of guilt and sin, and triumphant materialism. They were marginal men in nearly every respect except the most important-their personal integrity, their dedication to craft, and their crucial purchase on thc disintegrations of modernism.
None was more marginal than Tate, who alone among this group pursued the life of the unrooted Bohemian artist-intellectual on both sides of the Atlantic, who literally lived by his wits for much of his life, and who flouted many of the traditional conventions. Not the greatest artist among the Agrarians; not, contrary to Sullivan (like Tate, a Roman Catholic convert), the best theologian (a distinction that belongs to Andrew Lytle), Tate nevertheless combined the highest skills of poet, critic, and essayist to become, as M. E. Bradford has put it, "the most complete example" of "the man of letters in the antique European sense" among contemporary Americans.
For this reason, it is possible that Tate will find his place among the small company (after Yeats and Eliot) who will be looked back upon by intellectual historians as exemplary figures of our age, as Erasmus was for the sixteenth century and Goethe for the eighteenth. If so, he will be exemplary both in his poetic vision and intellectual formulations and in his disordered private life, which is so thoroughly and skillfully examined here.
As a historian I can by no means approve the suppression of the record, but one wonders why Professor Sullivan did not deposit this recollection in the Vanderbilt University library for the use of future biographers. The decision to publish at this time, when a number of the persons portrayed are still living, is especially puzzling because Sullivan has been an eloquent opponent of the graphicness of modern literature. To advocate reticence in art while publishing ugly stories about one's friends seems to me exactly the opposite of the course that would be pursued by a proper disciple of the Agrarians, who advocated and displayed integrity in art and good manners in private life.
Sullivan's treatment is not and is not intended to be a contribution to intellectual history or an examination of Tate's place in letters. Its intent is biographical context, a cause it serves forcefully. But the most important thing about a writer, or probably about any man (except for that part best known to his Creator), is indeed his work, which this book illuminates only marginally, if at all. In fact, we are not yet at the point where Tate and his confreres can be assessed with true historical perspective, though perhaps we soon will be. This book, as the author probably knows, is a document of the transition.
COPYRIGHT 1989 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
