Carrollton, Mississippi, seemed a greater and greater distance away from me during those heady years. But once, when I was walking the short distance from my rooming house to the campus, a surprising encounter took place. I found myself overtaken along by an energetic, brisk gentleman, who was one of the Vanderbilt professors, Frank Owsley.
Professor Owsley was a historian, noted for his work on Southern subjects. He asked where I came from. “Mississippi,” I said, but he wanted more. What town? When I said “Carrollton,” he paused and we walked on a few steps in silence. “Then you know about the Carrollton massacre?” he said. It was half a question. “Yes, I do,” I answered. That was all.
Robert Penn Warren’s departure to go up north to Minnesota was the subject of grand lament. He had been teaching at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge at the time. With Cleanth Brooks, that other pioneer of the New Criticism, Warren had founded the influential Southern Review at Louisiana State University. There was evidently some hostility to them within the LSU administration. The fears ran that Warren might never come home again. How could he do it? his Southern admirers wondered. It seemed he had done something to all of us. But Brooks, too, had left for Yale, where Warren as well would eventually take a position. Still, their group never regarded him or Cleanth except as one of them, in some mystical way still living below the Mason-Dixon line. They never quite gave one another up.
Who else could be put beside them? They reached out with high selectivity, and drew in whom they would. Faulkner was never part of their group or any other, but they did much to advance Faulkner criticism, which was only in the forties beginning to make sense of his achievement. George Marion O’Donnell from Mississippi, a student of Davidson’s, had done groundwork on Faulkner criticism which was to be basic to all future critical exploration. Peter Taylor gravitated to them and when the war ended swung easily into their orbit.
Up north, working with undiminished energy, Warren encouraged the young Saul Bellow. His friend Albert Erskine, at Random House, edited and promoted Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. They were unanimous in noting and praising Eudora Welty, just as before her Katherine Anne Porter had won their high esteem. William Styron, inevitably, became an accepted friend. Among the poets, Robert Lowell had sought out the Tates, and spent time in Baton Rouge with his wife of that time, the gifted Jean Stafford.
Eventual differences within the group seemed to me (entirely from the periphery) not so much based in literary theory; instead, they tended to spring from the “Southern way of life.” A basic idea of the old South’s true nature would always be held by them as common knowledge and a common bond. Thus when the Agrarians put together I’ll Take My Stand, a collection of essays to set forth their position, they sought out others who held that knowledge too—Stark Young from Mississippi, for example, and John Gould Fletcher of Arkansas, and several more.
But a joker was hiding in the deck. It was black and it was bound to show up sooner or later and it raised a question.
In his later years, I was told, and have every reason to believe, Davidson grew more and more reactionary. His scorn for those who questioned the segregation of races in the South was evident even back in the forties, when I was a student. He regarded those blacks highly who were able, always as individuals, to “find a place for themselves,” in terms of the prevailing white culture. He remarked once in class that a plantation owner he knew had said that when a black worker misbehaved he had to do something about it, so he gave him a whipping. “They’re just children, after all.” Davidson admired a Disney movie that came out about that time, Song of the South. It celebrated the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris. It glorified, said Davidson, “the old-fashioned Negro.” He seemed to fear, even back then, that Warren’s more generous attitudes toward race, as expressed in his essay in I’ll Take My Stand, foretold defection.
I never heard from Davidson again after the publication of my own novel on a racial subject, The Voice at the Back Door. He must have had to recognize that I had jumped the fence. I don’t doubt that in his view outer darkness was my lot, and I believe there would never have been any chance of my getting back in. Perhaps I behaved too timidly in the matter, but I know I would have had to survive his wrath, and this I had no inclination to risk. I saw once or twice in memoirs of the group that Tate had admired my novel. I was surprised and gratified, especially as I knew Tate had remained in touch with Davidson. There is also the fact that after the novel appeared, I was awarded a Kenyon Review Fiction Fellowship, and Kenyon called Ransom to mind at once. Warren was generous in his praise of the book. Enough said.
I like to think of them, despite differences of whatever nature, all remaining eternally in touch. One thinks of some Valhalla reserved for them, of meetings still going on—the lengthy discussions, the ideas advanced for talk to turn on, the new poems brought in fresh to read aloud, frequent laughter at genuine wit, the rise and fall of excited voices. A large fireplace burns companionable logs in the somewhat rundown, pleasantly shabby Southern parlor, windows reaching to the floor, dogs snuffling out on the front porch in the night. Their joyousness in one another, the pure zest of the intellect they shared—all this should never die.
Davidson has celebrated them in a poem written long after the group dispersed. The writers are dominant, but Frank Owsley is thought of as one of them also:
… remember the firelight blessing
Owsley’s uplifted head, Ransom’s gray eye,
The Kentucky voice of Warren, until that household’s
Oaken being spoke like a plucked lyre.
I take to heart more personally—not to say it was so meant, for I knew Davidson long after it was written—a poem called “Spoken at a Castle Gate,” dating from his earlier days. It seems to breathe out the spirit he gave to his students, the prophecy of what might lie ahead for stubbornly creative spirits:
Before you touch the bolt that locks this gate
Be warned. There’s no return where you are going.
A sword is tinder at the touch of fate
And crumbles in a way beyond your knowing….
A voice that follows you past endless night…
Even as you touch the bolt that locks this gate.…
… Ah, yes, what you create
Perhaps you’ll find,—but never come back again.
20
VANDERBILT AND BEYOND
MORE even than the Agrarian movement, for all its dazzlement, the one overwhelming fact about my time at Vanderbilt was World War II. Social life was either minimal, or conducted in odd ways. The girls I knew from our classes all had boyfriends in the service. I, like the rest, got my share of V-mail with APO numbers for return addresses. Paragraphs were cut out, messages absurdly reduced to fragments. I remember a girl who received one of these missives with all but the salutation blotted out, no text left. “You suppose he said he loves me?” she wanted to know, waving the sheet in the air.
Sometimes, for the lark, we piled up together to go to soldiers’ dances. Other times, servicemen on leave came in to visit. Nightclubs, floor shows, dancing, whiskey and beer. Letters from lonely men who would fall in love with you if you’d only write back.
Of the men around school who were still not in service because of 4F status, or who were soon to be called up, not many were of more than intellectual interest, though I found their talk of things I had little knowledge about was stimulating, and we developed friendships that seemed “meaningful” at the time. I learned to do wicked things like smoke cigarettes and drink beer. There was a gathering place across the street from the university called Butch Petrone’s. It was where we went to laugh and drink after the library closed, and it was fun. I used to feel daring, and I liked the free talk and the company. They say that college trains you for life. Much later, when I made it to Paris, I found people who sat around the sidewalk tables at the Deux Magots were doing what we did in Butch Petrone’s.
But even with all the loving thoughts
of men in uniform, the war put life on hold. Everything one saw ahead seemed dependent upon it. A cloud had to lift before the sun could shine. We followed the papers and broadcasts and talked about men, as girls do in any time or place, but it was all a waiting game. We were young and lively. We read the war news, and answered our V-letters, and felt that for us the times had not been fair.
I continued to write. I showed fragments of a novel I had started to Donald Davidson, but had to see that it was only “promising.” I wrote my thesis on William Butler Yeats, graduated, and was offered a job teaching English in a junior college at Senatobia, Mississippi, a town south of Memphis, Tennessee.
In Senatobia I met a young woman whose interests were similar to mine, Carolyn Pugh, daughter of the college president. We became fast friends. Carolyn was also at work in a first job, teaching high school in the Delta. But she, more than I, was leaning outward. The war was on; jobs were available that usually would have been filled by young men. She revealed in confidence that though she valued family ties, she was acquiring a real dislike for Mississippi, its narrow outlook, its ignorant disdain of a larger world, the poverty of cultural interest. Many people were charming, many were endlessly laughable, but to her it was not the world she wanted to live in. Predictably, she left a year later, having found secretarial work in Washington. Like me, she had broken off early romantic interests when it seemed they were going nowhere.
For myself, I had at that time no notion of leaving the South. I think after Vanderbilt I was more attached to tradition than ever. I had thought all along of trying for some branch of the service, but had to give up the idea because I had never been very strong physically and had been subject to any number of ailments and frequent stress from overwork. I did dare to hope for publication of my work, to win through to a writing life. I clearly saw that reaching my goal would take an excessive amount of luck.
But to leave the South, my home and native land, seemed a sort of betrayal. With his great skill as a teacher, Davidson had led me to see modern literature as a profound experience. But he also sought to imbue his students with a sense of what South-ernness meant, a quality that was more than just American. To him the South was still a nationality, an allegiance, a continuing cause, a land to take a stand in, to live and die for. If I was to write, then sticking with my heritage would be the only route possible.
So I reasoned, though I had to note that “sticking with the South” at the moment meant living in an ill-heated dormitory room, eating greasy food in a noisy dining hall, getting up at six for breakfast, or trudging across the highway to eat at a filling station, teaching four classes a day, and doing all the chores regularly assigned to the English teacher. These included: assisting with the school paper and the annual, teaching a Sunday School class at the Presbyterian church, going in a pickup truck on cold, sometimes rainy, nights to see the basketball team play in a drafty gym in some town even smaller than Senatobia, one of them named Independence but known as Bucksnort. One end of the Bucksnort gym had a small iron stove, burning red-hot and doing little good beyond ten feet. A white-haired man sitting near it looked me over and heaved up out of a cane-bottom chair. “Gal,” he said, “you need this worse’n me.” I was also asked to direct the school play, but refused. “There are some things the English teacher always does,” they said. I said I couldn’t. The typing and shorthand teacher, an attractive girl who smoked a corncob pipe, agreed to the chore but didn’t like it much.
I had no car and every afternoon I walked uptown. The family of a man I had known at Vanderbilt lived there, and their enveloping hospitality was a big help. Once I came down with flu just as the school was closing for a holiday. They came without a second thought and took me in.
This junior college was one of a number run by the state. It offered two years of college, tacked on to a four-year high school. There was a big emphasis on vocational training, such as agriculture and secretarial skills. The students in the college were well-mannered enough to teach with some pleasure, but the entire football team seemed to have landed in the twelfth-year English class. Keeping them halfway quiet took most of my time, and furthermore was not really possible. If I turned my back to the blackboard, paper airplanes whizzed across the room, loud noises exploded, rickety desks squeaked and clanged. I taught grammar and composition as best I might; I graded innumerable half-literate papers; I even taught Shakespeare. One student wrote some pages dealing with “Macbeth and Miz Macbeth,” how they had ganged up on this old king.
Nearby Camp McCain (named for “Uncle Pink”) was the scene of soldiers’ dances. I was inevitably asked to chaperone, but wound up with not one but two boyfriends myself. I shared them with Carolyn on weekends, and we found ourselves dating polite but awkward Yankee servicemen who had not the faintest idea of the wondrous things we talked about and wished to have as part of life.
Girls and women everywhere in civilian life were restless. A society at whatever level stumbles along in wartime. The college girls dated high-school boys who had scarcely begun to shave. “Nursemaids wanted for our escorts,” ran one headline in the school paper.
Hard times, a daily fact of life during my childhood, and part of the Depression, now said to have ended with the war, still persisted. I was earning less than one hundred and fifty dollars a month, plus the room (no private bath), and meals.
After one year of teaching in Mississippi, I was offered a job in a finishing school, Ward-Belmont, in Nashville. A return to Nashville, where warmth and encouragement for my writing, not to mention intellectual stimulation, had been found before and might well be again, seemed the best and only course. Carolyn was gone from Mississippi. She would visit, as I would also, we would exchange voluminous confidential letters, but we would never live in the same place again. I had no sister, and think at that time she filled my need for one.
At any rate, the friendship had occurred between us at a crucial moment and had been rewarding; we were two young women different from our social group in our intense interest in reading, our family backgrounds, our sensitivities. She was attractive, questioning, both venturesome and vulnerable, but no bluestocking, not brash or overly bold. Senatobia was near enough to Memphis for us to go see traveling New York theater together (Life with Father, Tallulah Bankhead in The Little Foxes), or to shop and see a movie. These were happy times, discussing, laughing, comparing ideas.
And so, back to Nashville. I expected things I craved most to open up again for me there. Eventually, they did. But not at first.
At Ward-Belmont I found myself in something of a Belhaven situation. There was not much emphasis on religion, but manners and deportment were up for their accustomed workout. The war rolled on monotonously; the heavy news rolled in.
At the school, the girls I had to teach were smart and eager, but once more a sense of confinement closed in, and I knew I would not be there long.
Who told me about it, I don’t remember, but I began going by bus to downtown Nashville to a night school called Watkins Institute, which specialized in vocational-training courses and had, tucked away in its curriculum, a “workshop group” in fiction writing. I was shy, but did it anyway. It was conducted by a mystery-story writer named Raymond Goldman. He was crippled in both legs by polio. He taught to supplement his income, and also sold men’s shoes in a local department store. A kinder, more receptive and earnest character than Raymond Goldman was never born. He took to my writing with a delight that all but stunned me. He was a natural enthusiast anyway, born to chuckle, encourage, and understand. He not only limped but wore thick glasses and a hearing aid. He thought that life was glorious.
His approach to writing was odd. He listed a number of possible plots—I think there were fifteen in all: “The biter bit”… “Nothing ever happens here” … “Aint love grand?” … “Grandeur in unexpected places,” etc. If a story that didn’t fit turned up, he would sometimes add another one. Being from an old Nashville family, he knew, or knew of, all the famous names clus
tered around Vanderbilt.
My attention shifted from teaching to writing stories to read before the rather mixed group he had nurtured for years, to seeking out the works of published writers we discussed, to finding my way once more. I think that no one really writes just for himself. An audience is what we have to have. We will find it someway. I once had a friend from a Tennessee farm who could find no one to listen to what he wrote. He would ask the black farm laborers to listen for a while in the evenings while he read aloud out on the porch. They would laugh when he laughed, and cry when he said it was sad. It wasn’t much of a help, but it was something.
Mr. Goldman took the time to talk with me often. He thought teaching at Ward-Belmont was not the thing for me, and wondered about newspaper work. One thing led to another: I found myself angling for a job on the Nashville Tennessean. With Goldman’s and Davidson’s help, I got it, though Davidson scarcely approved of the move. “Why on earth anybody wants to work on a newspaper…!” he raged. I slunk away feeling permanently dashed, but then found he had done one of his amazing turnarounds and had called the managing editor on my behalf. I think I would never have landed anything there except for the war. As reporters, men were definitely preferred. But now they were scattered far and wide—Europe, the Pacific, the Middle East. And so the knowing faces in the city rooms were often those of young girls like myself, observant of a world laced with rough talk and cynicism, hard-boiled, more than a little relentless, often out to trip us up.
Still, it was another start.
On assignment from the city desk I wrote up minor stories, like meetings of Rotary or the Optimists Club, obituaries, and rewrites. Once the newspaper, a strong supporter of the New Deal and the Tennessee Valley Authority, sponsored a farm-produce contest for the TVA area. Reports poured in and prizes were to be awarded. I went daily to a central office distant from the paper, to read about community achievements and put them into feature stories. It was winter and there was even snowfall to go through. One of the city-desk chieftains nicknamed me Little Nell, the Farm Girl. He seemed to enjoy this.
Landscapes of the Heart Page 19