When the Twelve Southerners penned their classic collective manifesto I’ll Take My Stand one could wonder in awe at their audacity in making themselves nearly immediately irrelevant. Filled with interesting and true critiques of modern industrial capitalism and centralized bureaucratic statism, one was left with the question, “is that all there is?” Not necessarily nostalgia—these were men steeped in modernist literature characterized by its daring probity in the mode of shocking convention—but rather they made their case in terms of irrelevancy. Like their absent teacher T.S. Eliot, they came to defense of what they knew, despite whatever virtues it may have contained, was a dying way of life. It was a life that could make proper distinctions and discriminations—that knew the high and the low, the noble and the base—that admired an education in the best that had been thought and written—that held an urbane sense of humor in the highest regard—but that maintained a seriousness about the question of what was considered to be a good society and the good life. It is no consolation (and surely a backhanded compliment) that Richard Rorty claimed that had he emigrated to the U.S., the “schwarzwald redneck” Heidegger would have found sympathetic ears amongst the agrarians.
The agrarians were not willing to fight fire with fire and hence were willing to stand for principles they had to have known were in some sense already destined for decay. Robert Penn Warren’s essay alone—“The Briar Patch”—attempted to deal with race relations in a “realistic” empirical, social science manner, but even he came to regret his racist remarks in later seminal works like “Segregation” and “Who Speaks for the Negro?” Others, like Donald Davidson, became more recalcitrant in defense of their own, writing such interesting internal histories of the Tennessee valley and rhetorically railing against the New Leviathan. While Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom continued their brilliance as literary critics—the former delving deeper into the personal past exemplary of a whole traditional way of life, while the latter explored the heights and depths of metaphysical abstraction and the linguistic analytics of poetry.
Not seeking power, but hoping to persuade nonetheless, all of these men came to exemplify a southern stoic self-reliance immune to the blandishments of the pop celebrity that was given great writers in the 1950s and 1960s. Luckily they missed out on much of that celebrity. With all their relative fame, they had none of the hassles of celebrity. If you doubt such popular ballyhoo of “great writers”, look at the time that Time magazine covers gave all the writers of their day. Today (or a couple of years ago) the “person of the year” is (was) “you” yourself shown in a trashy make-shift mirror—depending on how long the magazine sat under the sun or under a coffee cup, one could even call it a funhouse mirror.
At any rate, Tate retreated for a time to San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico and Ransom to a tenured position at Kenyon College. At Yale, Warren carried on with writing poetry and fiction that is unfortunately largely not read these days because much of it is excellent.
Perhaps one should have known that taking a line from “Dixie” was suicidal or at least futile for the agrarians. Why would one want bring up ceaseless arguments that are at best hard to defend? Whatever truth was to be found in their writings became clouded by historical connotation and innuendo. Hence the accusations of racism, secessionism, obscurantism, atavism, romanticism, etc. lodged at this group.
Regardless of their literary reception, it is also true that relevance is highly overrated. In America, where allegedly all men are Cartesians without having read Descartes, this is a hard truth. If one pierces beneath the veneer of pop-cartesianism the old way of holding on to what is important and desiring for wholeness in even an infinite can make itself shown. Unlike the Marxists, who tell that us in the interstices of each and every item or moment of day to day life one can find the most horrible of oppression and exploitation, the irrelevant agrarians can remind us of moments of nobility and joy.
None of this is sufficient for today’s issues of globalized and computer networked world, but It would be a great waste and shame if it were all forgotten.
I was moved to write all this after reading several of the essays on Tom Wolfe and Walker Percy found in the most recent Perspectives on Political Science. These two writers seem to be able to speak to our current concerns with technology and democracy with more impact and dare I say relevance than the agrarians. Their wisdom is suffused with great hilarity in describing the predicament of what Percy, at the least, is not ashamed to call our post-modern and post-Christian world. I think the agrarians would balk at such a concept.
So comparatively to Wolfe and Percy, the agrarians appear as a relic and perhaps (at least in some cases) too one-sided in their “phenomenological” descriptions of the way that the problems and the possibilities for human goodness if not greatness appear today.
I’ll quote a section from RPW’s multipart, extended poem called “New Dawn” from the early 1980s. The old poet says—
XV. Sleep
Some men, no doubt, will, before sleep, consider
One thought: I am alone. But some,
In the mercy of God, or booze, do not
Long stare at the dark ceiling.
