Making It New: 1900–1945 437(1929) and several volumes of comment and criticism, from Reactionary Essays on
Poetry and Ideas (1936) to Memoirs and Opinions (1975). He also produced one,
major novel The Fathers. Set in Virginia before and during the Civil War, it tells the
story of two families, the Buchans of Pleasant Hill and the Poseys of Georgetown.
Major Lewis Buchan, patriarch of the one family, is the consummate Southern
aristocrat. George Posey, his son-in-law, is the modern man, steeped in Southern
tradition but restless and outside it. Young Lacey Buchan, son of Lewis and just
coming into manhood, narrates a sequence of events that tear his father and
brother-in-law apart and his family asunder. These events are coincident with
and inseparable from events on a larger canvas, where the South experiences
comprehensive defeat and division. The personal is the political here, and vice versa.
This is an intensely emotional novel that explores social conflict and dissolution
through war in and between families. And through war within a single personality,
since Lacey Buchan is himself divided in his loyalties between the old and the
new, drawn in love and veneration toward both his “fathers,” Major Buchan and
George Posey. As Tate observed, many years after writing The Fathers, the novel has
two heroes: “Major Buchan, the classical hero, whose hubris destroys him” and
“George Posey ... a modern romantic hero.” It is torn between two characters,
and the dispensations they symbolize, just as much as its narrator is. The triumph
of the novel, in fact, is that Tate, despite his intense attachment to traditionalism
and the South, is able to keep a sufficiently critical purchase on his subject, and
sufficient distance from his own instinctive loyalties, so as to create real balance
and tension. The old Southern way of life, epitomized by Major Buchan, is destroyed
by its own inherent flaws as much as, or more than, anything else. The new order of
things, embodied in Posey, is a compelling mix, or confusion, of the dangerous and
the desirable, violence and energy. Which is why, perhaps, the very last words in the
story express Lacey’s yearnings toward his brother-in-law: “I love him,” he says,
“more than I love any man.”
Tate was different from Ransom, too, in that he was affected by the poetic
experiments of Eliot and Crane. He even defended The Waste Land against Ransom’s
dismissive criticisms. This is reflected in the tone, and sometimes the structure, of
Tate’s own poetry. Freer forms alternate with logical patterns. Logical connectives
are omitted, sentences inverted, and scenes changed rapidly. The distance between
Tate and Ransom is measured with particular force in Tate’s most famous poem,
“Ode to the Confederate Dead.” In some ways, “Ode” operates within the same series
of assumptions as “Antique Harvesters.” It, too, is a profoundly traditionalist poem
which attempts to create a myth, an ideal version of the past, as a corrective to the
present. It, too, is a poem that dramatizes the mythologizing process, the creation
of an idea, a complex of possibilities, out of historical fact. The narrator, a man
who characterizes the modern failure to live according to principle, stands by the
monuments raised to those killed fighting for the South during the Civil War; and as
he describes their lives, or what he imagines their lives to have been, the description
is transmuted into celebration. The past is reinvented, just as place, landscape is in
“Antique Harvesters”; the soldiers being remembered are transformed into a heroicGGray_c04.indd 437ray_c 04 .indd 437 8 8/1/2011 7:53:58 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 58 AM