28
PARTISAN REVIEW
Allen Tate:
I.
The question is ambiguous. It is phrased so that "usable past" can
mean either a literary past or an historical and social past. Perhaps the
best situation that a writer could he in would he that in which the literary
and the historical past are identical. My own historical past was not incor·
porated into literary forms that I can take over and use, or use after some
modification. For example, the only articulate literary tradition of the
South that has been close to the life of most of the people is the folk
tradition, which is perfectly vigorous today and which shows very little
break with the European past; it witnesses a natural and gradual altera·
tion under the conditions of American life; it is a model of what a literary
tradition ought to he. But it is an incomplete tradition, and to confine
oneself to it would he a deliberate act of naivete; it would not hear the
weight of the complex experience of modern life. While the historical past
that I am conscious of is wholly American (that is to say, I could not pos·
sihly write on a European subject, past or present), the literary past that
interests me is highly eclectic, and is more European than American, or in
so far as it may he American it is an American literary past strongly
influenced by consciousness of Europe. For example, until the time of
Poun'jl and Eliot, there are no American poets whose styles have been of
any use 'to me; on the other hand, the English metaphysicals, certain
Italian poets (Dante, Leopardi), and some modern French poets have
been
useful in working towards a style that is suitable to my own kind of Ameri–
can experience--more useful in fact than the New England poets or the
poets of the Old South (including Poe) have been. It is my belief that a
"regional" writer, such as I conceive myself to he, can draw upon the
whole literary past, while a "national" writer in America at any rate, must
he parochial, since his interest in a national essence leads him into the vice
of "imitative form" on a large scale; that is, if he assumes the national
essence is unique and crude, he must develop a style that is unique and
crude; and there is, in this school (which stems from Whitman), the dis–
advantage that every writer must begin his career as
if
no literatur-e had
ever been written before. [Another disadvantage of our nationalist writer
is that he cannot assume and make conscious, as Goethe did, an existing,
homogeneous culture; he either naively assumes the "nationalism" of mere
observation (Sandburg), or tries to) our myths into "America" from the
top of his mind (Crane).] I place Mark Twain nearer to Augustus Long·
street than to Whitman; he was a regional writer in "Huckleberry Finn,"
and he mastered a subtly modulated style; compare this with the vulgarity
of "The Gilded Age," written when Mark Twain had accepted the national·
ist myth. At his best Twain was regional and universal; towards the end
of his life he became national and parochial.
2. I conceive myself to he my own audience--which means that I am
writing for other persons like myself; I thus assume that such persons
