The Modernist as Confederate

In his literary essays, as well — the best of which are available in Essays of Four Decades — Tate produced work that bears remembering, especially for his early and feisty advocacy of new, “difficult” writers like Hart Crane and William Faulkner. Within the rather narrow range of his taste (he seemed as humorless as anyone of woman born could be), Tate was a shrewd judge, with a way of driving home his apercus with a quick, single stroke of the pen that goes far to compensate for the sometimes dust-dry decorum of his prose.

Tate outlasted or outmaneuvered most of the other heirs apparent, until by the late 1950s he was the leading emeritus modernist, a regular participant in ceremonial occasions though no longer a creative force to be reckoned with. He occupied the chair of poetry at the Library of Congress, won prizes from the Bollingen Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, was president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, as well. Few poets have ever had so many laurels to sit on. And that is just about all he did for many years while he procrastinated work on the memoir he’d contracted to write for Scribner’s in 1966. Not for Tate the auroras of autumn. He died in 1979, “angry, bitter at many old friends, and obsessed with money.”

Or such, at least, was the judgment of David Laskin in Partisans, a group biography in which Tate and his wife, Caroline Gordon, figure as supporting players. It is not an accident that there has not been a full-scale biography of Tate until now, with the publication of Thomas A. Underwood’s Allen Tate: Orphan of the South. Tate did his best to erect a wall of silence, both by funking the task of the contracted memoir, and then by squelching the work of a would-be biographer, Louis Rubin. After Rubin admitted defeat, Robert Buffington tried his hand, only to decide — when his “authorized” biography bit the dust — that “If he left out all the names he had been pressed to leave, there would not be much left to write.” A third aspirant biographer, Ned O’Gorman, has been candid about the difficulties posed by the dragons guarding Tate’s literary estate:

I have discovered that lies, deceptions, half-truths, fake truths, family loyalties, friendships, literary feuds get in the way and render even a birth date suspect. . . . The difficulty, after all the literary feuds are ironed out, is how we will deal with Allen’s erotic life. It was not a phase, a period, a flash of libidinous fever. It was a quality of life that assumed in his marriages a fragmenting power and dealt to his creative life a sundering loss of energy. . . . Many of the ladies with whom Allen slept are alive. Many of them are distinguished, and some of them are “celebrities.” . . . I must find a way to deal with this erotic “element” and to do it with charity — but unless it is dealt with there is no biography.

Tate’s widow has promised to take O’Gorman to court if he writes the book he so beguilingly advertises.

Underwood has got round the problem by limiting the first of his promised two volumes to those years before 1938 when the poet’s behavior, as reported, can pass muster with the dragons at the gate. Though not as zesty as the tale O’Gorman suggested (indeed, rather flavorless in those regards), it is a life full of improving or cautionary lessons, with vistas of a vanished literary world less glamorous by far than the jazz-age legends, but with an occasional springtime whiff of genuine barnyard innocence.

Tate was born in Kentucky (though he grew up thinking he was from Tennessee, and sometimes claimed Virginia, as a German might adopt the ennobling von) and died in Tennessee. Though he spent some years as an expatriate in New York, France, and Minnesota, he was a professional southerner, whose constant theme, in his poetry, prose fiction, and essays, was Dixie. His signature poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (begun in 1926 and fiddled with for the next decade), is a lament for the primal Eden of the antebellum South, when Faith and Chivalry were in flower. His one novel, The Fathers (1938), is a tragedy set in the same lost Eden, as Virginia is swept, all innocently, into the Civil War, her prelapsarian virtues corrupted by Northern guns and money. This myth became doctrine in the political tracts that Tate wrote as an advocate for the political clique known first as the Fugitives and later as the Agrarians.

Under neither name did Tate and his associates (among them such notables as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren) engage in any actual political activities other than to write tracts and speak at small conferences, but in the context of that time, the 1930s, this allowed them to steer safely between the Scylla of Fascism and the Charybdis of communism, and to emerge at the end of World War II relatively uncompromised.

Even so, by today’s litmus tests many of the Agrarians would seem to be as far off in the fever swamps as Seward Collins, the published of their principal journal, the American Review. Collins’s aim was to create the American equivalent of the Action Francaise or the British Distributionists, led by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. He was, in effect, an upscale Father Coughlin, with the same populist alternatives to New Deal socialism, the same tropism toward Mussolini and Hitler. For Collins, the Jews and Communists were a single enemy, and Tate’s take on this was pragmatic: “With the fierce, literal, Yankee logic of his, Collins has worked himself into a great froth over the Jews. Let us not discourage him.” Tate would later eschew overt anti-Semitism, but it was surely no accident that he was one of the chief engineers behind Ezra Pound’s receiving of the Bollingen Prize in poetry and eventual release from St. Elizabeths, the insane asylum that was his sanctuary from charges of treason.

As one might expect of someone so smitten with Dixie, Tate’s views on “the Negro problem” are even more of a problem and even more revealing. There is no other American intellectual of distinction whose views come as close to unqualified redneck racism (unless it was his colleague Robert Penn Warren). He was contemptuous of Northern “reformers who are anxious to have Negroes sit by them on street cars.” Such do-gooders couldn’t understand “that there has never been equality anywhere, there never will be, nor ought there to be.” The best way “to destroy the lynching-tension between the races” was to give blacks and whites their own subsistence farms so they would not rub shoulders in soul-destroying cities. And in 1934, in Collins’s American Review he declared: “I belong to the white race, therefore I tend to support white rule. Lynching is a symptom of weak, inefficient rule; but you can’t destroy lynching by fiat or social agitation; lynching will disappear when the white race is satisfied that its supremacy will not be questioned in social crises.”

Little wonder that in his emeritus years, when he was presiding over various learned conclaves, Tate edited such potentially scandalous materials from his life and bibliography, even choosing not to republish the two most successful non-fiction works of his youth, biographies of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, both of them rich in embarrassments. Yet for all of this ethnic cleansing, the odor lingers everywhere — and most damagingly, in the novel he set so much stock by, The Fathers. Tate was a fervent elitist in all things. He believed there were Dantean hierarchies in Heaven (if Heaven existed, which he wasn’t quite sure of), and similar rankings in anything else that mattered, including the arts. In the art of the novel, he revered Faulkner and championed his work at an early date, but he was full of contempt for the more successful Southern novelists of his day, such as Thomas Wolfe and Erskine Caldwell.

Of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, he carped, “I could not get past page sixty, and I walked out of the movie.” If that is true, then he would not have known how uncannily similar it is to The Fathers, nor how far superior it is in plausibility, dramatic intensity, and basic carpentry. Tate’s women are cardboard next to Mitchell’s, his men plywood. His larger scenes are a jumble of stage directions, with every cough and rustle annotated to no purpose. The dialogue never develops its own momentum or emits a distinctive aroma. The first two-thirds of its three hundred pages are lumbering as a wheelbarrow, while the finale is a hysterical pile-up of corpses, at the center of which stands the same primal scene that figures so prominently in Gone With the Wind and, even more, in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation: A black man who has threatened the heroine, an innocent Southern belle, is killed for his effrontery by a chivalrous Southern gentleman. The spin that Tate puts on this old chestnut adds no moral illumination, nor any unique historical slant. Indeed, the basic staple of the historical novel, those details that are tellingly redolent of a bygone era, are in very short supply. By his own high standards, Tate must be reckoned an inferior novelist.

He must have known. The work on The Fathers went slowly, with frequent blockages, unlike the ease with which he wrote his biography of Stonewall Jackson, a book that excels in just those respects in which the novel fails: narrative momentum and vivid detail. Other projects had given Tate equal difficulty during the 1930s — a biography of Robert E. Lee that he abandoned before it was well begun, and a “history” of his own family, which became a quagmire of half-truth and wishful thinking. These defects were his true inheritance as the offspring of two inveterate romancers, a feckless father, Orley, who went bankrupt when Allen was a boy and a mother, Nellie, who might have been a model for Blanche DuBois in her more genteel moments. It was the son’s ambition to turn his mother’s airy self-delusions into history, a project doomed, like his father’s businesses, to failure. The abandoned family history gradually evolved into The Fathers.

What became of Tate after the publication of his novel we know only from the glimpses available in the biographies of his many famous friends, for Thomas Underwood concludes this first volume of his biography as Tate finishes The Fathers and before he would become an academic legend for his philandering, and the mentor and drinking buddy of the young Robert Lowell.

The interest of Underwood’s volume resides, therefore, in its portrait of the poet as a young modernist. For it is the poetry that has, despite its thorniness, stood the test of time: interesting both in its own right and as a uniquely “pure” specimen of American modernism. Tate’s poems, like those of his friend Hart Crane, seem Athena-like, springing from the zeitgeist fully armed and showing little evidence of its evolution. Even his juvenile work reads like imitations of Eliot. Tate wrote some teenage doggerel that imitates Poe’s “The Bells,” but his visible influences thereafter exclude most poetry written before the twentieth century (excepting the French symbolists).

The truth is that he had probably read little except modern poetry, for he was not a precocious student of anything but the violin. As a teenager Tate studied with Eugene Ysaye at the Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. Ysaye’s judgment of Tate’s graduation recital at age eighteen was that his left hand was good “but it is all very uninteresting.” Tate abandoned the violin, and yet, in an odd way, it may have been his musical discipline that was the secret of his precocious success as a poet. A violinist must possess absolute concentration, a sense of nuance but not without zest, flair, elan, and a sure attack. All these qualities exist in Tate’s earliest poems — and rarely in the work of other apprentice poets. Modernism has nothing to do with it.

The benefit the young Tate derived from being a poet without a tradition is similar to that which young painters like Basquiat enjoy in having no painterly role-models but Matisse, Rauschenberg, and Warhol: If they have the knack to do quick knock-offs of the trend-setters, they needn’t regret the lack of more time-honored competencies. At twenty-one Tate could do a jazz-age riff like this bit from his poem “Euthanasia”:

 

The graceless madness of her lips,

Who was the powder-puff of life,

Cannot rouge those cheeks nor warm

His cold corpuscles back to strife.

If its stylistic and rhetorical tics now seem a little dated, the effect they had on the editors of the Double Dealer, a Modernist magazine that published Hart Crane and Babette Deutsch, was electric. They hailed him as one of “the white hopes of the South” and assured him, “Absolutely anything that you do will be met very hospitably here.”

Strictly speaking, Tate was no surrealist, but the thrill of such quatrains to his contemporaries would have been similar: the disjunction between the neon imagery and the prim diction, the in-your-face and slippery non sequiturs — mad lips that can’t rouge cheeks, life as a powder-puff. It doesn’t parse but there is a ghostly shimmer of naughtiness, as though one were looking at the X-ray of a poem by Swinburne. This is what modernism looked like to a bright Tennessee teenager in 1923. And if anyone asks what it means, you are licensed to sneer.

Those who have written about Tate at any length tend, expectably, to be unqualified in their admiration of his poetry, but John Stewart, the author of the most persuasive study of the Fugitives and Agrarians, The Burden of Time (1965), has reservations about Tate’s early poems. He also offers a droll account of the Nashville of the 1920s that contextualizes Tate and the other Fugitives in a way that the more reverential Underwood does not.

The central figure in Stewart’s account is the poet and bodybuilder Sidney Hirsch (he posed in the buff for Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney), who would become the guru and den leader of the Fugitives when they were mostly undergraduates at Vanderbilt University. Prior to that, he wrote The Fire Regained, a civic pageant in verse meant to commemorate the replica of the Parthenon that had been built in Nashville’s Centennial Park. Nashville was promoting itself as “the Athens of the South” and needed a Parthenon and some classic theater to go with it. It was a huge success, for it offered, to quote the advertisement, “The Flight of a Thousand Doves, the Revel of the Wood Nymphs, the Thrilling Chariot Race, the Raising of the Shepherd from the Dead, and the Orgy of the Flaming Torches.” What would one not give to travel back to 1898 to hear such lines as these, delivered by a chorus of Greek maidens:

 

O Hestia! Virgin votaries we,

Attend our tremulation.

Come Astraea from cerulean seas,

To fend our tribulation.

O guard they doves within the cote

That is thine own afflatus,

Defence devise that shall defeat

Storm shades would devastate us!

Stewart’s account of Hirsch and Nashville’s civic pageants explains more about the young Tate and his poetry than Underwood manages in his new biography, for all his careful documentation. Hirsch was a proper Oedipal father, king of the Nashville frogpond of the arts, the monster from whom the young poet must escape, only to discover, years later, that he has become just such a monster himself, idolatrously reverent of the Great Classics, in love with his own high pomp, and delighting in fustian that wows the groundlings.

But the fact is that the young poet did become the mature poet — allusive, gnomic, and germane; as full of riddles as in his salad days, but riddles that merit tending to. Tate was fond of quoting Yeats’s dictum: “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

Neither in his fiction nor his essays could Tate resolve his internal conflicts as an apologist for antebellum (and medieval) values and a twentieth-century American intellectual. But in his poetry his quarrel is with himself, a man who would have liked to sing at vespers along with T. S. Eliot, but who instead stood immobilized at the cemetery gate contemplating the twin skulls of death and history:

 

Row after row with strict impunity

The headstones yield their names to the element,

The wind whirrs without recollection;

In the riven troughs the splayed leaves

Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament

In the seasonal eternity of death;

Then driven by fierce scrutiny

Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,

They sough the rumour of mortality.

Those disposed to might still sniff at these opening lines of “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” might think them clotted or ponderous. But they are the genuine article, and so is the rest of the poem, which would provide, some forty years later, the impetus and impulse for Robert Lowell’s own signature poem and riposte, “For the Union Dead.” Another poet who has testified to his regard for Tate, and emulated his example, is Geoffrey Hill. Judged by the quality of his acolytes, Tate has racked up a high score.

Unfortunately, Tate’s poems are no longer available outside anthologies. There is a fourteen page selection of ten poems in the Library of America’s second volume of twentieth-century American poetry, but anyone who is duly impressed by that selection will have to search used bookstores for one or another winnowing that the author made in his later, less productive years.

His output was small, which may seem a charity in an author so difficult, but it is full of surprises, such as his translation of the late Latin Pervigilium Veneris. In my own youth, when everything else by Tate simply baffled me, I doted on that poem’s over-determined sonorities, as on a new poem by Poe. It opens:

 

Tomorrow let loveless, let lover tomorrow make love:

O spring, singing spring, spring of the world renew!

In spring lovers consent and the birds marry

When the grove receives in her hair the nuptial dew.

Tomorrow may loveless, may lover tomorrow make love.

There are twenty-one more strophes, all sealed with the same refrain, one that seems — in its lyric teetering between loss and expectation — a suitable epitaph for this poet whose own life was so similar in its antitheses: a poet in the springtime of the modern era who yet was consumed with bitterness for the salt desert Carthage of the South; a man whose own springtime offered meager rewards (though his muse was generous); a gentleman who became in his late years something of a satyr (though we will have to wait for Underwood’s second volume to learn those details) — but only after his art had ceased to flower.

Thomas M. Disch is the author of two books of poetry criticism: The Castle of Indolence (1995) and the forthcoming The Castle of Perseverance: Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry.