Books: Border State of Mind

THE FATHERS—Allen Tate—Putnam ($2.50).

For 25 years before the Civil War no one knew which way the Border States would go if war came. They vacillated, compromised, stood on one political foot and then the other, kept the country on pins and needles till the last moment. The literary inheritors of this Border-State vacillation are the Southern regionalists: Poets Allen Tate. John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson. Novelists Caroline Gordon (Mrs. Allen Tate). John Peale Bishop, et al., from the divided States of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia. Subtle, urbane and inexhaustibly energetic, they straddle the question of the South’s inevitable industrialization, preach a Southern culture modeled on pre-Civil War agrarianism.

Among these agile regionalists none is subtler than Poet Allen Tate, who has written biographies (Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis), contributed to regional anthologies,, made himself their best-known spokesman. The Fathers, his first novel, exhibits Border-State mentality at its most devious. The story, laid in Virginia and Maryland during the first days of the Civil War, is recalled 50 years later by an old bachelor doctor named Lacy Buchan. The protagonist, however, is the narrator’s brother-in-law, a handsome, money-making Marylander named George Posey, whom the narrator worshiped but only vaguely understood. The elder Buchans, Jeffersonian aristocrats, understand Posey even less. He flouts their social codes, which he dismisses as the unpractical rigmarole of idealists who “think of nothing but marriage and death and the honor of Virginia.”

When Major Buchan orders a family of slaves freed, Posey calls it sentimentality, sells them down the river and applies the money on Buchan debts. But when his own house servant (who is also his half brother) is shot for imputed rape. Posey shoots the white man, who is the narrator’s oldest brother. As another result of Posey’s following his own rather than the Buchan social codes, his wife is driven crazy. Yet the narrator withholds moral judgment; the tragedy, he concludes, is one in which Fate pulls the strings.

As a picture of Southern family relationships, The Fathers might well have furnished a plot for William Faulkner. But in a Faulkner novel the portrayal of decadence would have left no room for Tate’s wavering conclusion. Between Novelists Tate and Faulkner the gulf is as wide as that which separated the Border States’ champion compromiser, Henry Clay, and the Deep South’s champion non-compromiser, Jeff Davis.