Making It New: 1900–1945 443are not alone in doing this even within the context of their region. Another, unjustly
neglected figure suggests other possibilities: John Peale Bishop (1892–1944). Born in
West Virginia, a close friend to F. Scott Fitzgerald and the writer, critic, and editor
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972), Bishop thought of himself as a Southerner to the end
of his life. More than any other writer, too, Bishop reveals the neoclassical strain in
the Southern tradition. The feeling in his poems and essays, gathered together
in Collected Poems (1948) and Collected Essays (1948), and in his one novel, Act of
Darkness (1935), is consistently stoical; the sense of humor is fierce, the form of
expression laconic, chiseled. Many Southerners, especially in the eighteenth century,
liked to mold themselves on republican Rome; and Bishop developed this tendency,
perceiving himself as a patrician republican confronted with the corruption of
empire. He saw a parallel between the decline of Rome and the decadence of the
United States; and he felt the necessity of withdrawing into the exercise of private
virtue. Convinced of the necessity of order, personal and public, he was totally
committed to the ideas of duty and ceremony. And ceremony was lost in America,
Bishop felt: the pursuit of the future excluded any honoring of the past. In works
like “Experience in the West” (1935), he hauntingly reversed the westward myth
since, for him, it was precisely the tragedy of America that it supplanted culture
with nature. Striding apart from the human community, the pioneer had made for
himself a world without “soul”; that is, without those dimensions and resonances
that only ritual and ceremony could offer. Other writers have celebrated the open-
ness of America, its substitution of geography for history: in Bishop’s opinion,
however, that was something to be lamented. As he saw it, there was a seamless, sad
connection between the literal wilderness, that “green savage clime” into which
American had gone centuries ago and the moral wilderness that was the America
of his own time.
Bishop was roughly a contemporary of the Fugitives but other, later Southern
writers continued to testify to the vitality and variety of traditionalism. Most notable
here, and very different from each other, are Wendell Berry (1934–) and James
Dickey (1923–1999). Poet, essayist, and novelist, Berry has developed what might
be termed the ecological tendency in traditionalist writing. The titles of some of his
collections of essays testify to his allegiances: The Unforeseen Wilderness (1971), A
Continuous Harmony (1972), The Gift of Good Land (1981). His novels, Nathan Coulter
(1960), about a boy growing up in tobacco-farming land, A Place in Earth (1967),
and The Memory of Old Jack (1974), in which a 92-year-old farmer recalls his earlier
days, reveal an attachment to one dear, particular place that blossoms out into a
recognition of kinship with nature. So do the poems, in collections like The Broken
Ground (1964) and Traveling at Home (1988). Always, the animating conviction is
that “slowly we return to earth.” And always the enemies are those familiar bêtes
noires of the traditionalist, mechanism and abstraction – a world in which people
are turned into products in the name of certain insubstantial theories concerning
nature, human nature, and power. Dickey is as preoccupied with nature and the past
as Berry is, but his preoccupations take very different forms. For his major interest is
in the primeval bases of existence – that storehouse of energies and imagery, theGGray_c04.indd 443ray_c 04 .indd 443 8 8/1/2011 7:53:59 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 59 AM