All quotation marks retained as data.
All end-of-line hyphens have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.
All smart quotes have been converted into straight quotes.
[This text is machine generated and may contain errors.]
THE REBEL MAGAZINE
VOLUME IX, NUMBER 1 1965-1966 EAST CAROLINA COLLEGE
RICHARD F. GORDON JR:
THE REBEL MAGAZINE
VOLUME IX, NUMBER 1 1965-1966 EAST CAROLINA COLLEGE
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW 3
LARRY BLIZARD Artist 18
JOHN JUSTICE The Window 23
JERRY TILLOTSON Odyssey " 1964 31
DWIGHT PEARCE Quiet 32
S. CHERNOFF The Jacket 33
Guy OWEN Randall JarrellTs Last Book 35
Editor, Thomas Speight
Associate Editor, Dan Williams
Business Manager, Richard Papcun
Assistance and advice:
Jackie Williams
Beth Clark
Barry Dressel
Janie Johnson
James Forsyth
Sarah Forsyth
Cover Painting by Larry Blizard
Published three times a year at East Carolina College,
Box 2486, Greenville, N. C.
BOOKS BY ALLEN TATE
BIOGRAPHIES:
Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier (1928)
Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (1929) o
POETRY:
Mr. Pope-and Other Poems (1928)
Ode to the Confederate Dead (1930)
Poems: 1928-1931 (1982)
The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936)
Selected Poems (1937)
Sonnets at Christmas (1941)
The Winter Sea (1944)
Poems: 1920-1945 (1948)
Poems: 1922-1947 (1948) :
Two Conceits for the Eye to Sing, if Possible (1950)
ESSAYS: \
Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936)
Reason in Madnesss Critical Essays (1941)
On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays, 19281948 (1948)
The Hovering Fly, and Other Essays (1949)
The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays (1953)
The Man of Letters in the Modern World: Selected Essays, 1928-1955 (1955)
Collected Essays (1959)
FICTION:
The Fathers (1938)
This list does not include numerous magazine
articles, editorships and co-editorships. The most
notable omission to many people will be The
House of Fiction, an anthology widely used in
writing courses, which he co-edited with Caroline
Gordon in 1959. The commentaries are detailed
expositions of the craft in literature. Mention
should also be made of the long association be-
tween Mr. Tate and The Sewanee Review.
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
INTERVIEWER: Well, I was going to ask you what
you are working on now.
TATE: This summer, for two months, I was try-
ing to finish up a long poem I began about ten
years ago " longer than that. I got pretty far
ahead on it, but then the T. S. Eliot memorial
issue of The Sewanee Review has taken up all
my time for the past two months. We are getting
out a memorial issue in January "a great deal
of correspondence; but thatTs about done now.
INTERVIEWER: Is that the poem Seasons of the
Soul?
TATE: No. I published three parts of it: oThe
Maimed Man,� oThe Swimmers,� and oThe
Buried Lake.� In my book of 1960 there are two
parts. ItTll be in nine parts. I think ITm going
to publish one more part in a magazine but keep
the rest for the book, which I hope is going to be
out in about a year.
INTERVIEWER: Will these be as you originally
published them, or will you go back and change
these small parts, or add on to them?
TATE: I would like to change a few things in
each. Each part is complete in itself, each is
a little narrative. There may be some continuity,
but I am not sure; itTs probably in my mind
rather than on the page. But I have seven parts
which I think are finished and an eighth almost,
and I have the ninth part to write from scratch.
I donTt know why nine parts, I just decided that
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
arbitrarily at the beginning. There are people "
children that walk on the sidewalk and feel they
have to step on every crack, or every other crack
" you lay down a rule and then you just follow
it.
INTERVIEWER: There was something Robert Lo-
well said in an article that appeared in The Se-
wanee Review a while ago called oVisiting the
Pater o.".
TATE: Oh yes, for my sixtieth birthday.
INTERVIEWER: And he said something about you
consider each poem your last.
TATE: Yes, ITve never expected to be able to
write another one. I think thatTs sort of playing
safe, you know. Suppose you canTt; then you will
have faced it in advance.
INTERVIEWER: I couldnTt tell whether he was
being facetious or whether you were being "
TATE: I didnTt know heTd said that. But ITm per-
fectly serious. I donTt know whether I can write
another one.
INTERVIEWER: DidnTt he also say something about
your cabinet-making? He saw one of your
cabinets.
TATE: Oh yes. The summer that Cal [Robert
Lowell] spent with us. That was a very amusing
summer, in retrospect, but very trying at the time.
I had a farm for a long time in Montgomery
County, Tennessee, and I had some timber cut
on the place " walnut, black walnut. I made some
corner cupboards and some other pieces of furni-
ture; I built a garage " Cal helped me with that.
He had never lived in the country; heTs complete-
ly urban, Bostonian. He was very amusing when
he first came to Tennessee. He said one day, oITve
never seen so many donkeys.� He thought mules
were donkeys. He was a wonderful boy. Of course
heTs a man nearly fifty now. He was only about
19 then. When he first came to the house we
didnTt know anything about him; he just drove
up. Nice Spring day. HeTd borrowed a car in
Nashville. He knew Merrill Moore and Mer-
rill had sent him to friends of his in Nashville.
He came up and introduced himself and said
that Mr. Ford" Ford Madox Ford "had told
him if he wanted to be a poet, go to Tennessee,
instead of Paris, and things like that. Shortly
after we went into the house he rather timidly
asked if he might spend the summer with us. I
said ITd be delighted to. have him, except that
Mr. Ford himself was arriving in a few days
with his wife and secretary. Mr. Ford was a
very large man, and he took up a lot of room.
And by way of dismissing the idea in a kind of
hyperbole, I said, oIf you came youTd have to
live in a tent. ITm sorry, I wish we could have
you.� And about a week later " you see Cal had
a literal New England mind " and a week later,
he drove up in the same car, and he opened the
trunk of the car, and he pulled out a nice new
green tent " set it up in the yard and stayed
there two months. But we became very fond of
him. Of course ITve been fond of him ever since.
HeTs a very great friend of mine.
INTERVIEWER: You mentioned Ford Madox Ford.
Amy Lowell and Gertrude Stein seem to be in
their heyday, but you find that people have never
heard of Ford Madox Ford or Sherwood Ander-
son. Why is that?
TATE: Yes, and itTs very curious. There have
been a great many books about Ford recently.
There is to be a complete edition to be gotten out
in a year or two by McGraw-Hill. And there
have been about four critical works. And just
recently, an excellent biography by a man named
Frank McShane; there is to be another biography
by Arthur Mizener, who did a good book on Scott
Fitzgerald. For some reason FordTs widow would
not let anybody see certain private papers, except
Arthur Mizener; Frank McShane didnTt see lots
of things. ItTs a fine book nevertheless. ArthurTs
book will probably be more complete. ItTll be
what is sometimes called the definite work. All
these books have been pubished, and yet the only
novel of FordTs which is still read today is The
Good Soldier. The others are not at present.
INTERVIEWER: I believe theyTve reissued The
Fifth Queen and something else together " in
hard-back. They did something on it in the Times.
TATE: Well, I should think The Fifth Queen would
be the thing to get out first in order to bring
FordTs reputation back. You know he had a
tremendous reputation in the 1920Ts up to the
middle of the thirties; then he disappeared.
INTERVIEWER: What was his real name? Was it
Hueffer or "
TATE: It was Ford Madox Hueffer. It was more
than that, it was Herman Ford Madox Hueffer "
had a great string of German names. Ford was
originally in his name and thereTs been a mystery
made of his changing his name. He simply didnTt
want to have a German name. But a legend I used
to hear was that after the great scandal with
Violet Hunt he had to change his name. He took
Violet Hunt to Germany and got what he thought
was a valid divorce from his first wife, Elsie Mar-
tindale. But the divorce was not valid in England.
They came back and registered at the Hotel Sa-
voy: Mr. and Mrs. Ford Madox Hueffer. This
must have been about 1911 or 12. The first Mrs.
Hueffer brought suit against the society column
which published this notice, oMr. and Mrs. Ford
Madox Hueffer are registered at the Savoy,� and
she won the suit. The court enjoined Violet Hunt
forever from calling herself Mrs. Hueffer. ThatTs
one explanation for the change of name to Ford
Madox Ford. Except the time of the change seems
to be pretty good evidence that it wasnTt really
that; it was simply changed from a German name
during the war. Yet he had the name all through
the war. He was Captain Hueffer, later Major
Hueffer.
INTERVIEWER: I didnTt know he was active in
the war.
TATE: Oh yes he was; he was gassed in the war.
INTERVIEWER: I guess the only ones you read
about being active are the ones that were killed.
TATE: Yes, the poets.
INTERVIEWER: T. E. Hulme was killed.
TATE: Well, Siegfried Sassoon wasnTt killed, but
he wrote war poetry. Wilfred Owen, of course,
was killed.
INTERVIEWER: When I was reading The Fathers
and that section along about three-quarters
through the book " it seemed to me to give a
recapitulation or something of the sort in classical
allegory.
TATE: Yes, Jason and the Golden Fleece.
INTERVIEWER: That really struck me because it
seemed to fit so well.
TATE: Well, ITm glad you feel that. I got to that
particular place and the boy had to get home.
HeTd seen all these horrors, the first bloodshed
in Alexandria, and run away from the Posey
house. I was up against it. I didnTt know what
I was going to do. I didnTt know how to get him
home. And I didnTt want to say, well, a certain
amount of time passed and he got home. I had to
show his progress home; and in order to fill that
out, I had to use the journey home as a way of
bringing the threads of the action together up to
that moment. It was a dangerous thing to do
because it was a climax and I had to have another
climax at the end, and a novel with two climaxes
is a little difficult to do. But it suddenly occurred
to me that the myth of Jason might work.
INTERVIEWER: I guess that was part of something
I was interested in, whether you had been building
up to this before...
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
TATE: Well, I couldnTt do anything for about a
month and finally the Jason thing popped into
my head one morning and I rushed to the Vander-
bilt Library and got out The Argonauts by Apol-
lonius of Rhodes and read it. I didnTt use all of
it. No, it wasnTt something ITd been building up
to at all. It was a technical device to get me over
a difficulty.
INTERVIEWER: Well, it seems to me to have trans-
cended a device. That was the startling thing
about it.
TATE: It had occurred to me that I could also
use a part of a poem I had written long before.
I have a poem called oThe Dream;� itTs about a
boy walking along a road with an old man whoTs
evidently his grandfather; and so the myth of
Jason, plus this walk with the apparition, gave
me the suggestion about the device of using the
myth. I couldnTt just let it occur in Lacy Bu-
chanTs mind. I wanted somebody else to tell him.
So I had the apparition of his grandfather, and
the boy was hallucinated.
INTERVIEWER: You said it occurred to you in the
morning. I just wondered, a lot of writers have
certain times of day they write. Do you keep a
particular schedule?
TATE: Only in the morning. If I canTt do it by
12:00, I give up. I used to be able to work all
day, but I canTt anymore "I havenTt for years.
I canTt work at night. Any notions I have usually
come to me first thing in the morning. I never
could sleep all day as most boys do when I was
your age.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, thereTs one part in The
Fathers where"I forget who"tells Lacy,
oHadnTt you better go to bed? You must be tired
by now.� But Lacy thinks, oITve never been tired
in my life.�
TATE: Yes. I donTt think I was ever tired until
I was about thirty years old. ITd get physically
tired, but not so tired I couldnTt do any work.
INTERVIEWER: I got very interested in that piece
oTechniques of Fiction.� And there was a ques-
tion about that " wait a minute, I thought I knew
where it was. Oh yes. You said something about,
I believe, that trade secrets seem to vanish once
they get into the province of formal criticism.
TATE: Yes, I think this is true. I think writers
learn from one another by word of mouth or
through their own works. That little device youTve
been asking me about " Jason. Now I think the
way a critic would go about it is the way you did.
That ITd been building up to it. ThatTd be the
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
critical approach, because it appears at any rate
that I had been building up to it, but I wasnTt.
I was not an architect. I was a carpenter trying
to do something practical. And Ford had an
immense knowledge of that kind of thing. He
could sort of glance at a manuscript and turn
the pages and he could tell you exactly what you
were doing. He was an amazing man. What little
I know about fiction I think I learned from Ford.
And I donTt think I could have written The
Fathers without The Good Soldier. I didnTt learn
everything Ford had to teach me, because I
couldnTt have used it all. But what I did learn
to use in The Fathers was how to get a first person
narrator whoTs sufficiently involved in the action
to makeThis report credible and at the same time
sufficiently detached to view the whole scene.
And the only way I could do that was through the
device of having him write the story fifty years
later. He gives you the actual scene, you have
the feelings and the perceptions of the boy, but
the old man is always standing over the shoulder
of the boy; and he knows more than the boy does.
And thatTs what "in a much more complex way
" thatTs what FordTs Dowell does in The Good
Soldier. He seems to be stupid, when he tells you
what is happening. He pretends, he says that
he doesnTt understand it. But in the very act of
telling you he doesnTt understand it, Ford lets the
reader understand, even if Dowell doesnTt. The
Good Soldier is one of the greatest pieces of fiction
ever written. I read it every two or three years
now, and ITm always surprised, there are sur-
prises in it still. You can never " itTs so complex
that you never can quite remember the sequence,
whatTs going to happen next. I suppose there are
greater novels because The Good Soldier is a novel
on a small scale. It doesnTt have the range of
experience of War and Peace or Anna Karenina.
But itTs like a French masterpiece on a small
scale.
INTERVIEWER: I donTt know whether itTs legiti-
mate to get at this, but you said itTs true that these
devices vanish under formal criticism. But do
you have any idea why they do?
TATE: Well, I think as a rule the formal critic
attributes to the novelist, or to the poet for that
matter, a conscious plan in advance of the writing
of the work. This is not usually the case, because
I think the novelist is usually " well, he has
usually only a sense of direction. He knows gen-
erally where heTs going. But the great problem
is to invent the detail that will get him to this
destination. And that canTt be foreseen, and the
technical problems of fitting that detail into a
design which is not yet complete is something
that formal criticism canTt deal with. As you
know, in our time thereTve been a great many
essays by writers explaining how they did it. I
wrote one myself. I donTt think I really did it
that way. Maybe a little of it was true, but I
was partly rationalizing. I was trying to "I was
giving the whole procedure of my oOde to the
Confederate DeadT a little more coherence and
certainty than it had. For some years I had
wanted to write a poem on that subject because
there were so many bad ones; I thought I would
try and see if I could write a better one. The only
really fine poem, an elegy on the Confederates,
is Henry TimrodTs ode after the war at the Mag-
nolia Cemetery in Charleston. ItTs very short.
It must be, what is it, ten or twelve lines, some-
thing like that? And the others are all the old "
they are mostly done by the United Daughters of
the Confederacy, an estimable group of ladies, few
of whom were poets. One morning, the first line
popped into my head: oRow after row with strict
impunity.� I said, well, where do you go from
there? I had no grand design. Of course it was
about a cemetery, it was an elegy, in fact the poem
was called elegy instead of ode at first. And then
I wrote the second line and moved on step by step.
I think it is true, that what I said in that essay
is true, that itTs not really about the Confederate
Dead. ItTs about the man whoTs writing the poem.
I think Conrad Aiken feels much the same way
about his poems "a kind of free but controlled
association is operating. You take what comes
and try to see what you can do with it. WouldnTt
it stand to reason that if a poet knew what his
poem was going to be about, and had a grand de-
sign for it" was able to see everything " why
should he write the poem? Poets write poems in
order to discover something that they didnTt know
before, something about themselves which they
discover through the formal requirements of
poetry.
INTERVIEWER: It certainly sounds more reason-
able than most...
TATE: ITm sure The Waste Land was written that
way. Everybody knows it was about twice as
long as it is and parts of it we know Eliot had
written years before; when he wrote most of it,
around 1920, he picked up those old fragments.
The one about Phlebas the Phonecian was a
French poem called oDans Le Restaurant;� and
the woman who opulled her long black hair out
tight� was written as a fragment years before.
Conrad Aiken brings that out in his piece we have
in the Eliot issue of The Sewanee Review.
INTERVIEWER: Which issue was that?
TATE: The Eliot issue weTre bringing out. WeTre
reviving ConradTs review of The Waste Land in
1923. ItTs excellent " astonishing. Everybody
else was completely baffled by it. Or hated it.
But Conrad was a very sharp fellow. Even as a
young man he understood the importance of the
poem. And he understood the poem, too, which
is better than most of us could have done.
INTERVIEWER: I read at one point that Eliot had
considered oGerontion� as being part of The
Waste Land.
TATE: Yes, exactly. It was supposed to go in it.
The versification wouldnTt have done in The
Waste Land; itTs a kind of Websterian blank
verse, but it might have worked " you canTt tell
" he mightTve been able to turn it into something.
INTERVIEWER: What sort of blank verse did you
say?
TATE: Well, itTs loose blank verse probably mod-
eled on John Webster " oThe White DevilT and
oThe Duchess of Malfi� "a kind of blank verse
very difficult to scan. It has an iambic movement
and thatTs about all. If you put it into prose, it
would be very difficult to restore it to verse. You
couldnTt be quite sure where the lines ended. The
sequence of the parts of The Waste Land might
be changed without much altering the effect; ex-
cept the first part, in which he announces all the
themes heTs going to develop in the other sections.
But in oA Game of ChessT " well I donTt know,
I should think in oA Game of ChessT we might
have had something very different from that
Elizabethan blank verse that begins it, oThe Chair
she sat in, like a burnished throne.� We might
have had oGerontion� there because ~oGerontion�
could have shaded into Tiresias who appears in
the next section " two old men, you see. There
were all sorts of possibilities. I think it would be
a calamity if the original version were ever redis-
covered " you know itTs lost. It would be a won-
derful thing for the Ph.D.Ts, wouldnTt it? Think
of the thousands of dissertations written on that.
INTERVIEWER: I may be displaying ignorance
again, but ITve never been able to decide for my-
self whether the notes to that are serious or not.
TATE: In the lecture he gave at the University of
Minnesota in 1956, called The Frontiers of Criti-
cism, he rather disclaims the notes, repudiates
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
them, says that the publisher wanted the notes
to fill out the book so he could charge enough for
the book. I donTt know. I think T. S. Eliot wrote
those notes with a complete deadpan. He was
perfectly serious about them.
INTERVIEWER: Well, ITve also heard that since the
books were published in 32-page sections it was
too big for 32 pages, but too small for 64 pages.
TATES ItTs possible that he did that " Tom Eliot
had a unique sense of humor. He may have been
pulling our leg in those notes; I donTt know. Some
of them were so solemn that " for example, the
note on the line oWith a dead sound on the final
stroke of nine.� His note on that is oa phenome-
non I have frequently observed.� But a great
change came about in him. When I first knew him,
I felt the difference in age was very great. He
was eleven years older than I and he was a little
solemn. But he mellowed and loosened up greatly
in his old age. He was wonderful company, very
warm-hearted and responsive. As a young man
he was rather formal.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, Mr. Aiken said something
about him developing his manners at Harvard,
being very shy.
TATE: I think his early formality was even a
little pompous; but that was rather due to shyness,
which he gradually overcame. He was always a
little shy, even up to his death. But in a way that
was a kind of protective coloration to keep the
" you know a man of his immense fame was bom-
barded all the time by cranks and people who
wanted just to see him and touch his sleeve. He
had a formidable British exterior, but his sense
of humor remained American always.
I could tell you a joke about " he was at
Princeton in the Fall of 1948 at the Institute for
Advanced Study. He was just finishing The Cock-
tail Party. He had got the Nobel Prize while he
was there. I was in New York then. He invited
me down for a weekend " he had a house to him-
self "and some friends of ours invited us to
dinner the first evening I was there. HeTd al-
ready received a lot of crank mail as a result of
the Nobel Prize and after weTd had several mar-
tinis, he put on his spectacles, reached into his
pocket, and pulled out a postal card. He read it
to us; it was from some prohibition or temperance
society somewhere in Pennsylvania, exhorting him
to stop drinking and join the society. When he had
finished reading it, he looked over his spectacles
at me, handed me the card, and said, oAllen, I
think you need this more than I do.� That isnTt
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
English, thatTs American humor. I donTt know
why; I canTt define the difference; but I canTt
imagine an Englishman saying that to enybody.
INTERVIEWER: Well, I can sort of see that, I think.
ThereTs something I wanted to ask. It was about
the general role of the critic. It seems that part
of the role of the critic is to clarify. Do you see
the criticTs role converging with that of the
teacher ?
TATE: You mean the role of the critic and the
role of the teacher tend to merge? Yes, I think
the critic is a teacher, in a way. Even if heTs not
in the classroom, heTs the middle-man; heTs pass-
ing on to either a small or large public, a public
of whatever size, certain insights into a given
work and comparing it with other works in his
own language or in other languages. That is a
kind of teaching. So it seems to me that criticism
is expendable. Practically all literary criticism is
programmatic. The great piece of programmatic
criticism in English is the Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads in 1800. Some of WordsworthTs theories
are pretty shaky. Coleridge later on pointed that
out: It was an unconscious effort on WordsworthTs
part to create an atmosphere in which his own
poetry could be understood. T. S. Eliot was
exactly the same kind of critic, even though he
was writing chiefly as a young man about the
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. He wrote about
those authors because they were the people he
was studying and learning from so he could use
them. And PoundTs criticism has always been
overtly programmatic; he was " he said this was
rubbish and all thatTs trivial and no good. And
then what he salvages from this wreck of what
people ordinarily call the literary tradition are
the things he could use, and thatTs programmatic
criticism. There are certainly great critics who
survived their time; theyTre all programmatic
nevertheless; their range and depth is so great
that they survive. Coleridge, Johnson, Matthew
Arnold to some extent, although I think a lot of
Arnold is now irrelevant; but most critics are
that way " criticism is always in a very bad po-
sition. ItTs neither philosophy nor literature, itTs
in between, and the great critics who survive are
the masters of style. You read them as writers
rather than as critics. Now the Biographia Lit-
eraria, from the critical point of view, is just
irrelevant " now useless, but Coleridge was a
great master of style everybody can read with
pleasure. So is Samuel Johnson. The Lives of
the Poets, even wrong-headed as most of them are,
are literature in themselves. I think the best of
" I think Conrad Aiken is a programmatic critic.
HeTs almost never written any theoretical essays,
theyTre mostly reviews. He doesnTt take an ab-
stract literary problem and explore it and develop
it. But I think his criticism is going to last. Its
intelligence, precision, and just the sheer enter-
tainment of reading it is of value in itself. He
writes extremely good prose.
INTERVIEWER: You know, that brings a question
to me. ITm not referring to the poet who also
writes criticism, but just critics in general. It
seems that the woods are full of them.
TATE: I take a rather dim view of all that; I just
donTt see it. ThereTs Northrop Frye. He invents
five new categories on every page. And thereTs
a and a prime, b and b prime, and sub-one and
whatnot; itTs the height of academicism, and itTs
the kind of thing that provokes academic discus-
sion. There are round tables and panel discus-
sions based on Frye, but the discussion is not
based on literature. At the end of his book, The
Giant Weapon, Stanley Hyman has a chapter
called oThe Ideal Critic.� The ideal critic is a
man who doesnTt have to read the literature; he
just reads other criticism. ItTs like that com-
munity the members of which make their living
by taking in each otherTs washing.
Some theoretical criticism is good. Critics
like I. A. Richards. In his old age, heTs begun to
write poetry. Some of itTs very amusing; but
heTs almost a pure critic " that is, in the sense
that he didnTt start as a poet, and his criticism
cannot really be described as programmatic in
the sense of criticism justifying the poetry of the
critic. I think one of the best English critics to-
day, probably the best, is Frank Kermode. HeTs
not a poet, but he has an uncanny sense of what
poets are up to, and the novelists too; he gets in-
side the works, heTs not relating the works to
some historical process or some abstraction. In
a remarkable collection of reviews and essays
called Puzzles and Epiphanies, he does very much
the same thing that Conrad does as a reviewer.
He can bring his intelligence to bear on a great
variety of all sorts of literature; I think he has
a very great value. But a man like F. R. Leavis
leaves me extremely cold when he sets up an
abstraction like the Great Tradition. The great
tradition for him is what he arbitrarily likes;
and he puts all these people on a bed of Procrustes
and they have to fit this bed; cuts their legs off
or stretches them out and " itTs too bad. He has
a mystique of criticism. HeTll say this is criti-
cism, that is not. But you canTt tell; I canTt tell
half the time one from the other, I donTt know
what he means by criticism. I think he means by
criticism what he writes.
INTERVIEWER: Another thing of yours I liked
was that essay on Longinus. It was completely
new to me"I never heard of the man. I was
very interested in what you said about subject
and language or style. I donTt know quite how to
approach this, but " well what reminded me of
it was the conversation a minute ago about people
being read for their style.
TATE: I donTt think you can read a man for his
style if he hasnTt got something to say through
the medium of style.
INTERVIEWER: Well" just what do you say
through the medium?
TATE: Think of Samuel JohnsonTs great life of
Abraham Cowley, in which he discussed the Meta-
physical poets. If you can imagine some ham
18th century critic like John Dennis expounding
exactly the same point of view and same opinions,
itTd be unreadable today. Suppose we donTt agree
with Johnson that the Metaphysical poets are
deficient in many ways. I think Johnson is unjust
to them, but I still read that essay with great
pleasure. Because it is a point of view about the
Metaphysical poets which you canTt dismiss, and
itTs expressed in a great style.
Z
TATE: The fact that a writer will survive into
posterity is no guarantee that heTs better than
somebody who has been lost. For example, in
the early part of this century in this country the
two most prominent poets were William Vaughn
Moody and George Edward Woodbury " God help
us. There was a poet who died in 1904, a Bos-
tonian named Trumbull Stickney. HeTs not a
great poet, but very fine. He has been completely
neglected for over fifty years. Occasionally you
see a few things in anthologies. I did an anthology
years ago with David Cecil in England and I
put some of his things in. F. O. Matthiessen knew
about him. But thatTs about all. And just the
other day Mr. [Andrew] Lytle received an essay
on Trumbull Stickney which heTs going to publish,
and it may help to get him back in circulation.
INTERVIEWER: I think during the 19th century,
the big American writers were little old ladies
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
writing some sort of sentimental novels.
TATE: Certainly. We were always told that the
great Southern poet was Sidney Lanier. Cer-
tainly the best antebellum Southern poet is Henry
Timrod of Charleston. The bulk of his work was
slight and itTs rather 18th century, but itTs very
pure diction; itTs the real thing, you know. Lanier
was a windbag. He wrote one or two nice short
things. ThatTs about all. Years ago, the literary
society in Macon, Georgia, asked me to come and
make a talk to their annual luncheon. They have
an annual luncheon in honor of Sidney Lanier.
ITll never be invited again.
INTERVIEWER: I donTt know how to get into this
without getting into some sort of mystique about
it, but thereTs something still unclear to me about
the relationship between subject and style. Well,
ITll have to fall back and say that ITve gotten
kicks at various times out of the images used, or
metaphors, and things like that. They really
seemed rather far from the subject itself, except
that maybe it was the appropriateness that was
striking.
TATE: You mean these images, metaphors, seem
to have an intrinsic interest apart from the poem
as a whole? Well I think that is very true. You
remember oAsh Wednesday.� Remember the
passage about descending the stairs " at the top
of the stairs. And he speaks of where the figure
appears to him of an old man driveling, something
like otoothed gullet of an aged shark.� Well,
thereTs nothing in the theme of oAsh Wednesday�
that would demand that image. ItTs completely
unpredictable. It comes as a shocking surprise.
But it gets its power from its context neverthe-
less. ItTs a matter of style; but the content of
the image is created by what precedes it and what
follows. Take any familiar poem, like Andrew
MarvelTs oTo His Coy Mistress,� and write a
paraphrase of that. A paraphrase would seem
to indicate that the poet meant that he wanted
his lady to succumb to him as soon as possi-
ble. In fact, thatTs a paraphrase of the poem, just
that one sentence. But what gives it its interest
is the wonderful invention in the poem, and in
the end we see heTs not really saying that at
all, heTs saying something very different. HeTs
saying if you yield to me itTs going to be an
animal act, and disgusting. Because Marvel was
a Puritan, and he didnTt like the body, so the
paraphrase itself is meaningless. ItTs the style
that creates the poem, out of the abstract con-
tent or maybe the " which comes first, the
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
chicken or the egg? The style or the content,
we donTt know. They move hand in hand.
They move together. ITm a little suspicious of
the lyric poet; I donTt know about an epic poet.
I donTt know anything about that. But ITm a little
suspicious of a lyric poet who says oITve got this
great theme that ITm going to write about.� He
doesnTt know whether heTs got it or not until he
writes the poem.
INTERVIEWER: In your essay on understanding
POCETY. si.
TATE: Oh yes, that was a little thing I wrote
years ago. You know, I wrote that so long ago I
canTt really remember it. I wrote it more than
thirty years ago. I think itTs called ~~Understand-
ing Modern Poetry,� isnTt it?
INTERVIEWER: Yes. And without slighting the
Romantic poets, you said something about the
tradition that had come down was degenerate ro-
manticism. That the poem was an emotion, and
this was what was likely to be taught in high
schools.
TATE: Oh, I remember now. I quoted some awful
psychologist " a lot of jargon about you just sit
there and have emotion, and you donTt have to
understand it. You turn off your brain altogether,
just have emotions. And you know certain
theories evolved that sociologists still propagate,
a kind of decadent aesthetic. Even John Dewey,
a pragmatist: his theory of art was about as
naive as this dog here. He doesnTt know anything
about it at all. I think probably popular criticism
has always been a generation behind, somehow,
and represents " well, we know that certainly re-
viewers in The Edinburgh Review in the early
19th century, Wilson and Jeffrey, and Lockhart;
they were debased Samuel Johnsons. ThatTs why
they tore Keats all to pieces. And Wordsworth
also. They couldnTt read the new poets at all,
and they were bringing standards of sixty years
before to bear upon them, but not as Johnson
would have done. It was just 18th century preju-
dice operating, decorum and poetic diction and
all that sort of thing.
INTERVIEWER: Someone mentioned something
about the teacher. What is the background, say
training ground, for poets? It seems that right
now weTre at the mercy of these English teachers.
TATE: Well, we always have been.
INTERVIEWER: I think Frost said one time that
the best thing a university could do for a poet
was to throw him out.
TATE: Well, that sounds nice doesnTt it? If
10
Cambridge had thrown John Milton out, that
would be a marvel. You asked about the educa-
tion of a poet. I notice you also use the word
otraining.�
INTERVIEWER: Somehow I equate education and
training " somewhat the same.
TATE: Yes thatTs probably true. It seems to me
the best education for a poet is just education,
and nobody knows what that is " whether any
special education is necessary or not. I think he
ought to know some language and he ought to
know some history. He certainly should read some
other literature besides the contemporary litera-
ture or literature of his own language. But the
proper education for any poet is unpredictable;
you canTt tell. Robert Lowell knew he was going
to be a poet; and he more or less consciously read
the things he could use. But lots of poets donTt
start that way. I donTt think John Crowe Ran-
som started that way. John was a Rhodes Scholar
at Oxford back in 1909. I think he had almost no
English courses at Vanderbilt. When he went to
Oxford he read ancient history and ancient phi-
losophy. He was a fine Greek scholar. And when
he came back he taught for a year in some eastern
prep-school " I think it was the Hill School, ITm
not sure, it was some school like that. Then he
came to Vanderbilt. And for many years he taught
composition, not literature. He read his literature.
He was like an Englishman in the 19th century.
You know at Oxford, English literature was not
taught until 1875. It was assumed that an edu-
cated Englishman would read English literature
just on his own. Coleridge never had a course
in English literature. We couldnTt expect a man
today to do that. He wouldnTt read anything,
probably. The education for a poet is sort of a
difficult thing to deal with, isnTt it? I should
think a scientific education wouldnTt be the thing,
obviously. But maybe he ought to know a little
more about science than somebody like me. I
donTt know anything about it. I just "I simply
donTt like it. It is always easier to dislike some-
thing you donTt know anything about, isnTt it?
What I donTt like and what I do know a little
about is scientism, the misapplication of scien-
tific ideas to society and the arts. DonTt you think
a young man who feels he wants to write poetry
will have an instinct for what he needs? He can
ignore the teacher or not. Here in Tennessee years
ago, we were very lucky in having a teacher like
John Ransom who was a fine poet.
INTERVIEWER: I was wondering about that. I
mean it seems odd that at one university at one
wine. Ss
TATE: It was just luck. Somebody was asking me
about that the other day, about the talented people
at Vanderbilt in the early twenties. Did they get
there accidentally or did somebody bring them
there? We werenTt brought there. The university
was not sympathetic " we were cranks or a little
nutty. And ITm sure there was as much talent
at other places. I think John Ransom was the
catalytic agent, he made the difference. He was
good for the people who were really concerned
about literature and we really learned a great deal
from him in conversation. It was a little difficult
to remember the subject matter of anything he
taught. It was the way his mind worked on that
subject matter. For one thing, he always treated
us as equals. Even if we werenTt gentlemen, we
had to pretend to be because he assumed we were.
There was a certain decorum about it; he was
uniformly polite, considerate, and patient. I re-
member once "I think I wrote this in a little
tribute on his 75th birthday " something to this
effect, that the only explicit criticism I remember
getting from him while I was his student was on a
paper I had written for a course and he gave me
an A minus; I thought I always should have an
A. And I took it to him. oMr. Ransom, why did
I "if you donTt mind, would you tell me why I
got an A minus?� He flipped over a few pages,
and put his finger on the end of a paragraph and
said, oWhy do you always put your best idea at
the end of a paragraph where nobody will see it?�
And I learned a great deal from that. And he
handed me the paper back and nothing was said
again about that A minus. The A minus stood.
Then, at our Fugitive meetings he never presumed
to be our leader. We were all equal. And I think
that made us behave ourselves. You couldnTt take
advantage of that.
INTERVIEWER: To get away from just the Fugitive
group "I mean it seems that at that time, well
just briefly in that span of around twenty years,
the enormous growth of literature. .
TATE: Between the two wars.
INTERVIEWER: Well, starting around 1912 to 1925.
TATE: Yes, but even up to the Second World War.
Faulkner had done most of his great work by the
end of the thirties. But there was a tremendous
outbreak, not only in the South, but all over the
country. ItTs an interesting fact, isnTt it, that
the Southerners, up to the last war at any rate,
have dominated the novel in this country. There.
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
were more good novelists and short story writers
from the South than from any other part of the
country. Only Fitzgerald and Hemingway were
first-rate from the North.
INTERVIEWER: Well, even today, the Southerner
William Styron, is sort of ...
TATE: HeTs a very brilliant writer. Yes. I donTt
think heTs as good as Faulkner, but thatTs a dif-
ferent matter. HeTs a very talented writer.
INTERVIEWER: There seems to be such a scarcity
of them.
TATE: I canTt think of any first-rate New England
novelists today. Marquand, in our time, thatTs
about all.
INTERVIEWER: Then you donTt see a general trend
away from " Southerners, I believe?
TATE: I think there is. The young Southerners
are not dominated any more by the Southern
myths. No reason why they should be. Because
consciousness of the myths came out of a certain
historical moment after the First World War. It
happened all over the South. Malcolm Cowley
originally thought that Faulkner invented it. You
know his essay oWilliam FaulknerTs Legend of the
South?� He describes the legend beautifully in
that essay. But I saw the original version; I pub-
lished it in The Sewanee Review. I told Malcolm
he must change his mind because William Faulk-
ner did not invent it. He used it more powerfully
than anybody else. And if he had invented it, it
might not have been as good as it is. It was a
real myth that everybody believed. And a myth,
I take it, is a way of expressing a certain kind of
reality; itTs not mere fiction. People all over the
South had it. It came from the fact that we were
aware of the world at large for the first time.
The South had, from 1865 to 1914" now you
boys are too young to remember " well we didnTt
have an iron curtain around us, we had a sort
of curtain of lavender and lace. Mark Twain
wasnTt considered a Southern writer. He really
was. ThereTs no question about it. But they
didnTt like him much. He was considered " well,
he wrote boysT books. When I was a little boy,
my mother read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn to me. He wasnTt taken seriously as litera-
ture. ItTs incredible to realize that people felt
that way. My mother was born at the end of the
Civil War. She still read the novels of John
Esten Cooke. YouTve never even heard of him.
You ought to look him up sometime. Surrey of
EagleTs Nest. Things like that. Very popular
novels. Or Augusta Evans " Saint Elmo. Saint
11
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
Elmo was on a showboat all up and down the Ohio
and Mississippi Rivers, and up the Tennessee
River. After 1918 people realized that the South
was really changing. And the sense of the past
in the present: thatTs the drama of Southern
literature of that period. ThatTs what Faulkner
wrote about. The Compsons and the Sutpens "
the aristocrats and the upstarts of the Old South,
destroyed by the Snopeses, who are Modern Man.
We get variations of that theme in all the Sou-
thern novelists of the time. Stark Young, for
example. You get it not so much in a writer like
Eudora Welty. ItTs in Katherine Ann Porter,
very definitely. Caroline Gordon has it and Ro-
bert Penn Warren " they all have it.
Since the last war, thereTs a whole new gen-
eration, including you boys. The myth is not
so dominant any more. ThereTs not any reason
why it should be. I think itTs up to you people
to discover a new one.
INTERVIEWER: I think there are a lot of times
when people try to ignore it. They donTt even
want it to survive. Some people seem to mis-
understand what Faulkner was trying to talk
about. I think itTs generally people who donTt
read him, they just hear about it. Faulkner, in
this thing " he seems to "in his mixing of the
time element...
TATE: He does it with great skill. ItTs what Ford
called the ~~time shift.�� And Faulkner learned
it for himself. He didnTt learn it from anybody.
ItTs a little different from the way Ford uses it.
Ford locates it in what James called the opost
of observation.� In all his novels and stories
thereTs somebody who sees everything. So the
shift always takes place in the minds of his
characters; such as in The Good Soldier, Dowell
the narrator weaves back and forth; but weTre
always in his consciousness. Faulkner uses it
through an omniscient narrator. ThatTs much
more difficult to do. He does get it muddled oc-
casionally. But I think on the whole itTs very
brilliantly done. Absalom! Absalom! and " well,
in The Sound and the Fury each section has its
observer. The idiot boy, Benjy " everything is
in his consciousness. Then we move on to Quentin,
and then we go to the brother, Jason. Well, any-
how, thatTs the way it works. In Light in August
he shifts from one point of view to the other, but
I think itTs justified.
INTERVIEWER: It seems that his technique throws
a lot of critics. I read one where they considered
the boy in As I Lay Dying to be an idiot. I never
12
figured how in the devil they could get to that.
TATE: Which boy do you mean?
INTERVIEWER: The one who bores the holes in
his motherTs coffin.
TATE: HeTs not an idiot at all. As I Lay Dying
is a more limited novel, isnTt it? But itTs a bril-
liant piece of technique. A masterpiece. ThereTs
nothing quite like that novel anywhere. Notice
the subtle modulations of style. All these illiter-
ate people in their various speeches will rise to
heights of great eloquence. But thereTs no real
inconsistancy, because Faulkner manages the
transitions so subtly and beautifully. Obviously,
the Bundren family couldnTt speak that way;
theyTre not literate enough. They donTt have the
vocabulary. But itTs always credible the way
Faulkner does it. Because, again, heTs standing
over the shoulder of each of these characters,
gradually extending their consciousness beyond
anything they could observe or feel.
INTERVIEWER: I was always amazed by oThe
Bear.�
TATE: Yes, thatTs his great long story. In The
Hamlet, the oSpotted HorsesT episode is a com-
plete story in itself. ItTs a wonderful story too.
ItTs sometimes reproduced in anthologies as a
separate story.
INTERVIEWER: I think the old anthology we had
has that and oA Rose for Emily.� The only other
question that I know anything about which has
to do with time " ITm not sure whether this is
scientism or not "is Lawrence Durrell.
TATE: Yes, the Alexandria novels, I canTt read
them with any pleasure at all. I donTt know quite
why. I think the prose is poetic prose, and I
donTt like that. I think a poet writing prose
should write prose, not poetry.
INTERVIEWER: He also seems to force his vo-
cabulary .°.�.
TATE: ItTs exotic and overdone.
INTERVIEWER: Particularly The Black Book.
TATE: Yes, I tried to read it and didnTt finish it.
I like some of his early poems much better than
the fiction. He started out as a poet, you know.
INTERVIEWER: Back to Faulkner, a tremendous
influence on him in his time theory was Henri
Bergson.
TATE: I think maybe thatTs true.
INTERVIEWER: Do you see this in any other
writers?
TATE: I think in Eliot, the oFour Quartets.�
Maybe in The Waste Land. He was very much
influenced by F. H. Bradley and Bergson. The
two philosophers he read as a young man.
INTERVIEWER: I may be getting this wrong, but
I think ITve heard it. I read some place that you
were supposed to have been influenced by those
same people.
TATE: Bergson? Well, to some extent. The in-
fluence has largely been Jacques Maritain. I
had some philosophy at Vanderbilt. Then I tried
to forget it until I was much older; and began
to read some philosophy again. I like to blame
the philosophers for my inability to write a co-
herent sentence until I was thirty years old.
Bradley was a good writer. But very few philoso-
phers are. If youTve ever come across T. S.
EliotTs dissertation in philosophy at Harvard "
itTs on F. H. Bradley. You wonder that he ever
learned to write anything anybody could read.
ItTs the most congested and obscure prose I think
ITve ever seen. I have it around here somewhere.
INTERVIEWER: I was looking for that one time
and couldnTt find any trace of it.
TATE: It was reprinted two years ago. As a
matter of fact, Eliot had a curious development.
The essays in The Sacred Wood had an enormous
influence. But most of them are badly written.
The famous one, oTradition and the Individual
Talent,� is heavy and full of jargon. Look at
it again. ItTs a great mystery of literary history
that that essay had such a powerful influence.
It seems as though "I read it first when I was
about twenty, and, well, it seemed to open up a
whole new world to me I had never thought of.
But I donTt think he learned to write very well
until he was about thirty. Or even older. Then
he developed a beautiful critical style.
INTERVIEWER: Well I guess ITve always gotten
poetic prose and style sort of mixed up.
TATE: There are a lot of paradoxes about it.
Nobody can define it. But isnTt style either the
vehicle of the subject matter or identical with
the subject matter? HemingwayTs oThe Killers�
seems to have no style. ItTs very much under-
written. The narrative passages are like stage
directions, almost. And yet the style is very im-
portant. Simply dialogue and stage directions.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, I think I read "I guess it
was that essay on Longinus. I suppose he meant
that as more or less a definition of style " identi-
ty with the subject matter. That the style wasnTt
noticeable by itself. That tone would be the
style.
TATE: I think thatTs about the way to put it.
By the way, I think that essay was a program-
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
matic essay. I was trying to show that Longinus
would be useful to us today. He was sort of a
new critic. But wouldnTt it be fair to say that
in every generation or every period of litera-
ture criticism has to be rewritten? We have to
think of the past from the point of view of the
present and what the present needs, and litera-
ture now. The way Arnold understood Words-
worth is not the way the modern critics under-
stand him at all. ItTs something entirely different.
Read Lionel TrillingTs fine essay on Wordsworth.
ItTs as far from Arnold as possible. Both recog-
nize him as a great poet. For example, nobody
would say today that high seriousness is the
criterion because that would rule out Chaucer.
In fact, Arnold dismisses Chaucer "he didnTt
have high seriousness. And Keats was a osen-
suous� poet. Well, he was a great deal more than
that. Arnold was a strange fellow, wasnTt he?
Keats was a sensuous poet; Matthew sort of dis-
missed him on the grounds that he and the other
Romantics odidnTt know enough.� Yet in some
of ArnoldTs best poems the influence of Keats is
very obvious. Especially oThe Scholar Gypsy.�
INTERVIEWER: You were talking about tradition
a minute ago. I had never read it before, but your
essay on PoundTs Cantos "
TATE: That was on the first thirty. Yes.
INTERVIEWER: And in what few of them ITve
read, ITve always been sort of astonished. And
I didnTt know what to think. And that seems to
sort of put it in place. If heTs sort of a cosmo-
politan in his writings anyway, do you think
thatTs any indication of the way literature is
going? I mean, to be cosmopolitan almost implies
a lack of tradition, doesnTt it?
TATE: Yes it does. Pound was trying to invent
a tradition of his own. Three kinds: the ancient
world, the renaissance, and his excursion into
the modern world, which he dislikes. But it
seems to me a literary tradition is a little differ-
ent from a historical or social tradition. TheyTre
not quite identical. IsnTt the literary tradition
composed of the writers in the immediate past
who can hand something on to the next genera-
tion? A while ago I think I was referring to
Woodbury and William Vaughn Moody as the
only poets in the early 19th century in this
country that people were aware of. But they were
a dead end; no young poet could take off from
them. So that we had no visible literary traadi-
tions. T. S. Eliot has a nice essay on that; I donTt
think he published it in any of his books. ItTs
13
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
largely a defense of Ezra Pound written about
1946, published in Poetry in Chicago. He was not
defending PoundTs politics; he was trying to de-
fend him as a literary innovator. Eliot made the
point that a young American poet, say between
1900 and 1914 had to go to foreign literature to
get anything to nourish himself. Eliot went to
the Elizabethan dramatists, the Metaphysical
poets, and the French symbolists. Pound went
to the Provence, the Troubadours, and the minor
Italian poets like Guido Cavalcanti.
INTERVIEWER: Eliot said something on the liter-
ary tradition " something of his on Milton. I
think his point was that Milton didnTt leave much
to follow.
TATE: Yes, that was that early essay on Milton.
Milton was no model for the modern poet, and
heTd ruined a great many poets in the 18th cen-
tury. And some of the Victorian poets. EliotTs
attitude toward Milton changed. He took it all
back in 1947.
INTERVIEWER: TheyTve published those essays
together now. I read them and I canTt quite re-
member the difference.
TATE: Well, in the later one, the second one, he
said that weTve had a new era in modern poetry,
in English, and Milton would no longer be a
menace to the young poet. He gave us permission
to read Milton again. It was quite amusing. F.
R. Leavis was infuriated by that second essay.
He wrote a rejoinder that was published in The
Sewanee Review, saying that Mr. Eliot had let
us down. He, Leavis, had been an anti-Milton
man all along and had made it possible for Eliot
himself to flourish. And that this was disloyalty
on ElotTs part.
INTERVIEWER: Did people like Tillyard ever show
any reaction to "
TATE: Tillyard? Tillyard was a historical schol-
ar. I donTt think he cared one way or the other
what Eliot wrote. He was probably one of those
scholars who donTt believe it is of any importance
what a literary man thinks.
INTERVIEWER: This may be a somewhat tangent
aspect "do you consider Wolfe something of
the same kind of tangent off of the line? ThereTs
been no one to follow his methods or style.
TATE: Bill Styron has been slightly influenced
by him. I canTt think of anybody else. I donTt
think Wolfe is really a writer. Did you ever hear
the anecdote about Bill Faulkner? Wolfe comes
into it. About twenty years ago there was an arts
festival in a girlsT college down in Mississippi;
14
they prevailed on Faulkner to come. I was sur-
prised he did, to make a talk. And after the talk,
a coed held up her hand and said, oMr. Faulkner,
how would you rank your contemporaries, the
novelists?� He said, oITd put Thomas Wolfe
first, myself second, and Hemingway third.�
Ponder that. He told me years ago he thought
that Wolfe was awful. CouldnTt read him. Well,
he couldnTt put himself first, and he had to get
some sort of gimmick by which he could put
Hemingway after himself. Wolfe, Faulkner, and
Hemingway. That was Snopes cunning. ItTs like
old Lem Snopes.
INTERVIEWER: I read an apology for that later
on. And he said that what he really meant " you
know heTs always coming back with what he really
meant later on " was that Thomas Wolfe tried
for more. He tried for a little less and Heming-
didnTt try for anything at all.
TATE: Bill Faulkner was very cagey. I canTt say
I liked him much. I knew him for years but never
very well. ITd see him from time to time. But
I think he was in agony all the time through shy-
ness. He was the shyest man I think I ever saw.
It was shyness, too. He was just scared of people.
HeTd get loosened up after several bourbons. The
only time I ever really enjoyed his company was
once in Rome years ago. He was around there
for about a week. And I saw a lot of him and
had a good time. But only after about 5:00 when
the drinking started.
INTERVIEWER: He definitely didnTt like Hollywood
it seems. ThereTs some rather amusing anecdotes
about all that going on.
TATE: I think he came home back to Oxford and
drew his check. Hollywood didnTt even know heTd
gone.
INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that " the speech
that he made. Well something along the same
subject, all these art festivals and writersT con-
ferences .. . i
TATE: I donTt know what to think of them. ITve
gone to a lot of them in the past. They may do
some good. I think that Robert Lowell and Gene
Stafford profited by them. They got to know peo-
ple who stimulated them. The best writersT con-
ference I ever went to was in 1931 at Charlottes-
ville. Only writers, no students. We just talked
to each other. That was the first time I ever met
Bill Faulkner.
3
INTERVIEWER: I started to go on an interview
with Ralph McGill. But I found out they were
going to fly, with an amateur pilot.
TATE: I havenTt seen Ralph McGill for forty
years. No, I saw him about 25 years ago. In his
autobiography heTs pretty rough on the Fugitive
group, thinks weTre reactionaries. And some
years ago he gave one of his columns to a dis-
cussion of his old friend Tate and" we were
at Vanderbilt together " he said, oThis man is
an acolyte at the altar of T. S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound. ~He lives in a world of unreality, no social
consciousness about him at all.� RalphTs a fine
fellow but he never had any literary sense at all.
HeTs a reformer and he reads literature as politics.
INTERVIEWER: Was Randall Jarrell very closely
connected with any of the Fugitives?
TATE: He wouldnTt be connected. He refused to
be. He came much later, of course. He came in
the thirties. He was a student of John Ransom
and we all knew him. He came to Vanderbilt
when he was 18. And some of his early poems
are still among the best. He was a strange fellow.
That book of his, Poetry and the Age, is a fine
book, a brilliant book.
INTERVIEWER: Well, ITve liked some of his poetry,
but I find that quite a bit of his criticism is rather
poor, particularly what he spoke of at the Poetry
Festival [In Washington, D. C. a few years ago].
TATE: He was oplacing� everybody and ranking
them. And the only two people he praised were
Robert Lowell and Robert Frost. I was a little
amused. He said, oTate is a neglected poet. But
certain poems will not be neglected long.� Well,
ITve never felt neglected. And if you want to
get a friend neglected, you say heTs neglected.
Then people will say, oWell, heTs neglected.� Like
Conrad AikenTs situation. People say that Conrad
is a ohistorical figure.�
INTERVIEWER: Speaking of politics and litera-
ture, I thought that essay in Who Owns America?
of yours was very good on liberty and "
TATE: I was 36 then. I could never do anything
like that again.
INTERVIEWER: Well, right now it seems that
politics and the arts, as such, seem to be coming
to sort of a boil. What do you think of all this?
I know we have Theodore Bikel on one side and
Arthur Miller on the other. The subsidies and
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
that sort of thing.
TATE: You mean the relation of the government
to the arts? I donTt like it. Maybe the perform-
ing arts, theater, ballet, and music accept govern-
ment aid without being corrupted. Maybe "I
donTt know. In England they do it very well. The
British Arts Council is very intelligent, and the
politicians donTt meddle with it. They give the
money and let them go ahead. Imagine President
Johnson, what his opinions would be like. ITm
not sure how much Kennedy knew, but he took
advice.
INTERVIEWER: This thing that Ciardi made " I
was coming back one night and the only thing
I could pick up [on the radio] was Monitor, and
Ciardi was on there. And he said, what would ~
happen, suppose, that the government was subsi-
dizing a man like Pound, you know, and he came
through with his Cantos. What would the re-
action be there?
TATE: They would withdraw it. The Bollingen
Award was awarded in 1948 to Pound through
the Library of Congress. And the Library of
Congress had to give it up. They couldnTt award
it any more. There were speeches made to Con-
gress "a terrific row over it. Certainly litera-
ture could not be subsidized by the government.
YouTd have a race of literary geldings. TheyTd be
afraid to say anything.
INTERVIEWER: We just need more rich old ladies.
ThatTs something else you covered in one of your
essays too, wasnTt it? Part of that group, The
Man of Letters in the Modern World. And some-
where you mentioned the change of situation
about the time of Johnson.
TATE: Patronage changed, yes. The rich man
became the patron out of his own vanity.
INTERVIEWER: It seems to have worked rather
well.
TATE: It did. It wasnTt quite the same thing
they had in the Italian Renaissance. For one
thing, the writersT attitude had changed. Dr.
Johnson was an independent man. He wasnTt
going to be in the entourage of Lord Chesterfield.
Whereas the Renaissance artists didnTt seem to
mind that. They were sort of like upper servants.
They didnTt care. They were doing a job. They
were not received as equals. Now the patrons are
the foundations and universities. ItTs all deper-
sonalized, isnTt it? It might, be better to have a
personal relationship between the patron and the
artist, even though the artists were in an in-
ferior social situation. At least itTd be personal
15
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
and direct. But the great Italian patrons were
highly cultivated men themselves. They knew
what they were doing. Not just having them
around to " you see, in the case of Chesterfield
and Johnson, Chesterfield at the last minute made
the offer to get his name on the title page. But
Johnson had already done the work and he didnTt
need the money.
INTERVIEWER: There seems to be this competition
among colleges now to see who can have the most
renown author in residence. It seems to me that
in some cases it would be hard to function under
those circumstances. I mean just because a man
can write a book, that doesnTt make him a critic.
Unfortunately.
TATE: It doesnTt make him a teacher. ITm a
regular professor of English like any other pro-
fessor, although I never went to a graduate
school. But ITm not a writer in residence. I think
I got the job because I had published some books.
The scholars donTt think of that as quite the
equivalent of a Ph.D., but itTs almost. Just re-
cently one of my colleagues, whoTs an old-fash-
ioned scholar, a very learned man, well I"a
certain university had given me an honorary
degree. He didnTt mean to be rude about it "
just referred to those people who get ounearned
degrees.� HeTs an old-line Ph.D.
INTERVIEWER: You know it seems that certain
writers could not " theyTre doing it because of "
well, you need money, you know. The poor guy
" well, letTs admit it, itTs hard to make a living
writing poetry.
TATE: You canTt do it. I donTt know of anybody
who has except Frost.
INTERVIEWER: Even Sandburg has to raise goats.
TATE: He raised goats for many years. HeTs
made a great deal of money out of his Abraham
Lincoln. I donTt know about his other books. I
used to like him back in the thirties, but after he
published the Lincoln, he became Abraham Lin-
coln and very pious.
INTERVIEWER: We never could get any response
out of him. He wonTt even give us a ono.�
TATE: At a meeting in New York, somebody
asked him what he thought about T. S. Eliot.
He said, oI couldnTt have said this several years
ago, but I can say it now� "you see, the war
had begun and we all had to be patriotic " obut
T. S. Eliot is not as valuable as a truck driver.�
As a wide-eyed liberal friend of mine in Prince.
ton said, oNow, thatTs the democratic spirit.� I
said it isnTt, itTs the fascistic spirit. ThatTs fas-
16
cism. The reduction of T. S. Eliot to the level of
truck driver is fascism. Sandburg is incapable
of the most elementary thought. HeTs a rhetor-
ician, an old-fashioned ham actor. He wrote some
nice free-verse poems when he was young; thereTs
nothing quite like them. He became the spokes-
man for Lincoln, and then Lincoln himself, with
a little of Walt Whitman coming in too.
INTERVIEWER: A friend of mine had an album
of Carl Sandburg singing ballads and things like
that. I used to hear it through the wall.
TATE: Well, sometimes he was pretty good at
that. I used to be a ham fiddler. And he once
said to me. oWhen you give a reading why donTt
you take your violin?� I said, oWell, can you
imagine me getting up there and playing Bach
or Vivaldi and reciting the poems?� I used to
see him at writersT conferences back in the thir-
ties. Once he"it was at Olivel College in
southern Michigan, about 1937. He came first.
I was to read, and before he sat down, he said,
oNow, hereTs my friend Allen. HeTs a nice boy.
But culturally speaking, he hasnTt come over
from England yet.� Well, thatTs the kind of corny
act he would put on. And I just couldnTt stand
it.
INTERVIEWER: Maybe, to change the subject a
little bit " do you foresee any more short stories
for yourself?
TATE: No, I donTt. ITve written only one. One
short story and one novel. There was one other
thing, published in The Yale Review years ago
called a story. It was really a part of a book
that I never finished. It was called oThe Migra-
tion;� it was to be part of a book that " well,
The Fathers was to be the other side of it. But
I couldnTt bring the two things together. I gave
up on the other thing.
INTERVIEWER: Do you ever read on any of these
circuits that they have for colleges? They have
certain poets for "
TATE: Oh the poetry circuit? No I never have;
itTs too strenuous. ItTs done from New York.
Elizabeth Kray, you know, runs that. She tries
to organize the circuits all over the country.
Poets read every day for two weeks at some place
in some region or other " colleges close together.
That would be a little too much for me. Well,
what they ought to do is pay us for the cocktail
party and we would give the lecture free. ThatTs
the real work, the parties.
INTERVIEWER: ITve been sitting here trying to
raise some question about belief. ITm not speak-
te
ing of religious belief particularly, just belief
generally. Do you think that belief has some
bearing? On a writer " what he believes in?
TATE: Sure. It has a great deal to do with it.
But what, itTs hard to say. YouTve come across
the controversy between Eliot and Richards
years ago, havenTt you? About poetry and belief.
It concerned religious belief to some extent. Eliot
started it. He said that in order to enjoy The
Divine Comedy it was not necessarily true that
youTve got to be a convinced Catholic. But at
least you had to understand the theological frame-
work. And Richards had previously taken the
extreme position that belief was rather an ob-
stacle to the enjoyment of poetry. Especially if
you didnTt share the belief of the poet. This was
at the time of The Waste Land. ThereTs a very
extreme statement at the end of his Principles
of Literary Criticism; he says that in The Waste
Land at last we have a poem in which no beliefs
are expressed whatsoever. ItTs full of beliefs
of all sorts. Well Richards had convinced himself
that this is the ideal poem. No beliefs in it at all.
I think Eliot had the better of the argument. But
anybody in the western world with a fairly good
education " humanistic education " can with
some application understand the philosophical and
religious framework of The Divine Comedy. Even
if you donTt assent to that philosophy, the under-
standing permits you to understand the relation
of the characters to one another. And to Dante,
who is their narrator. So I think that Eliot had
the better of the argument. But beyond that I
donTt know what to say about it. Some people
said that after I had become a Catholic, my poems
ALLEN TATE INTERVIEW
changed. I suppose the only one of my poems
which is explicitly Christian is one I wrote in
1928 called ~o~The Cross.� And I had no idea then
of becoming a Catholic or anything else. So I
think itTs a very slippery question. I donTt see
how anybody can write anything without be-
lieving in what heTs writing. And whether weTre
practicing Christians of any sect, we live in a
Christian society and there are certain ideas that
are inevitable. TheyTre in the atmosphere, al-
though theyTre much diluted now. Now take the
novels of Murial Spark. She happens to be a
Catholic writer. ITm not sure that anybody could
tell it from her novels. ItTs not overt, as it is in
Graham Greene.
INTERVIEWER: I think the Jewish beliefs come
out more in writing now.
TATE: ThereTs a kind of Jewish revival now.
Robert Lowell said to me recently that first we
had the New England domination, then the Sou-
thern, now itTs the Jewish period.
INTERVIEWER: What about J. D. Salinger? His
writing.
TATE: Well I like The Catcher in the Rye. What
was this later thing? I had a sample of it in The
New Yorker.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, you mean Raise High the Roof
Beam.
TATE: Yes, something like that. Catcher in the
Rye I liked very much. HeTs a special kind of
writer. HeTs not viable. He can never produce
a tradition at all. But thatTs nothing against him,
No reason why a writer should. But heTs invented
a new literary language. And itTs extremely in-
teresting.
NOV. 15, 1965
JAMES FORSYTH
TOM SPEIGHT
DAN WILLIAMS
17
untitled painting
18
See
LARRY BLIZARD
He has been noted for a rather noncommittal attitude about art " that is,
he hasnTt made committing statements. But he paints and draws a great
deal. And a seeming diffidence of his about his work is really a tendency
of friends to look after exhibitions for him. This year he won the N. C.
Print and Drawing Society prize at the State Exhibition with the woodcut
on page 21. He was interested in art by a high school teacher in White-
ville, N. C., and graduated in art from East Carolina College with a B. A.
and an M. A. He now lives in New York City.
19
|
7
"
'P
¢
untitled drawing
an
The Swing woodcut
Van Gogh woodcut, two impressions
22
THE WINDOW
A SHORT STORY
JOHN JUSTICE
What held Ben back was the fear of
being ridiculous. Otherwise he would glad-
ly have immersed himself in P. C. and the
activities of P. C.Ts Campus Peace Union.
That fear of exposing oneTs self made him
hesitate. He had evolved from a long line
of mountain people to whom public notice
of any kind was notoriety, and even though
four years at the University had changed
him, had loosed the familial bonds, still he
listened for his familyTs laconic, drawled dis-
approval. He did meet with the Campus
Peace Union and wrote its pamphlets and
continued to edit the campus newspaper.
His campus life was widely divided: he was
a Deke, but at night he sat by the open win-
dow and battered out pilippics on the clear-
skinned, mindless residents of Greek Row.
Even his muddy brown eyes could see the
nightly writings were pitiful, but he felt that
the insistent, nagging drive which forced
him to fill the endless long, yellow sheets
was anything but pitiful.
Ben slowly mounted the brown gravel
path to P. C.Ts house, looking up at the
twisting branches and racing clouds, think-
ing it was a fine, appropriate day for the
Warrior to come. The spring-swollen clouds
were tossed and driven, and in the distance
rolled the occasional rare sound of spring
thunder.
The Warrior " Ben had thought him
dead until P. C. had announced at a meeting
of the Campus Peace Union that he would
come and address the group. A man who had
fought through five decades for causes whose
existence other persons would not acknowl-
edge " he was there when Palmer raged
red-eyed and righteous; he provided a run-
ning commentary at Versailles when Wilson
was sucked in and devoured by voracious old
Europe; and when CoxeyTs Army fell before
the might of America, led by McCarthur stiff
with holiness, the Warrior was there. He
was a confidant of presidents, kings and
kingmakers, and tyrants " Wilson, Stalin,
Hoover, Churchill, both Roosevelts " he had
known them all and outlived them all; yet
in the sprawling cornucopia of America, his
name was a subject for a joke or curse. Gad-
fly and agitator, he was the conscience of a
conscienceless nation.
The hill leveled off oas Ben neared the
large weathered house where the peace group
23
THE WINDOW
met, on a corner three blocks from campus,
just past fraternity row. Clouds bellied low
and wetly down toward the green shingled
roof as he came to the old barnlike place
where he had once stayed three solid days
while P. C. talked to him about the Campus
Peace Union; for three days and nights P.
C.Ts piercing eyes and deep, honest voice
confronted Ben in the large front room which
served for sleeping, drinking, debating and
on occasion, lovemaking. The two wide beds
with bowl-like depressions in the mattresses,
the oil stove, and the naked wood floor; rows
of paperbacks and a constant odor of dust
and burning oil; and always, the insistent,
arguing, messianic voices; sunsets and long
nights, the red glow of the sun again, rain,
wind, stars, moon . . . Ben had joined.
The news raced through classrooms and
offices and administrative inner sanctums
that the editor of the campus paper was in
league with a group of leftwing, possibly
communist, shrill-voiced, better-red-than-
dead pleaders for universal, unilateral (no
matter if the two were compatible) disarma-
ment.
Ben didnTt think of the group that way
at all, for he found P. C., who was the group,
and nearly all the rest as reasonable as most
persons and not particularly fanatic; though
P. C.Ts talks on Russell, Ezione, Szilard et
al, did have a slightly soporific effect if heard
too often. The majority of BenTs acquaint-
ances were puzzled and angered at his join-
ing the CPU. The newspaper crew looked
at him skeptically, the fraternity was overly-
polite, and not a few persons completely
ignored the convert. Most of them could see
no gradation between the CPU position and
that of groups such as Gus HallTs sad bunch.
Perhaps, Ben thought, the abundance of our
land has instilled in us an irascibility toward
shades of opinion, feeling, and thought. Hav-
ing been given so very much " land, climate,
unlimited resources " and having grown so
opulent, we canTt deal with middle values.
This inability to make fine distinctions
worked both. ways, though, for he suspected
P. C. would, if he could screw his courage
to it, go further to the left and cast off the
24
last vestiges of the values he had acquired
in Rome, Georgia. He is one of the most
honorable persons I know, Ben thought. P.
C., born a Southerner and a Catholic and
the sole support of a mother dying of cancer,
was presently in debt to several finance
companies who were becoming edgy. P. C.
lived for the movement, his true religion,
which Ben was trying to believe, or at least
to see how P. C. believed.
The rusted black mailbox on the front
porch was empty for the first time in BenTs
memory. Occupants of the large, wooden
house changed almost weekly, and the box
usually bulged with bills, library overdue
notices and third class mail for oOccupant�.
oWelcome stranger,� P. C. boomed
through the screen door, his face dim and
gray behind the thin, meshed wire as he
opened the door for Ben. His reference to
BenTs absences from meetings wasnTt sar-
castic; P. C. was wholly sincere and assumed
others, especially those in the movement, to
be equally one-dimensional.
oIs he here yet?� Ben asked, nodding
to Norwood Jones, a short, handsome philoso-
phy instructor.
oYes, heTs resting back in my room.�
P. C. said. oHe said he had a rough trip
down from New York.�
~He took the train?�
oUh huh. HowTve you been?T
P. C.Ts collar knot was slightly askew;
Ben always felt a petty gladness at P. C.Ts
sartorial aberrations then felt ashamed at
the snobbery in himself. P. C., who looked
like an amiable and slightly aging football
tackle, always had a missing button or a
grimy collar. He was thirty-one and was
pursuing a masterTs in math.
Ben said he was fine, noticing that the
room was filled with the village peace crowd:
Mrs. Bowers, Professor Cox, Mrs. Cox, the
CPUTs, and as visitors, the student-body
president and the president of the Young
Republicans with two companions. These
last stood in a line against the left wall,
smoking and talking to each other behind
cupped hands.
oHave you written any masterpieces
lately?� P. C.Ts humor was a bit heavy-
handed.
oNot yet. Faulkner can rest easy.� One
Sunday morning in the the school cafeteria,
P. C. had come across him writing. Ben had
yielded and handed him the poem which
began: Death will come to me on a silver
morn/ borne on trumpet tones past grey
veiled woods. He blushed at the memory.
He had been caught up in the excitement of
the act of writing, which always convinced
him (easily) that what he was doing at the
moment was fine, wonderful, fantastic.
The garbled murmur of voices cleared
into separate conversations, and he caught
the words oResnais . .. pretentious .
phony ... Che Guevera ... Burroughs. .
world culture... Rechy...� Mark Pierce
stood talking rapidly, obsessively under a
Klee print. Mrs. Flowers and Mrs. Cox
emerged side by side from the back room,
parted and revealed the tall figure of the
Warrior. Ben was struck at once by the
manTs solemn dignity "the great, domed
head, the wide, downturned lips, but most
of all, the eyes which seemed to have a life
of their own: dark and quick, they encom-
passed the room and everyone in it with a
single, swift glance. He wore a plain, dark
suit and brown shoes and a wide, wine-
colored tie in a Windsor knot. The sun burst
through the clouds outside and rushed to
the WarriorTs face, making it a gold and
gray mask. He stood framed in the doorway
as he smiled and turned another unblinking
look on them all. Then, moving his long
fingers through his hair, frowning slightly
as if trying to recall something-"" perhaps a
similar scene in a similar room " he care-
fully sat down.
No one applauded, but Mrs. Cox and
old Professor Perkins moved nervously. Mrs.
Bowers, the wife of a physics professor who
had played a minor role at Los Alamos and
had never forgiven himself, poured tea for
the Warrior. He had declined a drink. oI
hope you rested well,T Mrs. Flowers said
with a radiant smile.
oFine, quite well . . . although, at my
age, I begrudge each moment wasted on
JOHN JUSTICE
,
sleep.� Everyone laughed softly.
Mrs. Flowers, a lovely woman, had a
low, musical laugh, which was incongrously,
disturbingly girlish, She met BenTs eyes,
inviting him to laugh with her. He smiled,
noticing again the deep vertical line just
above her eyebrows. Why is it, he thought,
that every decent, honorable person I know
has the same tense and nervous expression
as if functioning always under intolerable
stress? The clouds converged and the float-
ing golden notes disappeared, and the room
suddenly darkened. oI donTt want to preach
to you,� the Warrior began, oalthough, God
knows, I suppose my life was " has been "
nothing but a long sermon preached in an
empty church.� oOh no-o-o,� Mrs. Jenkins
cooed. He smiled, oBut before I say any-
thing, suppose you tell me what youTre doing
here on campus.�
Everyone looked to P. C., who was lean-
ing against the mantle, beer in hand. Ben
saw Mrs. Flowers throw him the peculiar,
unreserved smile exchanged only between
true believers, a look at once encouraging
and beatific, empathetic and smug.
oWell, weTre a very young group,� P. C.
said, his smooth and powerful voice filling
the room, ~~WeTve been chartered only two
months. Mark Pierce, John Burns and my-
self are what you might call charter mem-
bers.�� Mark Pierce, sprawled on the floor
at P. C.Ts feet, was the campus existentialist.
Bearded, intense, extremely knowledgable,
he looked like the young Van Gogh, with
the same smoldering potential for self-
destruction in his eyes. John Burns, sleek
and blond, with clean, soft skin, sat easily
on the sofa beside Mrs. Cox. JohnTs father
was the twelfth richest man in the United
States and no longer communicated with
John, who received a monthly check, sub
rosa, from his mother. John was completely
hung up on P. C.
oWe are still in the organizing stage,�
P. C. was saying. oThe campus and town
are beginning to find out that weTre not such
a bunch of nuts, I think� He cleared his
throat, oiling the smooth machinery of his
voice. oAnd we hope, sir, that your visit
25
THE WINDOW
will spark some interest in the Campus Peace
Union.� The Warrior grinned a fighterTs
grin and seemed about to laugh. While P. C.
talked, the old manTs wide, sculptured lips
moved slightly and continuously, searching
for the correct expression. He leaned back
on his spine and threw his left leg carelessly
over his right, exposing part of his pale skin,
the hairs catching intermittent glints from
the sunTs recurrent glances.
P. C. rumbled on about plans for picket-
ing the computation center or the psychology
department, where, it was rumored, experi-
ments were being made with war gases for
Asia and perhaps Latin America.
Ben recalled a night in ByronTs Coffee
Shop when P. C. had surprised him with an
offer of a job after graduation. oHow would
you like to work for national headquarters
of CPU?T Before he could answer, P. C.
went on. oITve written some letters and made
some calls and told the director, James Free-
man, about you. HeTs very interested.� This
was about a month after Ben began working
for the peace group. He had dutifully read
Russell, Szilard, N. C., Norman Thomas and
Ezione, and had gone to the meetings where
resolutions were thrown out like meat to
starving tigers. After fierce debate, the
motions were passed or rejected, it never
seemed to matter which. And he had laughed
at the easy jokes made with veiled hatred
about those who abhorred the CPU " law
students, ROTC, businessmen, etc. He had
attended interminable parties in the echoing,
dim, wooden house where there were no
rugs or glasses or napkins or toilet paper.
Candlelight and beer smell; guitars; lovely,
pale girls who seemed oppressed with an
eternal sadness and seemed to be wafted in
and out on the night wind . . . endless talk
and a feeling, a most curious feeling which
gradually permeated him: an awareness of
approaching doom, martyrdom, Jehova-com-
plex, and bitter pain at loss of the worldTs
innocence. He suspected that if he went to
New York with national headquarters, he
would encounter a more sophisticated and
urbane group, but he knew that this strange,
choking feeling would follow. oI donTt think
26
I can do it,� he had told P. C. The burly,
dark-haired leader leaned forward toward
Ben, who, resting both forearms on the table
with palms upward, continued: oI just want
to find out whatTs in me, not tell everyone
else what they should think and do.� oBut
do you think you have a right to that sort
of life?� Part of P. C.Ts charm was that he
was never contentious, he seemed genuinely
curious. oWhy not?� It was Ben, instead,
who felt an argumentative edge creep into
his voice.
oAfter Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Hungary,
Selma... after all that, does any of us have
the right "the luxury. I should say "to
a self-concerned life?�
oOf course nothingTs changed, really, P.
C., cruelty and murder and horrors and hate
have always been with us. The Bible, for
GodTs sake, is a charnel house. And all those
eternal wars up and down Europe and Asia.
The Spanish Inquisition, Salem witch-trials.
The only thing is, P. C., now weTre more
aware of it.�
oYes, now all the stink is crammed down
our throats every day. DoesnTt that make
a difference to you?� Ben thought of the
slow mornings in the cafeteria, with the
gaily-tinted morning sunrays streaming
through the tall, painted stained-glass win-
dows. He drank coffee and read the news-
paperTs smug shouts of fraud, violence,
corruption, murder, genocide, apocalypse.
oYes,� he finally said. oIt does make a
difference. But not all the difference,� and
hated himself for his lack of conviction.
oItTs your decision.� P. C. looked blackly
over at the record which smoothly, magically
produced the Air for G string, which for
Ben would forever conjure up the low-ceil-
inged, warm room where they sat, the leader
and the one who not only was not a leader
but who didnTt know whom to follow.
oT donTt know,� P. C. said slowly, oOne
reason why ITm so involved in this sort of
thing is that my family was always so un-
involved that they got on the wrong side,
like my grandfather who started the Georgia
Klan.� Ben could easily conjure up a craggy,
night-riding ancestor of P. C., the burly
peace-hawker. oSo maybe ITm just working
out a complex. Certainly, my motives for
doing CPU work are no more honorable
or purer than are yours for not joining.�
oLet me think about it,� Ben had said
as a final answer.
When they left, the air was light and
clean, and the sky was green-blue, a trans-
lucent, upturned bowl through which the
grace of the first morning light poured upon
them. Already, the earliest of campus
walkers followed the villageTs gravel paths
beneath the heavy cover of shining leaves
The WarriorTs eyes " those life-studded
orbs which looked as if they would burn
even when death had made an easy conquest
of his body " those eyes were fixed on P.
C. Mrs. Flowers watched too, with a pair
of her slender fingers resting lightly on her
long, pale throat. P. C. finished.
When the old man rose, his voice was
reedy by contrast with P. C.Ts. ~Well, youTre
doing fine. I certainly think youTre headed
in the right direction. I might add, I think
youTre fortunate in having such a leader as
Mr. C We
Ben looked out the window, where huge,
bluish-white clouds billowed up over the
house next door, smoke from a heavenly fire.
oT donTt really know,� the Warrior said, oof
any advice I can give you, except to remind
you, if you need reminding, that the race
is not to the swift...�
Mrs. CoxTs semi-palsied hand wriggled
into the air, and she held her breath until
the Warrior said oYes, please.�
oI was wondering"� She gathered her
body as if to rise, thought better of it, and
plopped back into the yielding sofa, oI was
just wondering which party you think is
more favorable to our cause, the Democrats
or Republicans. I mean, ITm so confused...�
oWell " traditionally, the Democrats
have been quicker to pick up the ideas ITve
personally plumped for. ItTs hard to say,
because everything is now so sprawling and
amorphous that you donTt know where to
prick to produce an effect. One could go to
Teddy Roosevelt or even Franklin and, if
JOHN JUSTICE
you made your point, something might be
done. But whom do you see now to say ~our
foreign policy verges on madness?T That
just popped into my head, I donTt believe
it " necessarily.�
The president of the Young Republi-
cans stood up. Ralph Fawls was short and
blond, with creamy, glowing skin.
oTTd like to ask what you do think of
our foreign policy, particularly in Asia.�
oThatTs rather a large question. Gen-
erally speaking, ITd say we need to consider
the desires of the Asian peoples for whom
weTre supposedly fighting. And consider the
dictates of history and place less faith in
the stirring calls of our duty to defend free
countries.�
oDonTt you think.� Fawls said, oyouTre
over-simplifying a complicated thing? I
mean, itTs just possible the State Department
and the President may know something you
donTt about the world situation.�
An almost palpable tremor of disap-
proval rose at the words. The Warrior
squinted a little, pushed his glasses back up
on his nose and cleared his throat. oPerhaps.
But I think " and ITd almost go as far as
to say ITm possitive"that no knowledge
they have could justify the unspeakable game
they are playing with the worldTs life.�
oWell, then, Cuba? Would you let it
fall to the Communists?�
oT would leave Cuba to the Cubans, to
coin a phrase, until a far greater consensus
of their people ask for our help.�
oAnd Viet Nam?�
oA negligible country, as countries go,
until we made it indispensable for our pride
by incessant ranting on its importance.�
The Y.R. president colored and took a deep
preparatory breath, but the older man con-
tinued, ~I think, if youTll allow me, that Viet
Nam and Cuba are fine examples of our at-
tempts to impose our ways on the rest of
the world in the name of freedom. What
kind of freedom must be won by sending our
young men to alien countries to bathe the
lands in blood?� His voiee steeled into anger
for the only time that afternoon, but he
caught himself, stopped abruptly and smiled.
27
THE WINDOW
oBut you may be right, though I doubt its�
His tone was a subtle slap. A tall, brown-
eyed girl in a black sweater and orange skirt
asked the Warrior whom he most admired.
oOh I suppose Woodrow Wilson, as
exasperating as he could be at times. He
had the purest vision and most muscular
conscience of any American, certainly, and
probably of any world figure ITve known.
His environment unfortunately hampered
and eventually killed him.�
oHow about living persons?� the girl
asked.
oNo comment.�
The questions died down. The room was
filled with a rich bronze light that fell on
all their faces and turned them the same
smooth, golden color. Outside, a woman in
a bold red dress was taking clothes from a
huge wicker basket and fastening them to
the line. As she worked the gusty wind ruth-
lessly tangled and frayed her hair, and her
dress was plastered to one side and hung
pennant-like out on the other.
Mrs. Cox broke the silence with oBut
what can we" what can J do for peace?
Right here in Spring Hill.�
The Warrior tilted his great head a little
and looked mildly at the white-haired,
dumpy, sincere lady. Surely he had seen a
thousand, from Dedham to Berkeley to
Spring Hill.
oTI, of course, have no panaceas, no
miracles, to suggest,� he began. oI gave up
on miracles some years ago.�
His eyes pierced the air over their heads
and probed through the swarming years.
oMatter of fact, I gave Tem up after the third
time I ran for President.� The three stu-
dents politicians swapped quick glances and
laughed softly. A ripple of laughter ran
through the room. oWhat I can say, and
what I know, is that you can have an effect
on those around by your example in the most
ordinary things. It sounds banal, I know,
but that doesnTt matter ... perhaps a minor
tragedy of our age is that we are so conscious
and cerebral that weTve heard everything
one time too many, seen one sight too many
that we canTt bear. But if, as I say, it sounds
28
banal to say your behavior at civic meetings,
school functions, shopping even, is influential
" it isnTt at all a banal fact. ItTs the differ-
ence between hearing someone say ~God is
loveT and having a child kiss you on the cheek.
I think the CPU here is doing splendidly.
Anything you do in a pure-hearted way
toward making your world more human, will
help.� He stopped and looked at them for
a long few seconds, as if transfixing them
forever in his endless gaze, as if they were
terribly important to him.
oI must say I feel a bit sad, looking at
your young faces . . . so much expectancy,
and I have so little to offer you, only my old
body and old ideas.� He arose easily and
walked around behind his chair. Placing
his hands on the chair back, standing very
upright, he continued, oThe winds of my life
have always been stormy. When I ran for
President the third time " when a million
Americans voted for me"I was called
names publicly you rarely come across, even
in todayTs novels. They accused me of every-
thing from being syphilitic to having a hot
line to the Kremlin. That was when they
still called Tem Bolsheviks .. .� Head tilted
back, a gleam of sun resting cheerfully on
his cheek, he smiled as if memory had worked
its magic and transformed the old curses
into pleasantries. P. C. stood with his weight
evenly on both feet and his hands by his side,
He was transfixed, Mrs. FlowersTs half-smile
was imposing a mood on all of them, and
Ben resisted.
oThe trouble is,� the old man said, oI
have never been attuned to my time. The
things I advocate always come, but always
so late.� He spoke reflectively as if his words
were for other ears than those in the room.
oWhen, in 1910, I pleaded for decent wage
and hour regulations, nothing came of it.
But there was still time. And when the
League of Nations was bludgeoned to death,
the world could still weather another sense-
less war. Now, though, time is suddenly
running out. I say with utter certainty "
and though I hate to admit it, with despair
"I say, if we do not take the lead in halting
the arms race, Armageddon will come in
your lifetimes, it may even come within the
remnants of my own life. But ITm 75, and
I canTt expect to see everything. After all,
ITve seen Bilbo, the Depression, Hitler, and
the John Birch Society . . . what more can
I ask for?�
Ben suspected a self-pitying tone lay
behind the old manTs words. The WarriorTs
voice and manner were strong and com-
pelling. He spoke with the authority of a
man who was passionately involved in the
great issues of his time. Yet could he be
lost in the same howling black maelstrom as
Ben? Like Scott FitzgeraldTs hero, had the
WarriorTs omanner remained intact long
after the morale cracked?� He saw that
everyone " even the truculent Y. R. presi-
dent and his coterie " was caught up in the
WarriorTs quiet words.
o .. to sound defeatist, but I would be
less than honest if I failed to tell you that you
will let yourself in for many cruelties if you
continue to work for... for...� He stam-
mered, suddenly ancient and dead; his eyes
filled and darkened before he caught himself,
oMy god, they have taken our words, I canTt
say them... I was going to say, if you work
for a cause youTre an easy target. And if
youTre good enough and tough enough that
you have a chance of reaching success, they
wonTt hesitate to crucify you.
oWoodrow Wilson once told me, shortly
before he died...�
Ben saw the woman in the red dress
next door lift the basket spilling over with
fresh, clean clothes.
oHe said, ~In a way, my death will be
the certification of my worth. Had I been
less right, they wouldnTt have united so very
solidly against meT. That was after Versailles
and before the suicidal trip about the country
trying to get votes for the League.�
With swift, sure hands the woman pins
the shirts and pants and blouses and blankets
to the line. The wind rises and whips fran-
tically at the clothes. Overhead, massed
legions of clouds are driven toward the
South.
oBut as you know, the final judgment of
your lifeTs work rests within yourself, or
JOHN JUSTICE
possibly, with a god, but never, never, in
another manTs opinion. And I myself could
never live just for the sake of avoiding jail
and the poorhouse and tip-toeing over the
tightrope into the grave.�
Outside, the womanTs face is in profile:
a sparse, lean face which life has stripped
of the luxuries of youth and beauty. Yet
some beauty remains in the stern lips, the
proud, almost Indian features. She pauses
a moment, bent in the act of lifting an article
from the basket. She seems to cock her ear
and listen . . . does she hear him, does she
sense the hush that has enveloped the large
room?
Now the room is a cloistered shell of
silence except for the WarriorTs flowing, por-
tentious words. Soul, honor, doomsday, puri-
ty .... And P. C.Ts face is suffused with a
nameless surging emotion. The sun is behind
the racing clouds, but a sort of excited flush
glows in the room. Where eyes had met
briefly, now they lock in wonder. The War-
rior has lifted them all into another world,
a silent moment of soul-glancing, in which
it seems the very universe hangs breathless-
ly suspended.
John Burns, the apostate aristocrat,
looks over at Mark Pierce who is grimacing
as if in terrible anger or the millisecond be-
fore sexual release. Pierce will be stabbed
to death a year later in the Harlem office
of a Marxist party, but now he is the fire-
devoured believer who lusts for justice and
will fight fiercely for peace.
¥ . may snowball into an irrestible
moral juggernaut, smashing the old and
stupid ways of power-politics, the deceiving
shibboleths.
oYou, You, YOU! are the ones. And
though it seems sometimes that an invisible,
indestructible wall bars you from the power-
holders, walls can be smashed, and their
existence is no excuse for apathy. For time
endlessly rolling is now tired, man is tired.
He hungers for a millennium. He yearns for
the final catharsis and will settle for a uni-
versal purge by blood, a, release which will
leave children, mothers, fathers all blasted
into monsters wandering over a monstrous
29
THE WINDOW
earth, whimpering through inhuman lips.
Oh, we cannot acquiesce. We are everymanTs
hopes.�
The woman has not heard. She finishes
her work and stands a moment with her
hands on her wide, flat hips. She is about
twenty feet from the open window. She lifts
her face to the wind, her dress is plastered
against her body and the whiffing sound of
the clothes is wafted past her and through
the window to Ben"the tiny flapping of
wind-stirred cloth. Surely, as she stands per-
fectly still " she hears the Warrior say o...
on the other foot now. Now we must justify
manTs way to God, even if there is no God.�
But she turns and, with her brown-grey
hair flying crazily in the rising wind, she
strides back into the white clapboard house.
The screen door bangs twice after her.
o| gain the whole world and lose his
soul. That, old as it is, is the crux of it all.
Thank you, ITve talked too long.�
They throng to him at once, encircling
him. Questions fly, oWhat is our stand on
fallout shelters?T oWhat about war gas?�
oAs peace workers, are we morally bound to
enter the civil rights struggle?�
The Warrior is the tallest of them all,
and his large, great-domed head is above
their bobbing, smiling faces.
BenTs feet crunch heavily on the brown
gravel path as he hurries outside. The
strong breeze is strangely warm and sen-
suous on his skin. The whole afternoon,
plunging toward evening, is lovely. Cloud-
banks completely ring the horizon with an
almost perfect circle of blue at the skyTs
zenith. The clouds rolling and roiling are
grey and purple, and where great columns of
sun streak down, of the whitest white.
oNo, sir youTre wrong, Dead wrong,�
He sees three workmen digging in the
street. Standing waist deep in the hole they
have smashed in the concrete, they lean on
their shovels, picks and hammers. Their
work clothes are completely besotted with
sweat. oThe hell lam. Read the newspapers,
for Chrissake!� A young, muscular, pimple-
faced man argues, oAnybody can see weTre
all going to be blown clear off the planet. It
30
donTt take any brains at all to see that.�
An older man, too old, really, to be wielding
a jackhammer, shakes his head solemnly and
says, oTell me this, George, do you believe
in God?� oWell, hell yes. Why?� ~He made
the earth and man and everything, didnTt
he?� oSure, but whatTs that"� ~Then tell
me this, George, do you honestly think a God
who could do that will let man destroy His
earth, GodTs earth? What kind of God would
that be?T The pimply-faced workmanTs
mouth twists in frustrated rage. The older
man nods to the third fellow for support.
oYou know, Bill knows, and I know that
HeTs told us... no more water, but fire next
time... And He did not, no sir, He did not
say man would provide the fire. ThatTs for
God. Am I right or am I not?� oOh shit,�
said the shorter man and absently smashed a
crashing blow of his pike into the stone.
Ben turned right on Mallette Street,
beside the house, and, glancing over, saw
the window of P. C.Ts room. The Warrior
was still emprisoned by the polite, smiling
interrogators. The face framed in the win-
dow was solemn and touched with mortality
in the late afternoonTs light. In profile it was
emaciated, his nose sweeping horribly down
from the bridge and his adamTs apple pulsing
irregularly.
At the foot of Mallette Street hangs the
cheery, blinking red sign of ClarenceTs tav-
ern. The tavern is warm and dark, with
sturdy old English booths, cold beer, the
amiable chatter of law students, English
graduate assistants, students who would
laugh at the WarriorTs name. Or even frown
in unrecognition. The street swoops pre-
cipitously down toward the warm red sign,
and as Ben stands frozen on the gravel path
in the marine light of the coming spring
thunderstorm, he feels the WarriorTs pres-
ence, knows that the WarriorTs stark profile,
now half-hidden in the dusky light, is now
engraved in him, that wherever he goes when
the day grows dark and green turns black,
when the trees lose their gold and the birds
flee for their nests, the WarriorTs face will
remain.
ODYSSEY - 1964
The T.V. screen blears a white horizon
Into the dawning room;
As mounds of ashes sit stale
And mist-shrouded in dreg-browned cups.
Old Appolonius walks with feet of sandalwood
Across the floor;
And he waits before the mirror
For the murmurs
That live only in the light.
The voices in the empty room,
The whirring of the electric broom,
Meet and dwell in the trees
To become a revelation to Appolonius.
,
oApa ... Appolonius.� a stammering
Voice swelled.
oSmell the calebwood
From the ashes;
The apparitions are blowing
Through the minaret of the teapot,
To become a blurred and sweet,
Dear Alexandria.�
In the dawn his vision
Dies a precocious death,
And he laughs as his stomach
Calls sharply to the smiling wall.
The retchings
of a soul,
Within his cell.
JERRY TILLOTSON
Jerry Tillotson by Charlotte McMichael
31
Sam Yates
QUIET
Schooners, docked quiet and dry,
are good for thought or dream
when I am free
of love and logic,
when nights grow long
and no one comes softly
to touch a moon away
from you and me.
We know the feel
of sand together ingrained
and suns peaking
the waves higher and higher.
I passed these times
in gay moods,
touched you
and was caught fast
in one motion,
caught in articulate songs
you sang softly to me
or him your eyes dreamed
touched
knew
long before I knew
the soft feel of your body
close and warm to me.
I have known you
closing warm over me
when we kissed
when we fell the long rope
topsail to prow.
DWIGHT W. PEARCE
ei
THE JACKET
A FRAGMENT BY
S. CHERNOFF
The sleeves, he saw looking back at the
mirror, were still not even. He could cut them
again " that wasnTt what bothered him now. His
head was too small. It hadnTt occurred to him be-
fore he started to put on the jacket and it seemed
now, at this moment, like those jokes youTre not
let in on. His image sank, there before him, about
the eyes. His tongue returned to that sensitive
place he had bitten earlier into his lips. The pain
gave some relief yet, but not enough. Crazy, his
doing a thing like that to himself without know-
ing it. There had been the taste of blood and his
wonder, at first, where it was coming from. A
laugh then reached in from the next room. He
saw himself again in the mirror. If he cut the
hair away in the back he thought, remembering
his fatherTs balding there, and took up the scis-
sors once more. It was awkward cutting it that
way. The clipped hair fell in a spray and stuck to
the sweating nape of his neck. A conspicuous
breeze teased the maize curtains, blowing their
brief shadow across the wall. There was the
clamor of the street. Nothing changed, he ob-
served in the mirror. If anything, his attempt
made it worse and left him now with an even
sharper sense of loss. He closed his eyes to it and
reflected, presently, another picture for himself.
The tuneless song that used to come Sundays from
the bathroom. The arm his father claimed had
won sixteen in high-school barely reaching him
after ten minutes in the alley. The movies that
he said were only to please him. VictorTs smile
broke, coming to that split in his lip, and open-
ing his eyes found his mother there in the mirror
with him. She looked as though she had been
talking for a long time and was angry with him
for not hearing.
oAre you out of your mind?� Her words shot
from her in a whisper that was shouting. oEdTll
throw a fit " he sees this.�
oTtTs too small,� said Victor, directly into the
mirror, where it seemed he was facing her.
oToo small?� She was wincing as she did
when she was impatient with him.
oMy head.�
Still wincing, she motioned him to her and
he came. Bending, she pulled at the sleeves. Hard
hands, like stones being weighted to him.
oThereTs nothing I can do,� she wailed finally,
her eyes on a level with his. oItTs ruined.�
He was about to tell her he was sorry, when
her hand was before his mouth, the tips of her
fingers smothering what he had to say. The
pointed nails trembled at his mouth, the face set
33
THE JACKET
for something that had not yet reached him. She
appeared to him like an over-wound clock, and
himself one of her stuck hands. It was then the
back of his neck wanted scratching. He forced
his attention elsewhere " her breasts, and again,
his ears hot, returned to himself. That he wasnTt
here, he tried to imagine, that it wasnTt him it
was happening to. It often worked, but now it
occurred to him, and he wondered why it should
itch if it didnTt have to be scratched.
oWhat the hellTs keeping you?� a male voice
said suddenly. Victor felt the hands tighten now
around his arm and lead him behind her insistent-
ly into the closet.
oYou donTt even say a word,� the man was
saying as the closet door was closing, and Victor
glimpsed only pieces of him " a perforated shoe-
tip, the crease of his trousers, that much of what
he said before the darkness came. It frightened
him in the beginning " the plunge and the clothes
brushing him as if they had come alive. He
recognized one, a summer chintz of his motherTs,
and held onto it. He remembered her in it, the
memory somehow adjusted it all and made it
easier. He could almost see now and their words
too, were almost as if he were right there with
them.
oYou think I donTt know? YouTre always
screaming about honesty. Okay, letTs have it once
and for all. I feel like ITm screwing around his
grave.�
sh 1 ad
oWell thatTs how I feel.�
Victor buried his head in the sleazy material,
his hand holding on as hard as he could to it.
Yet he heard.
oT canTt get near you anymore and even when
ITm talking to you sometimes"you think I
donTt see those things?�
oT need time, Ed.�
oYou need. What about me? Where do I
come in?�
The taste of blood again was there with
Victor.
34
oOh whatTs the use.�
There was a silence and Victor prayed for
it and for them to remain so, locked in it.
oGod damn it,� EdTs voice broke out of it.
oT laid it on the chair, ITm telling you.�
He couldnTt hear his mother anymore. He
squeezed her dress, as for her.
oWhat do you mean, ~if it turns up.T ITm not
leaving here without it. You know what this suit
cost me?�
oT know, Victor thought he heard him say.
The dress was wet between his hands, the life
gone out of it.
It was then the door opened. The sudden
light stunned him, then his laugh. He had his
arm now, leading him back into the room.
oHere, let me have that,� Ed told him
laughing, trying to pry the dress away from him.
oYou canTt have them both. Make up your mind.�
Ed winked toward the bed. Victor looked there.
Her eyes seemed somewhere else though they
were on him. Victor started to take the jacket
off.
oKeep it on,� urged Ed forcing it back on
him, squatting and turning him back to the
mirror. oTake a look at yourself,� he said, there
with him"his smile, arms surrounding him.
In the process the dress had gotten away from
him somehow and now he could see it in the manTs
hand being held behind him.
oTtTs too small,� Victor said softly to the
glass.
oWhat?� asked Ed, and when he wasnTt
answered, pivoted on his heels partially toward
the bed. oWhatTs too small?�
oHis head,� she answered as if from a dis-
tance thought Victor, looking again for her in
the glass. EdTs body was in the way; he could
see only the places where it cut him off.
oT see what you mean,� said Ed, moving
closer to him in the glass, so that she seemed
swallowed up by him. oGive yourself time.
YouTll grow into it.�
RANDALL JARRELLTS LAST BOOK *
GUY OWEN
Randall Jarrell. The Lost World. The Macmillan Com-
pany,, New York. 1965. $3.95.
Randall JarrellTs The Lost World has been so
soundly drubbed that I would like very much to
come to its defense " but I cannot, in all honesty,
find much in it to praise. For example, Joseph
Bennet has allowed himself to write the follow-
ing in The New York Times:
othe book is taken up with JarrellTs familiar
clanging vulgarity, corny clichés and cutenesses,
the intolerable self-indulgence of the tearjerking,
bourgeois sentimentality. Folksy, pathetic, af-
fected " there is no depth to which he will not
sink, if shown the hole.�
(Who shows him the hole? One wonders what
the source of Mr. BennetTs ill-mannered attack is.
Perhaps Jarrell has said something nasty about
him in print or at a cocktail party, or maybe he
is merely put off by the poetTs beard?)
In any case, the book is not all that bad; per-
haps few books are. But, unfortunately, most of
BennetTs indictment can be supported " though
he does not do so in his snarling review. Jarrell
is sentimental in the recollections of his Los
Angeles childhood (oThe Lost World�), he is
prone to cuteness, and the language is occasionally
tired and too often understated to the point of
slackness. Jarrell seems impelled to take the un-
poetic things of this world and let them stand
+This review was written before the poetTs
death."ed. :
untransmuted in his recent verse: othe tin lunch
box with the half-pint thermos bottle� or the
opening of oA Street off Sunset�:
Sometimes as I drive by the factory
That manufactures, after so long, Vicks
Vapo-Rub Ointment, there rises over me
A eucalyptus tree.
What Bennet does not point out, and more
damaging, is that the masterful technique that
Jarrell was wielding so brilliantly twenty years
ago has hardened into mannerisms: the quirky
stammering line, the repeated word in the same
line, the word play that is merely clever (oWhat's
seen and whatTs obscene... .�), the Ramsonian
mixture of the banal and learned (oOne spoonful
is poured out into my milk/and the milk, transub-
stantiated, is coffee.�) Jarrell seems to deliberate-
ly freight his new poems with dull details that
do not add up to much, to flatten his diction until
the lines read like prose, as in oNext Day,� a
poem about an aging woman at a supermarket:
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school,
My husband away at work...
Well, this clearly wonTt do, not for poetry. Almost
everywhere there are the same slack, throwaway
lines and low voltage. Too often, then, the poems
simply do not engage the reader enough to make
him care"no matter how meaningful the ex-
ploration of his childhood or his relationship to
his parents or his wife are to the poet.
The truth of the matter is that JarrellTs repu-
tation as a poet (not as critic or novelist) has
always been rather overblown, and the inevitable
reaction has set in. Moreover, there is obviously
35
a growing rebellion against the Academics now
" not just from the Redskins, either " and Jar-
rell, along with John Crowe Ransom, his teacher,
has been during the 60Ts the favorite target of
abuse. And it is in terms of Academic verse
(though ITd like to see the term retired) that Jar-
rellTs failures here might be defined. For if any
volume can be labeled oAcademic�, this one can.
All the earmarks are present: the low-keyed, cas-
ual diction, the irony (not very biting), the ped-
antry, the learned allusions (In oWoman� alone
there are references to Disraeli, Freud, Eliot,
Middleton, etc.), the mixture of the literary and
the prosy, as in oWoman�:
Poor medlar, no sooner ripe than rotten!
You must be seized today, or stale tomorrow
Into a wife, a mother, a homemaker,
An Elector of the League of Women Voters.
As much as I would like to disagree with Mr.
Bennet, then, I find The Lost World a disappoint-
CONTRIBUTORS
36
ing book. But would it be that disappointing if
it were not by Randall Jarrell, Well Known Poet
and Member of the Establishment? And after
all, is it fair to expect him to go on re-writing
oThe Ball Turret Gunner� and oJews at HaifaT?
At least here the poet is courageous enough to
take all kinds of risks, even stripping himself
naked. And if one looks for them, there are some
eminent successes among the failures. The two
childrens poems, oThe Bird of Night� and oBats,�
are as good as Roethke; oA Hunt in the Black
Forest� is first-rate Jarrell; and oWell Water�
is a superb brief poem where every syllable is
just right. Jarrell remains one of the best poets
on the subject of women and children, and even
when the poems fail to come off, his characters
emerge wholly alive. I remain grateful for the
risks taken and for the half dozen or more poems
that are fully realized. They are their own de-
fense.
John Justice has been and is now a student at
Chapel Hill; in between, among other things, he
was a reporter in Greenville. He now works for
the North Carolina Fund in Durham.
Jerry Tillotson is a graduate of E.C.C. (B.A.,
English), who is now an editor for the Wilming-
ton Star-News.
Dwight Pearce: graduate of E.C.C. (B.S., Eng-
lish) ; teaching now in a military prep-school in
Virginia; formerly associate editor of this maga-
zine.
S. Chernoff is a writer in New York City. He has
been published in various other non-slick maga-
zines.
Guy Owen is the professor of English at State
College who recently published a picaresque novel
Ballad of the Flim Flam Man, which has done
well. He is also editor of Southern Poetry Review.