A Fugitive comes home

THE writers of the Southern States have written much of the finest American fiction. It is a remarkable legacy which has continued down to the present generation. The critic and poet Allen Tate (1899-1980) was born in Kentucky and was taught by John Crowe Ransom, a central figure in the Southern Agrarianism literary movement and founding member of the group of poets who called themselves "The Fugitives".

Through Ransom's influence, Tate was the first undergraduate to be invited to join the Fugitives. Tate also wrote one novel, The Fathers, published in 1938. It is now reissued as part of the impressive Voices of the South series compiled by the Louisiana State University Press. Among those included in the series are Evelyn Scott's Civil War epic The Wave (1929), Erskine Caldwell's Poor Fool, Barry Hannah's The Tennis Handsome, Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels, and Peter Taylor's The Widows of Thorn ton.

Tate's novel is a period piece. The narrator, Lacy Buchan, an old man, looks back to his youth which coincided with the American Civil War. Lacy was born into, the privileged life of an old Virginia family living at Pleasant Hill. His father, Major Lewis Buchan, a remote, patriarchal figure, who, as his son recalls, "thought more of his honour than of any of us, but he did not know that he did", is the embodiment of the old South. The world Lacy remembers depends on forms: it is carefully polite yet brutally dismissive of blacks. Lacy takes his mother's funeral as the central event around which to gather his memories, and this confers a solemn tone to the thoughtful, often philosophical narrative. "It was only today as I wad walking down Fayette Street towards the river: that I got a whiff of salt fish, and I remembered the day I stood at Pleasant Hill under the dogwood tree. It was late April and the blossoms shot into the air like spray. My mother was dead. Crowds of the connection had arrived the day before; and I had come, a boy of fifteen, after break fast, out into the yard".

Much of the novel's appeal is generated by its precise observations, the narrator's awareness of his own passivity and its controlled regret. "Memory is all chance," he says, "and I have learned that you remember things not because they are important; you remember the important things because they help you to fix in mind the trifles of your early life, or the trifles simply drag along with them through many years the incidents that have altered your fortunes." Lacy is intelligent and sensitive, vulnerable enough to be embarrassed by young women flirting with him. Early in his story he describes himself as "an unmarried old man", and it is soon easy to understand why his life has been limited to that of an observer. "I have a story to tell but I cannot explain the story." His father's genteel detachment shaped his life, but possibly even more influential was the role played by George Posey, his dashing, unpredictable and violent brother in law.

"I cannot say: if Susan had not married George Posey then Susan could not have known Jane Pusey and influenced her. But of course I might not have known Jane either. Could I have known her without Susan, I might have married her, for I loved her." George behaves oddly on the day of the funeral and Lacy notes of him: "George Posey laughed with all his fa& but his eyes. They remained cold and motionless." While he appears to have admired George throughout his life, Lacy is not blind to his flaws, such as having sold an entire family of slaves to a trader in Georgia, although Lacy's blather had considered them freed. This persistent ambiguity keeps the reader interested and baffled by Posey as a character. Lacy's doubts are also important to the novel, because of the fact that Posey is so obviously intended as a symbol of the new order, the man of action at variance with the staid and complacent men of the Old South.

Tate's narrative lacks neither humour nor colour. Exasperated by the rigid tradition which surrounds them, Posey announces to the young Lacy: "They do nothing but die and marry and think about the honour of Virginia." Much of the dialogue is written in a variety of complex Southern dialects determined by wealth and status as well as race. Tate's black characters are more disgruntled than downtrodden, and this helps him avoid many of the cliches associated with American Civil War novels.

Stylistic comparisons have been made between The Fathers and the formal, psychological fiction of Henry James; however, there are much stronger connections with the work of the great Peter Taylor. At times, Tate's novel reads as if it had predated Taylor's superb work, In the Tennessee Country (1993). Yet Tate's prose, for all its exact, deliberate descriptions - "Aunt Jane Anne was a "little old lady, not really old, but early sixty, whose features, tied up in a knot by her nose, bore an expression of sustained surprise" - and highly developed tone, lacks the elegant grace of Taylor, whose short stories and novels rank among this century's finest American writing. The artistic credibility of The Fathers is at times at risk because of the forceful intelligence of Tate's approach.

This is interesting; Tate's whose most famous critical essay, "Tension in Poetry", insisted on tension as a vital element in poetry, yet his work was frequently at the mercy of an intellectual ingenuity which consistently exerted an undermining influence. His novel is certainly intelligent and controlled, but it is ultimately saved by both its gentle beauty and the narrator's personal reflections and self understanding: "In my feelings of that time there is a new element - my feelings now about that time: there is not an old man living who can recover the emotions of the past; he can only bring back the objects about which, secretly, the emotions have ordered themselves in memory, and that memory is not what happened in the year 1860 but it is rather a few symbols, a voice, a tree, a gun shining on the wall - symbols that will preserve only so much of the old life as they may, in their own mysterious history, consent to bear" - and his often wonderful asides: "I should say that the Poseys were more refined than the Buchans, but less civilised."

Tate's South is somewhat idealised, but this is a strong, dramatic, atmospheric narrative, and Lacy's dignified horror at many of the events he relates certainly justifies The Father as an austere, elegant and worthy minor classic.