A Choice of Tradition: Allen Tate (1980)

oé 9Í>Ác€ce €>£ Sfiiadititm : tfáÍíen Sute by Kiffin Rockwell ALLEN TATE "A very high grade ofIndian. " More than acquaintance, less than friend. Shared as Southern distrust of Yankees, fear of the Twentieth Century, hatred of common man. Despised all New Deals, Fair Deals, Square Deals, New Orders in Europe, or Great Societies. Bulging forehead, an eye quick as a cat or serpent fixed. Prim moustache. Weary courtesy. The polished, touching, mocking verse showed the skill, the taste, and masked the meaning. From whatever Cumberland Calvinism started, became High Church, nor Lee's, Jefferson's Low Anglican nor Jackson's Scottish rite. Turned a while to Rome. (Helped his sales, not enough.) Poet, Librarian, Professor. Wed, an inside joke. First and last, poet. In the twelfth decade of Reconstruction, Tate is dead. The issue of Appalachian Heritage containing Jim Wayne Miller's "Appalachian Values/American Values," V and Jerry Morris's on the "Aestheics" of rural Appalachia reached me with the same mails that brought obituaries from several sources of Allen Tate, and Radcliffe Squires' "Literary Biography." G am impressed by the accuracy of the titles of these items: what Morris, in particular, is concerned with is a culture of poverty and rural life. The values of Miller are regional, and as such, may be supposed to be distinctive in America, American values being taken as somehow unlike those of the remainder of the world. Allen Tate was certainly one of the most distinguished "regional spokesmen" of our time, and a legitimate Southern Highlander. I can imagine Tate saying with heavy irony to someone in Europe that he was a hillbilly. It was not a word he used, of himself or others, but he was born in Ashland, Kentucky. An event that marked his boyhood and his writing occurred in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, where a negro was lynched in 1911 for the murder of a store-keeper. The relatively permanent home of his youth was Ashland, though he spoke unflatteringly of it. He became for a while a land-owner outside Clarksville, Tennessee. His later years were spent in Sewanee and Mounteagle. By birth and 30 residence Tate was one of us, as he was by ancestry. By background and by choice he was something else. A New Yorker might think Jerry Morris' title not only ridiculous but redundant: Is not Appalachia, by definition, rural? To ask the question is to forget that Pittsburg is within the northeastern limits of the Appalachian South, Huntington, West Virginia, in the north center. You pass paper mills, mines, and TVA to reach Birmingham on the southwest fringe of Southern Appalachia. None of this is attractive . But the industrialization of the mountains is not new; it goes back to just after the War Between the States. Big lumber mills operated throughout the mountains until the Depression. Charcoaling, that most wasteful of all industries, is still found here and there. But in contrast to industry, though perhaps even more disruptive of local tradition , tourism, horrid word, attacked the mountains even before the Revolution. The Springs of Virginia have not yet lost all their glitter, and Vanderbilt House (near Asheville, North Carolina) is only the gaudiest of monied intrusions. The rural of Appalachia is not then to be found in pure form in anything larger than a township , for where there is a county town, there is some industry, some foreign culture. Radcliffe Squires calls Mounteagle "an entirely remarkable place." So is the University of the South; but so is Valle Crucis in North Carolina, where Tate interrupted his college course. If Mounteagle was a conference center, such are many; but Valle Crucis is almost the creation of an Episcopalian brother and sister. When death first confronted the young Tate, he went to a place very unlike the university, the usual mountain cove, or the literary world. What effect this may have had on his spiritual development I cannot conjecture; it seems impossible that it should have had little or none. *¦ Jim Miller points to the differing attitudes of mountain folk as such and of those who sent their children to the academies. Tate belonged to the gentry. There had been money, and there was...