A Long Conversation

The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate Edited by John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young University of Georgia Press, 442 pp., $18 To a remarkable extent the serious American literature of this century has been Southern in both origin and subject. Likewise that discourse concerning the nature of the art that we call criticism. The situation has changed of late, with the appearance of a greater variety of voices speaking heretofore unknown (or unintelligible) tongues. Yet this fresh multiplicity has served only to make the anomaly of the Southern Renaissance all the more apparent. The explanation of such flourishing in the face of every impediment imaginable to the behaviorist can be partly traced to a revision of our cultural history. But the primary attribution, whatever are finally discovered to be the poetic advantages of a Southern nativity, must be to persons—gifted men and women who responded in language to the mysterious stimulus of their place and era. Thanks to the evidence in hand, we are in a position to know two of them as never before.

What this book does is to put beyond question what the friends of Davidson and Tate have suspected for some time: that their literary correspondence is perhaps the most distinguished of our time. When reading this almost fifty years of unbroken exchange, we should recognize that the late Donald Davidson and Allen Tate were friends before they acquired identities as masters of their craft, though of course their mutual devotion to the profession of letters informed and sustained their long conversation. Their letters contain long discussions of various works in progress, reciprocations of advice, counsel, and honest criticism; but the roots of their communion are elsewhere and explain their capacity to collaborate in more than literary concerns.

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M. E. Bradford

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The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate Edited by John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young University of Georgia Press, 442 pp., $18 To a remarkable extent the serious American literature of this century has been Southern in both origin and subject. Likewise that discourse concerning the nature of the art that we call criticism. The situation has changed of late, with the appearance of a greater variety of voices speaking heretofore unknown (or unintelligible) tongues. Yet this fresh multiplicity has served only to make the anomaly of the Southern Renaissance all the more apparent. The explanation of such flourishing in the face of every impediment imaginable to the behaviorist can be partly traced to a revision of our cultural history. But the primary attribution, whatever are finally discovered to be the poetic advantages of a Southern nativity, must be to persons—gifted men and women who responded in language to the mysterious stimulus of their place and era. Thanks to the evidence in hand, we are in a position to know two of them as never before.

What this book does is to put beyond question what the friends of Davidson and Tate have suspected for some time: that their literary correspondence is perhaps the most distinguished of our time. When reading this almost fifty years of unbroken exchange, we should recognize that the late Donald Davidson and Allen Tate were friends before they acquired identities as masters of their craft, though of course their mutual devotion to the profession of letters informed and sustained their long conversation. Their letters contain long discussions of various works in progress, reciprocations of advice, counsel, and honest criticism; but the roots of their communion are elsewhere and explain their capacity to collaborate in more than literary concerns.