same intensity. This is why his
statements demand our attention.
He has perhaps never before more
concretely expressed what it means
to be a Southerner.
What seems to define the South–
erner, in his own mind at any
rate, is his relationship
10
the
North, that is to the rest of the
Republic, a relationship which can
at the very best be described as
uneasy. It is apparently very dif–
ficult to be at once a Southerner
and an American; so difficult that
many of the South's most inde–
pendent minds are forced into the
American exile; which is not, of
course, without its aggravating,
circular effect on the interior and
public life of the South. A Bos–
tonian, say, who leaves Boston is
571
not regarded by the citizenry he
has abandoned with the same
venomous distrust as is the South–
erner who leaves the South. The
citizenry of Boston do not consider
that they have been abandoned,
much less betrayed.
It
is only the
American Southerner who seems
to be fighting, in his own entrails,
a peculiar, ghastly, and perpetual
war with all the rest of the country.
("Didn't you say," demanded a
Southern woman of Robert Penn
Warren, "that you was born down
here, used to live right near here?"
And when he agreed that this was
so: "Yes . . . but you never said
where you living now!")
The difficulty, perhaps, is that
the Southerner clings to two en–
tirely antithetical doctrines, two
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