Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  I had heard about them all at Belhaven from Dr. McDill, and from the first it was Davidson—the only one of the illustrious tribe remaining on the faculty—who attracted me. I was determined to write my thesis, a requirement for the degree, with Davidson as my director. With this end in mind, I enrolled in his course in modern literature.

  There was something about Donald Davidson that scared students to death. I used actually to shake when I had to go into his office, stand in his presence, and stumble through whatever I had to say. I have heard strong men relate how as students they felt exactly the same. Feature for feature, nothing suggested the effect of his presence. He was scarcely above medium height, neither fat nor thin. He dressed in a mild, gentlemanly way. But he had steely gray eyes that seemed to look straight to the inside of your thoughts, a kindly tone of voice (until something angered him), brown hair growing thin, the small beginning of what looked like a smile. It suggested many things: a willingness to listen? to sympathize? to laugh? to reject? You couldn’t know which, but felt its quality was mainly one of waiting. When seated, he appeared taller than he actually was, a figure so erect behind a desk he might have been on horseback. What he had was authority.

  His lectures would start low-key. He was informative but never spewed out an overload of facts. It was one of his tenets (in this he followed the New Criticism, though he never classed himself as one of them) that knowledge of a writer’s life was no substitute for the writer’s writing. The history and social habits of the writer’s times might be helpful but were not of primary importance. Neither did it matter so much—in many cases not at all—what emotions a piece of writing might (or might not) waken in the reader. What mattered was THE TEXT. What was it saying? Pay close attention. Read. Let it speak from the page. Form mattered. Structure mattered. Style mattered. Davidson liked to say that excellence in a novelist—Thomas Hardy, for instance; William Faulkner, for instance—had come from a “careful study of Greek tragedy.” Who could doubt he was right? Certainly no listener in his classroom dared to do so.

  I came into his office one day, a shy, frail, dark-haired student, to ask timidly if I could request his direction for a thesis on William Butler Yeats. As we were talking, a slim, sensitive-looking man entered from the hallway through the open door of the office. He was wearing a checkered vest and a black velvet jacket. He had an extraordinary face, not at all handsome but arresting, his brow being so high that his features seemed rather minimal beneath it. Mr. Davidson introduced us: “Miss Spencer, this is Allen Tate.”

  I must have said hello. A woman did not offer a hand to a gentleman in those days (I wonder when this practice started). Mr. Davidson continued: “Miss Spencer has just announced she would like to write a thesis on William Butler Yeats.”

  Tate moved to the window and stood there, profiled in thought. “One should note the influence of the French poets on Yeats. Some of his early work comes straight from French lyrics. ‘When you are old and gray and full of sleep,’ for instance. It’s pure Ronsard.” He quoted others, mentioning names which my ignorance of them did not permit me to remember. I felt he knew a lot. His voice was sensual, softly slurred, a quality he never lost. I sat paralyzed, wondering if I would be able to tackle my chosen subject at all, until Davidson changed the subject. “Yes … well…” he said and turned to me. “To begin you must go and read all of Yeats. Read everything he wrote.” “All of it?” I asked. “All of it,” he said. He smiled. There was nothing so nice as an approving smile from that formidable man. “Then come back to me,” he said.

  I went out more shaken than when I came in. But at least, I thought, he had got me out of the mysteries of France, which I, with my two years’ study of French at Belhaven, was in no way fitted to deal with. Perceptive to all I was feeling at that moment, Davidson had stepped in to give me something I could do.

  Davidson’s thinking and feeling were most passionately concerned with the South. The old, much maligned, backward, impoverished, tobacco-chewing, front-porch-rocking, cotton-picking, Latin-and-Greek-revering, racially segregated, agrarian South. Even then it was whispered that he was obsessed. He dwelt on events of the Civil War, tales of past military glories, on Southern writing, and on the thoughts and character of men like Jackson and Lee. Not that he necessarily scorned all that was Yankee. He would have said he loved America—the older, rooted America as it was meant to be—divided regionally, but despite differences in culture and climate, compatible and in many diverse ways one people.

  What Mr. Davidson hated—and when he hated he grew enraged, eyes flashing, voice harshly polemical—was Leviathan. He saw it as monstrous, the great standardizing commercial machine that was rolling over and plowing under home-grown cultures that had flourished earlier. He loathed mass culture. He was staunch in his beliefs, immovable, unchanging. Disagreement from a student on some issue basic to his thinking—socialism, for example, or racial equality, or “progress”—brought a response as if to blasphemy. He was vehemently opposed to President Roosevelt and the New Deal.

  Much later when I was myself working on a novel in Nashville, I had a period of helping him grade papers. I also met with some of his classes. A student from a Northern state had written on John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. “Look,” said Davidson, observing the title. “He couldn’t stay away from it to save his life.” He laid aside the paper as though it smelled bad. Yet Steinbeck was on his reading list in modern literature. Novels by Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Caroline Gordon were obviously approved, and William Faulkner, whom I was myself just discovering, was the subject of Davidson’s keenest thought and presentation.

  As his student I once chose a novel of Faulkner’s for a critical paper. Davidson read it aloud in class, then launched into a voluble attack on my point of view. My criticism took some note of Faulkner’s contemptuous behavior, as it was always being talked about in Mississippi. We had all assumed he was showing scorn for the society we, like him, had been reared in. I next related this attitude to his writing and found many evidences of it, and I felt I was being loyal to my own people to criticize it. But Davidson pointed out that Faulkner’s intention as a writer was quite otherwise; I had not found the true meaning of the text. Furthermore, what did a writer’s behavior have to do with what he chose to write? Nothing … at least nothing that a critic could properly present. Down on my small head came the whole weight of the New Criticism. I went to his desk at the end of the class. “I’d like to have it back,” I said, “that is, if there is anything left of it.” Again, the smile. “A very fine paper, Miss Spencer. I thank you for it.”

  What contradictions there were in that man’s makeup! Now it seems clear that he had seen my mind at work, even if going off on the wrong track, and thought me of enough value to want to haul me back and set me down to start over again, think things through onto firmer ground.

  For it was clear that I had ventured into sacred territory: he believed that I must not mistake what was there. Reasoning on subjects so important had to be both careful and precise. His own caring gave him the motive for taking me to task. Another lecturer might have said, “Well, this is one approach to Faulkner. But I wonder if you have considered …,” etc. Not Donald Davidson.

  Davidson once published a monograph called “To the Warders of the Gate.” It was about the role of the teacher. The metaphor is revealing. A battle is indicated—attack and defense. The matter is that crucial, of maximum importance. What is taught reaches through to minds that, once set right, have a chance of staying right.

  Davidson was wonderfully perceptive when it came to novelists outside the Southern frame. Theodore Dreiser came through on the winning side. Willa Cather stood up strongly and cast her individual shadow. She believed passionately in traditional cultures; she doted on seeing them survive when transplanted to the New World. But Davidson’s lecture on Sinclair Lewis left a trail of shredded paper. I remember laughing aloud. Davidson thought that Lewis was naturally a comic writer. “How can he do a seriou
s subject when he can’t keep a straight face?”

  Novelists all but forgotten, like Frank Harris, sometimes are “rediscovered,” and I find myself remembering Davidson’s comments, seeing again the fine penetration he brought to bear. He was a bit too derisive at times. He valued Thomas Wolfe but with so many reservations that Wolfe had a rough ride. “What does he mean that he’s lost, he’s … lost… ? Where exactly are the ‘ramparts of his soul’?”

  His Jamesian lectures focused on The Ambassadors. He was scarcely at home talking of Parisian manners; at an elegant soirée he might have felt a little gauche, certainly not in his native element, though he had courtly, old-fashioned manners. Many years later, however, he wrote me with enthusiasm about The Bostonians—a fine novel, he reported, with Basil Ransom, a Mississippian, among all those New England doctrinaire “dogooders.” “He showed them all up,” he rejoiced to say.

  In his class, we also studied the British novelists, beginning with Hardy. Hardy’s ties to the soil, the English farming country, led straight to Davidson’s high esteem. Then there was the spirit of Greek drama, which Hardy called to mind. Davidson denied that Hardy was a pessimist. He had no more responsibility for the tragic outcome of events than did the singer of a harsh old ballad.

  Conrad he admired so much he could find no fault to proclaim. I, too, made the Conrad discovery during that course. I would never like to be without him. He gave no easy answers, and led the reader’s mind out naturally into the wider world that he knew firsthand. I see his long shadow everywhere to this day, extending to Graham Greene, to Robert Stone, to V. S. Naipaul. Back then both Faulkner and Hemingway were easier for me after I read Conrad.

  But there were other aspects of being “modern,” and these opened up increased complexities. Davidson taught Joyce’s Ulysses as a gigantic satire on life in a modern city. I remember writing one of our required papers on Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Davidson had remarked that it seemed symptomatic of the modern era that a writer must stand up and identify the “I” (Stephen Dedalus), that it seemed necessary to establish a unique separate experience, an enabling act for writing at all. Writers of other times, he believed, had felt no such necessity.

  “Stream of consciousness” brought Virginia Woolf to the fore. She was not dismissed, but his reservations were many. “Compare her to Joyce,” he proposed. “She is like a little flute player confronting his grand orchestration.”

  On one of these absorbing days, Allen Tate once more wandered in. Tate was living at Sewanee, Tennessee, at the time, and the trip to Nashville was an easy drive down from the mountain. At Davidson’s request he came into our lecture hall while we were still on Joyce. Our eager faces were expectant. Tate, a born dramatist, knew how to make the most of an unplanned appearance like this one. He began to talk, first about Ulysses. In no time he had led us into a fascinating tangle of ideas—all suggested, lightly indicated, alluring. Vividly he reminisced on the first time he had actually read the book. An early copy had compelled his attention so much that he walked about reading it, and waking without it, recalled he had been interrupted and forced to put it aside out on a summer lawn. He went out on a rainy night to find it.

  Tate remarked that he considered Finnegans Wake one of “the great tragedies of literature.” Someone was timidly puzzled as to his meaning. Not that it was itself a tragedy, he explained; he thought its failure as a work was tragic. Once again, Davidson was skillful in bringing his bedazzled flock back into the fold.

  College courses may be of some cumulative benefit, but few are absolutely defining, continuing through life as a means of judgment—in this case a way of perceiving literature. This was what Davidson’s course meant to me. What he personally meant is easier to see now than then. At the time I felt myself a humble worshiper, resentful a little that anyone should assume such a large degree of authority. Now I can see how much his perceptions of me were of benefit. For he could see me as a well-brought-up but totally unsophisticated small-town girl of a farming family, and he could approve of that; and furthermore only he could positively rejoice in my being able to excel not in spite of but because of this upbringing. He himself, sensitive and bedeviled by a load of work no gifted poet should have had to bear, had begun to share a great many personal matters with me, as a favored student. And in the end, I suppose, like many others, I was a disappointment, unable to accept his dogmas— which as time went on grew more and more strict, especially in matters of race—finally straying off for good.

  As for Allen Tate, he was often discussed among the graduate crowd I socialized with. Some knew him; everyone had stories about him to repeat. His poetry was read and quoted. Word of his sexual affairs, his marital crises, perhaps exaggerated, reached our ears.

  I puzzled as best I might over Tate’s poetry. Its brilliance was obvious, its meaning not easily discovered. I found some lines opaque. Whatever did “one peeled aster drenched with wind all day” have to do with the tragic matter in “The Death of Little Boys”? Well, maybe the aster was a plant in the windowsill in the room where the child died. But a few lines on, suddenly “delirium assails the cliff in Norway where you ponder.” Norway! My literal brain was something of a handicap for taking such extravagant leaps. I got on better with the famous poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” where by a cemetery wall the poet sees the charging leaves in an autumn wind as a reminder of charging armies. But when I reached the lines on how to think of the sacrifice the dead have made and find we must resort to

  … mute speculation, the patient curse

  That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps

  For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.

  I wonder what a jaguar is doing in this Southern scene. Many a young brain worked hard to discover the meaning of such difficult images. Yet there were wonderful, accessible and justly famous lines, like “What shall we say who have knowledge/ Carried to the heart?” and “… the salt of their blood/Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea.” Here was brilliance at work.

  This studious attention went side by side with the textual study of Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Few others were so thoroughly approved. Tennyson was out, Browning was a maybe. Besides, who studied Victorian literature anymore? You had better go straight back to John Donne.

  Then there was poetry by John Crowe Ransom, the pride of Vanderbilt, recently hired away “up north,” to Kenyon College. To my reading, Ransom was so deep buried in the Southern myth of people, landscape, history, that his marvelous lyric gifts seemed always to be wandering around there. The speaker of his poem “Old Mansion” is wandering, too, thinking about one of those old Southern houses, an icon, so easily read as a model of how we all lived once, or thought we did or should have:

  Each time of seeing I absorbed some other feature

  Of a house whose annals in no wise could be brief

  Nor ignoble; for it expired as sweetly as Nature

  With her tinge of oxidation on autumn leaf.

  Settings are pleasant, sunlit and warmly Southern. “Blue Girls” stroll across a “finishing school” lawn. Little “Janet Waking” weeps over her pet hen, stung to death by a bee. In the twilight, a “gentleman in a dust coat” tries talking to a pretty girl. It flows so beautifully into things long known, bred in the bone.

  What was wrong with that? I used to wonder. I, too, had been brought up on these myths. Someone needed to speak out in celebration of it, to invent litanies to their beauty and melancholy, their persistence. But when I read poems like “Judith of Bethu-lia” and “The Equilibrists,” I got glimpses of a wider landscape. Chills go up my spine when I read of Judith: “Beautiful as the flying legend of some leopard …” Or when one hears spelled out the plight of two lovers kept apart by honor:

  Leave me now, and never let us meet,

  Eternal distance now command thy feet.

  There was a passionate spirit here, not ever perhaps released from what someone has called “the Souther
n obligation.”

  Ransom was something of an elder statesman of the onetime close-knit group, who had begun back in the twenties to come together to read their poems and excite their minds during what must have been great evenings of exchange. Tate had brought in an exceptional discovery, a red-haired undergraduate named Robert Penn Warren. And Davidson was present, along with others, like Merrill Moore, whose names have dropped from sight. Ransom, courtly and charming, was ready to gather them and others into a widening orbit. Then he left.

  At that time there were stories circulating as to why this departure. The Agrarians were controversial, it was true. They delighted to kick the stuffing out of soft Victorian optimism, to show how cherished poems, like Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” were weak efforts. If audiences were shocked, it was good for them. Let them see what literature was actually saying, something neither simple nor sweet. Rumor asserted that conflict with the administration had forced Ransom out. All this has found its recorders elsewhere. I knew little but that they all were measurelessly gifted, had stimulated one another, had been in glad accord for one brief, shining moment which changed forever the way we read literature.

  They still revered one another, and seemed to think of themselves as still present, still united. Learning later how bitter literary quarrels can become, I marvel at how loyal a band they remained. They might cast aspersions in private conversation, but no outsider was allowed to do so unchallenged. We heard that Ransom and Tate had dismissed Davidson’s poetry, but Davidson, though perhaps resentful of the slight, still taught Ransom’s lyrics and Tate’s highbrow stanzas with care and pride. Scandal about the Tates might rock the mountain at Sewanee, but Davidson, who was singularly upright, could be seen lunching at a local restaurant with Allen and his wife, Caroline Gordon.