In Tennessee: The Last Garden

By Melvin Maddocks

Old age is the best disguise. When Robert Penn Warren came to Vanderbilt University in the early 1920s, fresh off the farm in Gutherie, Ky., he looked like a poet. A city poet, after the style of T.S. Eliot. Glossy shoes. Handkerchief triangulated in the jacket pocket. Fingers exquisitely laced for the camera. Now, at 75, with over 50 years of poetry behind him--not to mention, a good deal of fiction, including All the King's Men--"Red" Warren looks like a farmer.

Seated on the stage of Vanderbilt's Underwood Auditorium, simultaneously slicked up and rumpled in his Sunday best, he could pass for a stranger who got lost on his way to the Grand Ole Opry, Nashville's other landmark. His mouth has the patient downturn of one who has endured flood and drought, and can survive this occasion too. When he speaks to the overflow audience, resolutely ignoring the mike, his parched hills-and-hollows drawl has the rasp of red dust in the throat on a July afternoon.

Red Warren is a Rhodes scholar, a classicist, and the South's answer to Robert Frost. He is swapping reunion talk with two other farm hands from central casting, Psychologist Lyle Hicks Lanier and Novelist Andrew Nelson Lytle. These three men are all that is left of a famous band of twelve Southerners, a lot of them poets, a lot of them from Vanderbilt, who 50 years ago published an alternately brilliant and baffling manifesto called I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.

In the years since, over 150 doctoral theses (in French and Japanese as well as English) have tried to explain exactly what those dozen splendidly provoking essays meant. This three-day gathering, half birthday party, half academic cracker-barrel session, has added a second question: Why do the Agrarians, with their crusty prophecies and affirmations, still sound so pertinent, half of a very non-agrarian century later?

Today the silo has become something likely to house a nuclear missile. But even in the 1920s, the Agrarians were behind their times. Words Like honor, magnanimity and Tradition with a capital T rise from the pages of I'll Take My Stand. In the midst of the noisy bash of the jazz age, the writers deplore the decline of "manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love." While Yankee highbrows like E.E. Cummings and Edmund Wilson were discovering the seven lively arts, the Agrarians were frowning on movies and imploring the yeomen of Tennessee to switch off their Atwater Kent radios, take down that country fiddle from the wall and scrape out an Elizabethan air. Their best poet, John Crowe Ransom, magically evoked a land where larks' tongues are never stilled, "sunlight lies like pale spread straw" and ladies of "beauty and high degree" arrange jasmine in vases, as courtly gentlemen pace the veranda. "Turn your eyes to the immoderate past," Agrarian Allen Tate advised in his best poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead.

Though the Agrarians mostly remained farmers of the typewriter in real life, on paper they kept insisting that "the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations." Tate was one of the few to own, briefly, a genuine farm, Ben's Folly, honestly named for the brother who financed it. A hired hand delivered the final word on Farmer Tate: "Mr. Tate, he ain't much of a hand with the hoe."

The Agrarians were to farming what pastoral poetry is to real sheep, and Agrarianism was simply the flag under which they marched against the forces of modernity. In 1930, as they sniffed the first whiff of smog at their writing desks in a university founded on the wealth of a New York railroad baron, the essayists of I'll Take My Stand shared, as Warren put it, a "dire suspicion" "that a great commonwealth has gone wrong." The enemy was industrialism, which they characterized as "an evil dispensation" and "a pizen snake." The issue was an intensely personal matter, almost a family feud.

Any practiced revivalist can supply a modern translation and make it sound trendy. The 1930 recommendation of "respect for the physical earth" glosses into ecology and environmentalism. "The South can well afford to be backward" may be twisted into relevance as a plea for the "zero-sum society." Agrarianism, in fact, can be defined with glib hindsight as a Southern branch of "neo-conservatism."

It is true that the Agrarian dictum "reaction is the most radical of programs" dates badly on the subject of race. Most of the Vanderbilt prophets leave themselves open to the criticism that when they did not behave as if slavery had never existed, they acted as if the slaves had loved it. But in the end, the Agrarians were not political economists; they were poets searching for a metaphor. When they called for a "world made safe for the farmers," surely it was because they believed that such a world would also be safe for poets.

What the Agrarians fought for, in every word, in every gallant and eccentric gesture, was the lost cause of civilization built upon three visibly endangered species: courtesy, sensibility and learning. They have the distinction of being the last body of literary men with the self-confidence to instruct their fellow Americans on how to live. These generalists, these gentle men of letters, promulgated their code as assertively as up-to-date experts--psychologists, urban planners, sex therapists--lay down their laws today.

To stroll across the Vanderbilt campus on an autumn afternoon is to see legends spring dazzling in the soft blue air--a little blurred, of course, as all good legends should be. Over there (nobody remembers quite where) Tate used to address a class of undergraduates. He was a severely handsome man who looked rather like a Confederate cavalry officer, and when he spoke of "the Republic of Letters," fond students could practically hear bugles blowing and see banners flying.

The ghost of Ransom seems to float somewhere above the clock tower of Kirkland Hall, as elusive as his own aromatic pipe smoke. He first appeared at Vanderbilt in 1903 as a 15-year-old under graduate, when the university itself was 30 years old. He did not leave finally until 1937. A courteous man, Ransom lived on civil terms even with death, the "gen tleman in a dustcoat" who turns up in his poetry. His I'll Take My Stand essay preached: "Men are not lovely, and men are not happy, for being too ambitious."

He may be conjured up on summer evenings, wearing a powder blue jacket with white flannels and white shoes, bending over his beloved croquet mallet. Meanwhile, in the land of the living, students in blue jeans that are not for farming file to a course on How to Develop Marketing Management Skills.

The paved road, Lytle complained in his essay 50 years ago, was a flying wedge that "split the heart" of noble provincialism. Today, beyond the old gym, built in 1880, West End Avenue now lines past a Pizza Hut, Popeye's Famous Fried Chicken, Taco Tico, Burger King. If a pilgrim travels far enough he will come to the site of the new $300 million Datsun assembly plant, seeming to mock any last illusions of any last Agrarian.

Was there ever such a lost cause since Don Quixote tilted at his windmill? And what wouldn't any latter-day Agrarian give for a decent windmill in the midst of the new factories of the New South.

I'll Take My Stand can be read as a statement of poetic spirit that has quickened half a century of Southern writing, from William Faulkner to Walker Percy, from Eudora Welty to James Dickey. But the manifesto was bolder by far. If a 1980 observer wishes to match it, he must risk one last speculation. When Red Warren peers out over the rows of listeners at Underwood Auditorium into some middle distance, he is acting out not just Southern romance but the original American dream of a New World Eden. He spoke for something in every American when, looking beyond the fast-food stands, the traffic jams and all the smokestacks, he wrote: "Hold, in my heart, that landscape."

By Melvin Maddocks

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