Over a Sinful Abyss

Alan Swallow has reissued Allen Tate’s The Fathers ($3.75; paper, $1.85), perhaps to discover if it can take its place as the finest novel about the South, and one of the half-dozen or so finest novels about America, now that the jargon and the mores of the “new-critical” thirties out of which it grew are dead. How soon it establishes itself, as it will, is of no significance; but the process can be hastened perhaps by admitting that Tate has not so certainly done for his subject—the Manichean sin-obsessed Puritanism that typifies the South— what Joyce did for Dublin: both rendered it intelligible, and offered an inescapable purgation.

Here then is no satisfying catharsis: too much remains of the compulsive concern with sin which caused Wyndham Lewis to write (thinking of Popeye and his “rape” of the “sinner” Temple Drake) that the South’s most highly-thought-of novelist was, underneath it all, a puritanical fanatic with a corn-cob. But it is only against Faulkner’s failure (and not against Margaret Mitchell’s, as Arthur Mize-ner suggests in his introduction) that Tate’s achievement can be measured; for the obsession of serious Southern fiction is best represented by Faulkner’s novels, and perhaps most clearly represented in his works by his story of Isaac Snopes in The Hamlet. Isaac is a half-wit, deprived of what Dante called the good of intellect, and pulled toward the good which man finds mirrored in the flesh after a horrible fashion. Here we have the main if not the only theme of modern Southern literature: the letch of a human will toward what seems always to Southerners to be the symbolic, depraved, horrible, fleshly desecration of some pure and other-worldy (and only occasionally magnolia-scented) ideal. It is an attitude of mind which has dogged the Christian West. In Tate’s novel its Southern embodiment is raised for the first time to intelligibility.

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Vincent Miller

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Alan Swallow has reissued Allen Tate’s The Fathers ($3.75; paper, $1.85), perhaps to discover if it can take its place as the finest novel about the South, and one of the half-dozen or so finest novels about America, now that the jargon and the mores of the “new-critical” thirties out of which it grew are dead. How soon it establishes itself, as it will, is of no significance; but the process can be hastened perhaps by admitting that Tate has not so certainly done for his subject—the Manichean sin-obsessed Puritanism that typifies the South— what Joyce did for Dublin: both rendered it intelligible, and offered an inescapable purgation.

Here then is no satisfying catharsis: too much remains of the compulsive concern with sin which caused Wyndham Lewis to write (thinking of Popeye and his “rape” of the “sinner” Temple Drake) that the South’s most highly-thought-of novelist was, underneath it all, a puritanical fanatic with a corn-cob. But it is only against Faulkner’s failure (and not against Margaret Mitchell’s, as Arthur Mize-ner suggests in his introduction) that Tate’s achievement can be measured; for the obsession of serious Southern fiction is best represented by Faulkner’s novels, and perhaps most clearly represented in his works by his story of Isaac Snopes in The Hamlet. Isaac is a half-wit, deprived of what Dante called the good of intellect, and pulled toward the good which man finds mirrored in the flesh after a horrible fashion. Here we have the main if not the only theme of modern Southern literature: the letch of a human will toward what seems always to Southerners to be the symbolic, depraved, horrible, fleshly desecration of some pure and other-worldy (and only occasionally magnolia-scented) ideal. It is an attitude of mind which has dogged the Christian West. In Tate’s novel its Southern embodiment is raised for the first time to intelligibility.