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PARTISAN REVIEW
that the quieter North hasn't. As for the sense of defeat, we know from
postwar Italian movies that it may bring an awareness of how tough
life can be, a sensitivity to the details of poverty, a remarkable candor
in the face of humiliation, and with it all, a bitterness that hardly dares
betray itself by its right name. Southern writers make no attempt to
obscure the wretchedness and bestiality of which people are capable,
while dreaming of human glories that are gone. As a group, they have
tried to remain true to the conception of man as the shame and glory
of the universe.
But the Faulknerian attitude to the Negro problem-that it is a
deep moral turbulence in the blood of the South which can only work
itself out in agony, guilt, and expiation-soon becomes a received idea,
and the urgency disappears. Violence gets out of hand, becoming a sub–
ject luxuriated in for its own sake or for effect, while the rhetoric gets
more and more flamboyantly dizzy. The kind of concreteness that derives
from a living response to experience, moreover, is as rare in the South
as anywhere else. Indeed, Italian movies and Southern literature (always
excepting Faulkner, who is as much an accident as any other genius)
have also taught us that defeat doesn't always bring wisdom. Certain ad–
mirable qualities, yes, but no sense of tragedy, no revelation of human
limits and the meaning of mortality. And most disturbing, a fuzziness
about what has been defeated that neutralizes the benefits a history of
defeat sometimes provides.
Who besides Faulkner has imagined convincingly and concretely
the great things that the world lost when the antebellum South was
destroyed? The experience of defeat has left Southern writers with a
poignant sense of loss, but loss of what? Ransom's poetry, for instance,
is so full of lament for transience that Isabel Gamble (in an otherwise
good essay) compares him to the Elizabethan lyricists. And when Tate
in the "Ode to the Confederate Dead" uses as an indictment of modem
man his
own
inability to imagine what the South used to be like, we
have surely reached some sort of record for self-mystification. Tate and
many of his co-regionalists can tell us, in effect, "I don't know what
kind of world it was, but I do know that it was better than ours, and
the fact that neither of us can imagine what it was like
proves
that we
are fragmented, dehumanized creatures." Only immense devotion to an
ideology would sanction logic of that order, and the Agrarians are de–
voted. They did everything they could to destroy the myth of the
courtly, well-mannered, hospitable, uncle-tommish, magnolia-filled South,
in order to replace it with a far more sophisticated legend based on a
preconceived ideology about culture. They have tried to convince us
that a little comer of America once was Europe.
