The Fable of the Southern Writer

Lewis P. Simpson

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780807140628
• eBook ISBN: 9780807153505
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"With a breadth and depth unsurpassed by any other cultural historian of the South, Lewis Simpson examines the writing of southerners Thomas Jefferson, John Randolph, Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Arthur Crew Inman, William Styron, and Walker Percy. Simpson offers challenging essays of easy erudition blessedly free of academic jargon.... [They] do not propose to support an overall thesis, but simply explore the southern writer's unique relationship with his or her region, bereft of myth and tradition, in the grasp of science and history." -- Library Journal

Index

Aaron, Daniel, 157, 158, 163–65, 175, 178

Adams, Henry, 1–4, 9–12, 15, 28, 117, 168

—works: The Education of Henry Adams, 1–2, 3, 24, 26, 35

Adams, John, 185–86

African-American literature, 22–23

African Americans, see Blacks; Slavery

Agrarians, See Southern Agrarian movement

Anderson, Sherwood, 73, 103–105, 106

Arbuthnot, John, 50

Auerbach, Erich, 108, 110

Augustan satirists, 6–7

Augustine, St., 138

Austin, Robert H., 222

Autobiography: of Henry Adams, 1–2, 3, 24, 26, 35

examples of, 24

of Jefferson, 24–26, 44–47

origins of, 24

Cox’s distinction between memoir and, 25–26

elements of, in Tate’s works, 26–44, 31n

Tate’s abandonment of, 26–27, 115

elements of, in Warren’s works, 138–41, 143–54

The Inman Dairy: A Public and Private Confession, 157–82

elements of, in Percy’s works, 197–207

oral, of Simpson’s grandmother, 232–34

Barthes, Roland, 13–16

Baton Rouge, La., 132–38, 140

Berkeley, George, 54–57, 65

Bible, 93, 108, 109, 110

Big Tree, 210–12, 215

Bishop, John Peale, 31n, 32–33, 37, 118

Blackmur, R, P., 1

Blacks, xvii–xviii. See also Slavery

Blotner, Joseph, 90

Bogan, John Armistead, 30, 37

Bowers, Claude G., 4

Brescia, Emma (Cinina), 132

Brodie, Fawn, 45

Brooks, Cleanth, 17, 18, 42, 133, 137, 138

Brown, John, 132, 142

Buchanan, Scott, 120

Cable, George Washington, 77

Camus, Albert, 198, 204

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 3, 96, 101

Civil War: impact 16–17, 23, 59, 97

in Faulkner’s works, 74, 81–95, 105, 106, 193–94

and southern authors, 74

Twain on, 74–77

and Inman, 167, 168n, 168–75

and Berry Lewis Ham, 221

and Simpson’s grandmother, 231

Clay, Henry, 9, 10

Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark

Conrad, Joseph, 142, 144

Constitution, U.S., 12, 16–17

Cooper, James Fenimore, 185, 187

Core, George, 117

Corrington, John William, 153–54

“Country” philosophers, 6–7

Cowboys, 185–86, 188–90, 212

Cowley, Malcolm, 101–102, 138

Cox, James M., 1, 24–26, 45

Crew, Benjamin B., 169–70

Dante Alighieri, 28, 123, 124, 142

Davidson, Donald, 17, 18, 97, 117, 142, 145, 157

Davis, Jefferson, 31–33, 148–52, 155–56

Davis, Richard Beale, 5

Davis, Varina Anne (Winnie), 155–56, 157, 178

Dawidoff, Robert, 1–3, 6–7, 11

Declaration of Independence, 2, 5, 8, 17n, 24–25, 44–47, 50, 97

Dickinson, Emily, 124–25, 129

Donne, John, 57, 101, 124, 125, 126, 129

Dostoevsky, Feodor, 120

Douglass, Frederick, 23, 47

Dutton, Tom, 135

East, Charles, 132, 136, 137n, 154

Eliot, T. S., 14, 15, 96–97, 114–16, 125, 142, 161–62

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7, 167, 168, 186, 187, 223

Faulkner, William: on the South, xiv–xv, 12

and history, xvii, 69, 72, 99–113, 214

and literary modernism, 14

and Mississippi, 54, 73, 96, 97, 101, 103–105, 106, 112–13

sexuality in works of, 61—62, 98–99

in New Orleans, 73

and Anderson, 73, 103–105, 106

Civil War in works of, 74, 81–95

and Southern Renascence, 80

identification of, with Quentin Compson, 81, 83, 94–95, 105–106, 107, 143, 146, 157

and Melville’s Moby-Dick, 81, 94, 98

reading of, 97, 99

Keats’s influence on, 98, 100

poetry of, 98–101

on Yoknapatawpha stories, 101–102, 111

long sentences in, 111–12

on is versus was, 112—13

Tate on, 114

on ideal life of writer, 118

as exile, 142

as southern loneliness artist, 153

as second-generation post–Civil War writer, 157

on Warren’s All the King’s Men, 194

French reaction to, 205

—works: Absalom, Absalom! xv, xvi, 74, 81–95, 107, 109–10, 175, 176, 179–80

Go Down, Moses, xv, 110, 111

Intruder in the Dust, xvi, 111

The Sound and the Fury, xv, 61–62, 74, 81, 83, 85, 94, 95, 107, 175

The Hamlet, 60

“Evangeline,” 90–93 90 98, 107

The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, 90

The Marble Faun, 98, 107

Marionnettes, 98–99

A Green Bough, 99–100

“And After,”99

“Eros and After,”99

“Twilight,”99–100

The Portable Faulkner, 101–102

Mosquitoes, 103, 106

Soldiers’ Pay, 103, 106

Flags in the Dust, 105, 106–107

Sartoris, 105, 112

As I Lay Dying, 107

Light in August, 107

Sanctuary, 107, 114, 193

A Fable, 110–11

Requiem for a Nun, 111, 193–95

The Mansion, 111

The Reivers: A Reminiscence, 111, 113

The Town, 111

Pylon, 176

Fitzhugh, George, 20

Foote, Shelby, 153

Fort Richardson, 209, 210, 212

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 20

Franklin, Benjamin, 24

Freud, Sigmund, 15, 25, 61, 99

Fugitive, The, 142

Genovese, Eugene, 20

Gilmer, Francis W., 4–5

Glasgow, Ellen, 36, 74, 156–57

Goll, Iwan, 142

Gordon, Caroline, 80, 97 153, 157

Gordon, Thomas, 6

Grant, Ulysses S., 211

Groner, Frank, 224

Hakluyt, Richard, 160

Ham, Berry Lewis, 213, 214, 219–21, 235

Ham, Dorcas Matilda Bowen, 213, 214, 215, 219, 220, 235

Ham, James Lorenzo, 219

Hamilton, Allen Lee, 209

Hammond, James Henry, 40–41, 44, 45

Hardy, Thomas, 96, 97

Harris, George Washington, 185, 192

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 51, 167, 168

Heidegger, Martin, 15, 58

Hemingway, Ernest, 14, 29, 73, 80–81, 142

Hindle, John J., 31n

History: Randolph as modern self’s response to, 3, 6–12, 192

Nietzsche on, 13–14

Henry Adams on, 15

Madison on, 53

Warren on, 57, 72, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue: John Randolph and the Inwardness of History
• I: The Fable of the Agrarians and the Failure of the American Republic
• II: A Fable of White and Black: Jefferson, Madison, Tate
• III: History and the Will of the Artist: Elizabeth Madox Roberts
• IV: War and Memory: Quentin Compson’s Civil War
• V: The Tenses of History: Faulkner
• VI: The Poetry of Criticism: Allen Tate
• VII: The Loneliness Artist: Robert Penn Warren
• VIII: The Last Casualty of the Civil War: Arthur Crew Inman
• IX: From Thoreau to Walker Percy: Home by Way of California; or, The End of the Southern Renascence
• Epilogue: A Personal Fable: Living with Indians
• Acknowledgments
• Index