A passionate voice

National Review, March 13, 1987 by J.O. Tate

A PASSIONATE VOICE

I'M TOLD THAT those who gathered atthe Ritz-Carlton in Chicago just before last Thanksgiving to observe the bestowal of the Ingersoll Prizes "came to hear Naipaul.' The widely respected --and sometimes vilified--Mr. V. S. Naipaul received the T. S. Eliot Award of $15,000, as had Eugene Ionesco, Anthony Powell, and Jorge Luis Borges before him.

"But,' the story goes, "they lefttalking about Lytle.' The other Ingersoll Prize, the Richard Weaver Award of an equal sum, was given to Andrew Lytle of Tennessee, a recognition previously tendered to such distinguished conservatives as Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, and James Burnham. Mr. Lytle stirred the audience with his provocative powers as a raconteur, for which he is legendary.

Andrew Lytle is legendary formuch else. One of the original Agrarians, Lytle contributed to I'll Take My Stand in 1930; his essay "The Hind Tit' asserted a vision of American history from which he has never retreated. Forty-five years later, in A Wake for the Living: A Family Chronicle,

Lytle anecdotally summoned,through the story of his family, an embodied vision of community drawn together by blood, by vows, by experience, culture, and place. Looking back through his kinfolk and neighbors at the history of the Republic, Lytle articulated a sense of the ties that bind to unite the generations. He also showed a sense of the unraveling of the polity through violence and dispersal. As the title of A Wake for the Living suggests, to Lytle the dead are the ones who are truly alive. Thomas H. Landess, writing in this magazine (Sept. 25, 1975), saw in Lytle's chronicle the story of "that community of the living, the dead, and the yet unborn which Burke lauded and which Americans always fought fiercely to defend until the emergence of ideological warfare.' But Lytle's innate conservatism is only a part, though a substantial one, of the reason why he received the Richard Weaver Award--an award named, by the way, after a late editor of this journal, and one that, having been given to luminaries and sages like Kirk and Burnham, will have for friends of NATIONAL REVIEW a particular meaning.

Thirty years ago, writing in thisjournal, Robert Phelps (in "Dust for an Adam,' Aug. 24, 1957) eloquently and energetically responded to the publication of Andrew Lytle's novel The Velvet Horn and went so far as to recommend theft if purchase or borrowing was out of the question. But since today The Velvet Horn is available in facsimile from the University of the South at Sewanee, our response to the opportunity should probably be the convenitional one. Actually paying for a copy is a way of thanking Sewanee for making that novel once again available.

And reading The Velvet Horn is themost direct acknowledgment of the stature of its author. The Velvet Horn is itself a look backward at history-- at the hill country of the Cumberlands before, during, and after the Civil War --and also more than a backward glance at familial history as well as the history of the human race as seen in the universal, endlessly repeated experience we know as "myth,' both pagan and Christian. The Velvet Horn is a meditation on the eternal human yearning for primal unity, here represented by incest, and on the recursive experience of division, the Fall into Time, the wages of sin. There are more senses than one is which The Velvet Horn has something in common with Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, with Tate's The Fathers, with Warren's All the King's Men.

But above all, The Velvet Horn--usually considered Lytle's masterpiece --is a sustained vision, an extended trope, a lyric tour-de-force, a tragic-comic flight that is one of the most imposing novels in American literature. The Velvet Horn is both a down-home story about rural life and a cultivated art-novel that's an object lesson, a benchmark of technique and poetic intensity. The dedication of that novel-- to that accomplished ritualist, John Crowe Ransom--may be the most significant dedication in American literature since Melville dedicated Moby Dick to Hawthorne.

In his famous essay "The WorkingNovelist and the Mythmaking Process' --which is one of the more remarkable statements any literary artist ever made about his own work--Lytle has told of being possessed by a fury of creation as he finished The Velvet Horn. But that essay must also remind us of his other brilliant responses to Tolstoi, Flaubert, Faulkner--criticism written by an artist, keen analyses of fiction as individual as they are revealing. Lytle's essays and reviews gathered in The Hero with the Private Parts (1966) are an indispensable guide and an invaluable exposure to a unique sensibility.

An an accomplished tale-spinner, Lytlehas also distinguished himself in his short fictions, and his Stories are also available from Sewanee. In "Jericho, Jericho, Jericho,' the old dying woman is jealous of her grandson's fiancee, who will inherit her property; but before death takes her, she suffers an even worse reversal of expectation. In "Mr. MacGregor,' the narrator cannot accept the meaning of the story he tells--and this refusal, more than the story itself, explains why he tells obsessively what he must not understand. "The Mahogany Frame' is a classic story of a classic subject--the rite of passage, a boy's coming of age. "Ortiz's Mass' is an excerpt from Lytle's novel of Hernando de Soto, At the Moon's Inn. (1941), itself related to the novella, "Alchemy,' a story of Pizarro --these narratives being examinations of the prerogatives of Renaissance expansiveness --of Faustian pacts and Promethean revelations. The Will to Power, so displayed in American history, implies a flaw in the Eden of the heart's desire that will forever deny that drive toward and presumption of innocence that we see in The Velvet Horn and elsewhere.