An article in the current New Republic, “The Country of the Damned” by Adam Kirsch (TNR June 25) awakened memories. Kirsch discusses the grip that the Southern Agrarian ideology held on Allen Tate, who for a time was thought of as one of our greatest poets. Along the way, Kirsch quotes some atrociously racist and anti-semitic remarks that Tate made in print in his younger days, one being a declaration in the early 1930s that certain blacks accused of a particular crime (I forget what it was) should be executed whether guilty or not.

 

 

Tate felt that he stood for a noble tradition, for a sort of order that the modern world had abandoned in favor of chaos, an order that must be defended at all costs against blacks and Jews.

 

At the University of Minnesota in the early Sixties, I took classes from both Tate and James Wright. At age 19 or 20, I knew nothing about Tate’s views, whereas rumors about Wright’s behavior lurked in all the shadows. Wright was bi-polar and alcoholic, both viewed then as character issues rather than medical problems. He was also involved in a contentious divorce. Tate led the move to get rid of him. Since Wright’s problems were too often on public display, I imagine they made even his more liberal colleagues uneasy.

 

 

But Wright’s identity as a poet and a citizen must have offended Tate even more than did his personal problems. Wright sympathized with the world’s outsiders and losers, with the people that Tate’s “order” would have ground down. Wright was driven from the department and went to McCalester College in St. Paul before landing a position at Hunter College in New York.

 

A serious dramatist could stage, in the clash between these two poets over the tenure issue, a clash of two powerful strains in American literary culture and in American society as a whole. A sitcom writer could have fun with this material too.

 

 

Tate, lamenting the loss of order in the world, kept his private “issues” wrapped in a veil of propriety, even as he divorced his wife in preparation to marrying a nun who had been a student of his and was leaving her “order.” In cynical moments, I imagine her agonizing over the choice between God and Tate.

 

And, to spice the drama with a subplot, there was another poet, John Berryman, drunk 24/7, preparing to leap from the old Washington Avenue Bridge. Many English Departments have provided fodder for the satirist–it’s an unintended service they do the culture–but in those gone days the University of Minnesota raised the standard.

 

 

I wonder if anyone has fictionalized those events. And if not, where in the hell was Kingsley Amis when we needed him?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 12:43 am and is filed under James Wright, Minnesota Literature, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.