THE UN: Southern literature and Andrew Lytle

Cameron Sawyer says: "Phillip Terzian has seen the old Ford Foundation film with my grandfather in it! I am surprised and gratified. I inherited a 16mm reel of this film, but I thought it has sunk into final obscurity. Monteagle Mountain and Sewanee are all the same area about half way between Nashville and Chattanooga. The University of the South campus is indeed located on the Domain. Middle Tennessee planters as w century,and would repair to there for the summer to escape the heat and the diseases of the summer. My Aunt Isabelle s family had a place in Beersheba Springs from the 1870 s with a wonderful library and guest books going back all the way to that time. Andrew Lytle (the last survivor of the Fugitive Poets and Agrarians groups) retired to Monteagle itself. I will never forget how he greeted guests in the summer barefoot and in a white linen suit with a pewter cup full of whiskey. I loved to sit at his feet for hours listening to his tales. When he died in 1995 at the age of 93, the last light of a once brilliant literary school went out. As to southern writers Bennett Cerf once said that he got more good manuscripts from Mississippi than he sold books there. The God-haunted, somewhat backwards southland was a seething cauldron of literary creativity during the early and middle 20th century, an analogue perhaps to Ireland during the same time".

RH: Oh Dear! I am sure Philip Terzian will lament Andrew Lytle's bare feet. "Beersheba Springs" distorts history, since Beersheba means "the well of the pledge", a well dug by Abraham. Didn't the people of Tennessee dig it? As for Andrew Lytle (1898-1995), here is an appraisal of him: One of the South's greatest 20th-century literary figures, Andrew Lytle was a successful novelist, literary critic, teacher (including students such as Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, and James Dickey), and witty spokesman of a rural Southern sensibility. In the 1920s and '30s he was one of the original Agrarians (along with John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren), a literary movement centered around Vanderbilt University whose members argued that the South should reject industrialization and cling to its rural identity. Lytle never abandoned that position. It sounds as though he represented Southern rejection of Northern culture.

Ronald Hilton - 12/5/02