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Making It New: 1900–1945 431

spring something happened to me,” she concludes. “Yes I remember. I fell in love

with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.” Her family can only watch and

wonder, as they see themselves in her: their own cry for meaning that has become a

crying for the past and a crying out against life. It is a seminal moment in American

theater. An American family of ordinary means inspires the awe, the fear and pity,

that used to be reserved for the special few, in traditional drama. It is also a key

moment in American literary modernism. The insignificant life becomes here the

significance of literature. What matters is that, in the old terms, nothing matters;

what this means is the loss of, and yet our need for, meaning; what we know, O’Neill

tells us, is that we must live in the absence of what we need fully to be and to know.

Traditionalism, Politics, and Prophecy

The uses of traditionalism

Not everyone during this period went after the strange gods of modernism. On

the contrary, responding to that yearning for the past to be found in writers

as otherwise different as Wharton and Cather, Robinson and Frost, and that

preoccupation with cultural loss notable in writers as otherwise complexly

modern as Pound, Faulkner, and O’Neill, many writers sought refuge and support in

traditionalism. Following the example, sometimes, of these and similar writers,

notably Eliot, they sought to allay some of their anxiety about the immediate

moment by discovering possible redemption in yesterday. The present might be

confused, their belief was, modernity might create fracture and division, but with

the help of traditionalist codes or forms that confusion might be allayed, the

fractures might be healed, and they might find balm for their own divided minds.

Of those who pursued this belief, actively and with passion, none were so influential

as those gathered in the South, initially around what was termed the Fugitive

movement. “A Fugitive,” one of their number, Allen Tate, was to explain later, “was

quite simply a Poet: the Wanderer,... the Outcast, the man who carries the secret

wisdom of the world.” Meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1915 on, the Fugitive

group was composed of Southerners, many of them associated with Vanderbilt

University. However, when the first edition of the magazine that gave them their

name, The Fugitive, appeared in 1921, it was not the regional affiliation that was

emphasized, nor even the sense of existential exile described by Tate. “THE

FUGITIVE flees from nothing faster than from high-caste Brahmins of the Old

South,” the opening statement declared. The common theme was alienation from a

particular tradition: “a tradition,” as the editors of the magazine put it, “that may be

called a tradition only when looked at through the haze of a generous imagination.”

The Fugitives saw themselves fleeing, in fact, from Southern romanticism, nostalgia

for the region’s past. And they saw themselves fleeing, too, from the dehumanizing

environment that they saw all around them – in Nashville, in the modern South,

and in the United States. Something of both their distaste for regional atavism and

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