Books: The Uncompromised Agrarian

A Wake for the Living: A Family Chronicle By Andrew Lytle Crown, 270 pp., $8.95 At the beginning of Classical civilization, the idea of death was so abhorrent that, according to Homer, the shade of Achilles was willing to trade all his glory for the lowliest state of servitude in the land of the living. In the second half of the twentieth century Andrew Lytle would have it otherwise. Or so I would judge from the title and substance of his latest book, A Wake for the Living.

Lytle is a novelist, historian, recently retired editor of the Sewanee Review, and one of the most uncompromising of the Southern Agrarians, who argued in 1930 that the urbanization of America would ultimately lead to the triumph of radical secularism, the debasement of the natural environment, and the breakdown of communal civility. In his latest work, Lytle updates this prophetic argument, the truth of which has become so self-evident that significant critics of the Agrarian symposium have lapsed into stunned silence. Lytle now suggests that we are all dead, that in the voices of past generations of Americans there is more genuine vitality than in the anonymous and regimented lives of those 215 million of us who now breathe the toxic air brooding over the New Republic in this our 200th year of nationhood.

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Thomas H. Landess

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A Wake for the Living: A Family Chronicle By Andrew Lytle Crown, 270 pp., $8.95 At the beginning of Classical civilization, the idea of death was so abhorrent that, according to Homer, the shade of Achilles was willing to trade all his glory for the lowliest state of servitude in the land of the living. In the second half of the twentieth century Andrew Lytle would have it otherwise. Or so I would judge from the title and substance of his latest book, A Wake for the Living.

Lytle is a novelist, historian, recently retired editor of the Sewanee Review, and one of the most uncompromising of the Southern Agrarians, who argued in 1930 that the urbanization of America would ultimately lead to the triumph of radical secularism, the debasement of the natural environment, and the breakdown of communal civility. In his latest work, Lytle updates this prophetic argument, the truth of which has become so self-evident that significant critics of the Agrarian symposium have lapsed into stunned silence. Lytle now suggests that we are all dead, that in the voices of past generations of Americans there is more genuine vitality than in the anonymous and regimented lives of those 215 million of us who now breathe the toxic air brooding over the New Republic in this our 200th year of nationhood.