BOO KS
121
Why did it take such a long time for the Southern way of life to
find expression in literature? Only when the cancerous growth of indus–
trialism had already contaminated the upper half of our body politic
and was threatening to invade the lower regions, did the necessity for
preserving the Southern way of life become clear.
The Agrarians declared in their symposium
[I'll Take
My
Stand]
that industrialism was predatory, in that it was based on a concept of
nature as something to be used. In so doing, industrialism threw man
out of his proper relationship to nature, and to God whose creation it
was. The Agrarian quarrel, they declared, was with applied science,
which in the form of industrial capitalism had as its object the enslave–
ment of human energies. (Louis D. Rubin, Jr.)
Southerners knew all this not because they were more intelligent than
Northerners, but because they had a different history. Having exper–
ienced defeat-"a bitter cup which no American is supposed to know
anything about"-and having lived through a "foreign" occupation, the
typical Southerner learned the lesson of tragedy: that human beings are
limited creatures. Northerners, on the other hand, because they are so
prosperous and successful, believe that whatever is willed can be achieved
if only you invent the right machines. For the typical Northerner, as he
appears in this book, is an identical twin of the typical American whom
contemporary Europeans have analyzed so thoroughly.
If
he weren't so
personally unattractive, he would make a good tragic hero, a sort of
industrialized, urbanized Tamburlaine.
Measured against this God of the Machine who worships no God
but himself, whose sense of life is a compound of the superficialities of
liberalism and scientism, whose urban character has blunted his sensi–
tivity to the eternal rhythms of Nature, whose social mobility has cut
him adrift in a world with no traditions and values-measured against
this Northerner,
The Southern temper is marked by the coincidence of a sense of
the concrete, a sense of the elemental, a sense of the ornamental, a sense
of the representative, and a sense of totality. (Robert B. Heilman.)
These qualities plus his experience of the vicissitudes of history make it
easy for the Southerner to write masterpieces, as easy as putting pen
to paper.
Now it
IS
true that serious Southern wntmg has a richness and
immediacy that are rare in other parts of the country. It is also true
that it goes in for specificity, is unembarrassed by violence and emotion–
alism, and makes a great show of organizing its total conceptions. More–
over, some Southern novelists, by virtue of living with the Negro prob–
lem, have been able to feel the urgency of hwnan relations in a way
