112
PARTISAN REVIEW
of cultural cliange, these are people who live by a culture and not by
a morality, by a code and not by the intention and habit of virtue.
Their society, on its surface, is coherent and flawless; but they them–
selves are prevented by its very coherence from having any conscious–
ness of what the narrator calls the "abyss"-the forces of evil, personal
or social.
This disparity between the forms of the old society and the action
of its members makes up, it seems, at least half of Mr. Tate's judg–
ment of the old South. The disease of which it perished, he seems to
be saying, was the disease of all highly codified societies: a codifica–
tion so thorough that consciousness no longer need function. The old
South destroys itself in this novel from lack of mind.
It is a cliche of Southern fiction, but apparently a valid cliche,
the idea of a social fabric of great elegance hiding putrescence and
being rent by acts of blind violence. In
The Fathers
we have the
familiar theme of a half-imbecile refinement-Mr. Jarman sitting
immured among his eggshells and slopjars, writing his history of the
Ice Age in the manner C?f Gibbon; and his sister absorbed by her
ills
and her food. And we have, on a different level, a young woman,
in
most respects decent, out of an obscure hatred using the prerogatives
which the South gave its matrons to make her husband's sister into a
harmless-but eventually harmful-nincompoop; then the familiar
Southern figure of the young man, talented and violent, who sees
through the code and cannot be contained by it, yet cannot quite
break out of it; and a worthy father so wholly formalized that conver–
sation is for
him
a chess game in which he feels brutalized
if
the
gambit he offers is refused, who has all the courage in the world to
hold a political position against his community but not imagination
enough not to cut off his son for taklltg an opposite stand. Here, too,
is slavery understood in all its human aspects, and hated--seen in the
apocalyptic vision of George Rozier riding in the "tournament" on
the back of his mulatto half-brother: in effect, of course; actually he
had only sold the man for the price of a good mare.
This would seem to be the perfect indictment of a vanished
culture. But we know that Mr. Tate attaches the greatest value to the
tradition he seems to attack and we look for the extenuation. To me
Mr. Tate's expectation of great spiritual good from the Southern
tradition has always seemed not incomprehensible but desperate. ·For
as a critic he has spoken of the smallness of the Southern literary
effort; he has reprobated the o!d South's infatuation with politics; he
has dismissed the genteel tradition, explained the spiritual hann
slavery worked, and demonstrated the failure of religion in the South
to create a sufficient human ideal. On what then, beside geography
and a dislike of industrialism, capitalism and Marxism, does Mr.
Tate base his expectations? Apparently it comes down to the tone
and manner of the old South-to its style.
Obviously, from any point of view, aesthetic or cultural, style
