Literature and Culture: The Fugitive-Agrarians

T HE question of the relationship between literature and the culture in which it is produced has been raised in many ways since Taine advanced his theory of literature as the product of "race, epoch, and era" ;' but the development of a sizeable body of distinguished literature in the South in the last forty years has seemed to many to pose the issue in fresh terms. It was stated tauntingly by Donald Davidson when he challenged the sociologists to "account for the appearance in Mississippi, of all places, of William Faulkner, in the three decades between 1920 and 1950."2 Howard W. Odum and John Maclachlan replied in the Hopkins Review,3 but I think that the group of writers known as the Fugitive-Agrarians are peculiarly suited to examination in such terms and that such an examination will indicate by example certain significant aspects of the relationship of the artist to his culture. There assembled in Nashville, Tennessee, in the early 1920's a group of young writers of literary genius so startling that they and their works have left what seems to be an indelible mark on American letters and on American culture. The writers were more than a dozen poets and critics-among them John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Merrill Moore, and Robert Penn Warren-the place of their assembling was Vanderbilt University, and the occasion was a small magazine which they published called The Fugitive.4 Astringent wit, philosophic depths clouded by obscurity, high technical skill, and an almost religious devotion to art and to its thoughtful and committed criticism were typical of the group. The very name of their magazine reflected a certain Ishmaelism, a sense of alienation. Tate said, "A Fugitive was quite simply a Poet: the Wanderer, or even the Wandering Jew, the Outcast, the man who carries the secret wisdom of the world."5 The group was rejecting what Davidson called "poet-laureating, the cheapness and triviality of public taste, even among those supposed to be cultured; the lack of serious devotion to literature, to the arts, to ideas."6 Other Southern writers were in much the same ferment. As early as 1921 the editors of the New Orleans little magazine The Double Dealer, in which William Faulkner's work was first published, declared: "It is high time, we believe, for some doughty, clear visioned penman to emerge from the sodden marshes of Southern literature. We are sick to death of the treacly sentimentalities with which our well-intentioned lady fictioneers regale us."7 The Fugitive's editors asserted that it fled "from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South."8 But in this flight they produced what Edmund Wilson called "a new literature that is as free from the flowers of rhetoric as it is from the formulas of gallantry .... Although it has sloughed off these demoded trappings, it has kept much of the grace and distinction with which they were formerly worn."9 Several of the best of these writers became members of the group who in 1930 issued the * Read before a joint meeting of the Southeastern American Studies Association and the Southern Sociological Society, Asheville, North Carolina, April 11, 1958. 1 Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la litterature anglaise (Paris, 1864). 2 In an essay, "Why the Modern South Has A Great Literature," Vanderbilt Studies in the Humanitics, I (1951), 1-17; quoted in Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South, ed. by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs (Baltimore, 1953), p. 83. 3Odum, "On Literature and Southern Culture," reprinted in Southern Renascence, pp. 84-100; Maclachlan, "No Faulkner in Metropolis," reprinted in ibid., pp. 101-111. 4The best account of this group is John M. Bradbury, Thie Fugitives: A Critical Account (Chapel Hill, 1958). 5 "The Fugitive-1922-1925," Princeton University Library Chronicle, III (1942), 78-79. 6 From an unpublished letter of May 10, 1939, quoted by Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, in The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, 1947), p. 121. 7 "Southern Letters," The Double Dealer, I (1921), 214. 8 Bradbury, The Fugitives, p. 13. 9 The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and the Thirties (New York: 1952), pp. 193194.