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PARTISAN REVIEW
culture,
should
have produced a great literature. Nowadays we all know
that only a hierarchical society with a leisure class at the top can pro–
duce works of art. The antebellum South was such a society, so it ought
to have had a literature. But for some reason it didn't: the great writers
of nineteenth-century America all came from the industrial North or the
frontier. Oddly enough, then, from a cultural point of view the South
was in the same position of inferiority with respcct to the North that
America was to Europe. Our traditionalist critics, however, take that
in
their stride. Without actually repudiating Eliot's Law, they invoke
Tate's leftist deviation to account for the special case. Tate's refinement
amounts to this: that the Civil War changed everything by creating a
"tension" between agrarianism and industrialism, aristocracy and de–
mocracy, regionalism and nationalism. In our own time, this tension
has finally generated a great literature. A delayed reaction, to be sure,
but better late than never.
Howard Washington Odum informs us that since 1900 "the South
has contributed no less than five thousand titles to the full-sized book
literature of the nation as measured by standard catalogues and major
publishers." Of course, the editors do not claim every one of the 5,000
titles for the Renascence. With a due sense of proportion, they give
Faulkner three essays to himself. Warren and Tate carry off second–
place honors, with two men assigned to cover each. Then come painstak–
ing accounts of Ellen GlasgoW', James Branch Cabell (whose "line of
descent is not from such mighty works as Dante's
Divine Comedy;
it is
rather from Dante's admirer and biographer, Giovanni Boccaccio"),
Stark Young, Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty,
Erskine Caldwell (who has "created a world abundantly and successfully,
a world sufficient unto itself, which bears significant relation to other
fictional worlds ... and, further, a world indispensable to the constella–
tion we call Southern literature"), Caroline Gordon, John Crowe Ran–
som, John Peale Bishop, Donald Davidson ("he is unique in modem
times in having made the effort Wordsworth undertook in his
Prelude"),
Cleanth Brooks, and Merrill Moore ("A culture has gone far that can
propel a writer to such distances as Moore has traversed.... He ex–
plores the universal through the personal, the abiding truth through the
moment of lyrical enlightenment flashing upon the contemporary
scene"). Along with these revaluations, we get several surveys charac–
terizing Southern writing in general and relating it to the Southern
temper. This great bulk of evidence demonstrates that the laws of cul–
ture discovered
in
history by Eliot and modified
slightly
by Tate have
now been confirmed before our very eyes.
