Arts and Letters

When Allen Tate died in Nashville last February, he left an empty place in the lives of his friends, as also in the broader republic of letters. I call it a republic, as Allen liked to do, but rather it is a loose federation composed of many dukedoms and principalities. Allen was one of the very few American writers who were able to pass freely from one to another of those smaller states. That is, he was a complete man of letters: a poet primarily and sometimes a great one, but also an essayist, a biographer, an astute critic, a fictionist—his one novel, The Fathers, has been republished many times during the last forty years—and the author of candid memoirs. I needn't speak of his being a professor, a gifted editor, a correspondent with everybody, and a visiting lecturer at 150 colleges and universities: Oxford, Harvard, Virginia, Florence—if you named them one by one you would find that Allen had been there.

As the citizen of a world republic, he had taken out his first papers, so to speak, when he was twenty-two years old and a student at Vanderbilt. It was then he attended an early meeting of what was afterward known as the Fugitive Group, which had assembled to discuss philosophy and read the new poems of its members. Others of the group were John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren; later they published a famous little magazine, The Fugitive. Still later the group, with additional members, became the Southern Agrarians and helped to shape the Southern renaissance of the 1930s and 1940s. Some of its members were active in the New Criticism, which was a force in the literary world of the 1950s.

Allen played a prominent part in all those movements, as initiator and theorist and also, thanks to his many friends abroad, as a sort of roving diplomat. One friend was St. John Perse, who had occupied a position that might be called permanent undersecretary of state in the French Foreign Service. It might be said that Allen had a corresponding place in the world republic of letters.

When he made his first trip to New York in June 1924, there was nothing cosmopolitan in his appearance except possibly the cane he carried. Hart Crane, with whom he had corresponded, introduced him to a Greenwich Village party, and it was there I met him. He was a slight young man with delicate features and an enormous forehead. Later I heard that when Allen was a boy, he was thought to have water on the brain. His mother once said, "Son, put that book down and go out and play with Henry. You are straining your mind and you know your mind isn't very strong." Was it as a delayed rejoinder that he wore a Phi Beta Kappa key conspicuously on his vest? I liked him at first glance, but I said severely, "We don't wear our Phi Beta Kappa keys any longer;" mine was in a pawnshop. Allen must have forgiven me for the remark because, two days later, we went together for a visit to Hart Crane on Brooklyn Heights. It was the beginning of a friendship that lasted—I have just been counting—for more than fifty-four years.

The friendship was often interrupted because both of us had to earn our livelihoods. That was an especially difficult problem for Allen during the early years. He believed profoundly that one should achieve a unity between one's moral nature and one's economics. For him that meant earning a living by writing honestly and well. It was a hard thing to do in the 1920s, when honest writing was published, it is true, but not at the fees that were paid for writing pretentiously. A penny a word, or at most two cents, was what an honest writer earned. On this Allen was supporting a wife and a daughter, not well, but without making a moral compromise. The daughter, Nancy, was told not to touch the papers on his desk because they were Daddo's living. Once when she was four years old she disobeyed her parents and picked up the manuscript of a book review. "Is this your living, Daddo?" she asked. Allen grunted yes. Nancy felt a page of the manuscript between her thumb and her forefinger. "It's a mighty thin living," she said.

Later Allen would more or less solve the problem of earning a livelihood without compromising his standards. He spent two years in Paris on a Guggenheim fellowship, and afterward taught and lectured honestly as a wandering scholar. Those travels led to further interruptions in our friendship, not to mention that our political enthusiasms had carried us in different directions during the 1930s. I was a radical of sorts and Allen called himself a reactionary, but both of us put literature above politics and in literary matters we were likely to agree.

What a delight it was to meet him, sometimes to live beside him and his first wife, Caroline Gordon, in one city or country house after another! I set down the names as a litany: Robber Rocks; Caligari Cottage; Cloverlands; Princeton; Burlington, Vermont; Sherman, Connecticut; Minneapolis; Wellfleet (on Cape Cod); Sewanee, Tennessee; Nashville; and often here at the Academy, to which we were both inducted in 1964. An earlier meeting I remember was during the Prohibition years; it was in the big kitchen of a speakeasy, one of the very few that managed to exist in Clarksville, Tennessee. Allen and Caroline and I, with two or three friends, are sitting at a round oak table. What we are drinking out of kitchen glasses, with branchwater but no ice, is Between the Rivers, recommended by our host as the best bootleg liquor in the Middle South. We drink, we laugh, we tell stories about literary friends, we sing sailor ballads, and suddenly it seems to me that the Tates have abolished geography. The round oak table and all our laughter might have been transported on the instant to Greenwich Village or Soho or Montparnasse.

"You-all better make less noise," our host says. "Might be that the neighbors could turn us in." We scatter and drive to our separate beds over miles of dirt roads, through the wide stillness of tobacco fields.

All his life Allen revealed that mixture of cosmopolitanism and localism, his true home being anywhere in the republic of letters, but also definitely in the Middle South. One of his best poems, "The Mediterranean," is a brief recapitulation of The Aeneid, with a change of scene. In Tate's version Aeneas and his sailors escape from burning Troy, but their destination is the banks of the Cumberland, not those of the Tiber:

Now, from the Gates of Hercules we flood

Westward, westward till the barbarous brine
Whelms us to the tired land where tasseling corn,
Fat beans, grapes sweeter than muscadine
Rot on the vine; in that land were we born.

The Middle Sea and the Middle South; Troy and Tate's Creek Pike: this was only one of the contradictions—Allen preferred to call them tensions—that gave depth to his poetry. He was classical in spirit but also wildly romantic, more so than any of his friends. He had an innate distinction of mind that everyone soon recognized, and he also had a touch of impishness and a roving eye. He was a proud man—the Romans would have called him superbus—who insisted on revealing his defaults and défaillances. He was determined to be loyal to friends with some of whom he had irrevocably quarreled. He was severe in his judgments, yet went out of his way to be kind. Lately I reread a dozen of his letters and found that in each of them he had strongly urged me to do something for somebody, usually for a younger writer of talent whose work was not being appreciated.

Allen wasn't happy during his last years, especially after the death in infancy of a favorite son. He suffered from more than his share of infirmities, with emphysema as the most crippling. His last expedition, in March 1974, was to the Library of Congress, where he read a magisterial paper on Robert Frost; the trip was nearly fatal. A year later his friends assembled in Sewanee, Tennessee, to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. They were a distinguished company and Allen appeared at the dinner to give a brief reading, but immediately he went back to his bed. Although he had received all sorts of honors and awards, including the National Medal for Literature, he nourished a feeling that often afflicts the old, a sense of being somehow pushed aside and also, in his case, of seeing poetry evolve in a different direction from the one he had bravely pioneered.

I saw him last in Nashville, where he had moved with his family to be close to a good hospital. By that time—it was July 1978—Allen was scarcely more than a skeleton with that immense forehead looming over it. He spent his days in a little room without books, since his vision had so deteriorated that he couldn't read; and neither could he leave the room except with a plastic tube dangling after him, the other end of it attached to an oxygen tank. As always he talked brilliantly about the world of letters and he laughed, too; both of us laughed until that little room without books—like the round oak table in Clarksville—might have been anywhere on two continents that good books were being written. I thought as we embraced and said good-bye that those deep lines on either side of his mouth were lines of laughter before they became lines of pain.