Allen Tate - Since its publication it has received very little attention, considering that it is one of the most remarkable novels of our time. Its occasion is a public one, the achievement and the destruction of Virginia’s antebellum civilization. Within that occasion it discovers a terrible conflict between two fundamental and irreconcilable modes of existence

Allen Tate, The Fathers, Ohio University Press, 1938.            

Set during the Civil War, The Fathers is the story of two old Virginia families, the Buchans of Pleasant Hill and the Poseys of Georgetown. It tells of the collapse of a way of life, hastened not by the onslaught of Yankees but by a tragic flaw within the civilization of the Old South. Major Lewis Buchan, patriarch of the family, is the consummate southern aristocrat; his son-in-law, George Posey, is the modern man, steeped in the southern tradition yet restless and outside it. Young Lacy Buchan, just coming into manhood, narrates the sequence of events that tears his father and brother-in-law apart and his family asunder - betrayal, rape, madness, murder, suicide - and his tale foreshadows the paradoxical love and respect Posey will ultimately command in him. In the end, both "fathers" are heroes, and the values of both are retained, a lesson not just for Lacy but for the South.


The Fathers is the powerful novel by the poet and critic recognized as one of the great men of letters of our time.
Old Major Buchan of Pleasant Hill, Fairfax County, Virginia, lived by a gentlemen’s agreement to ignore what was base or rude, to live a life which was gentle and comfortable because it was formal. Into this life George Posey came dashing, as Henry Steele Commager observed, “to defy Major Buchan, marry Susan, betray Charles and Semmes, dazzle young Lacy, challenge and destroy the old order of things.”
The Fathers was published in 1938. It sold respectably in both the United States and England, perhaps because people expected it to be another Gone With the Wind, wheras it is in fact the novel Gone With the Wind ought to have been. Since its publication it has received very little attention, considering that it is one of the most remarkable novels of our time. Its occasion is a public one, the achievement and the destruction of Virginia’s antebellum civilization. Within that occasion it discovers a terrible conflict between two fundamental and irreconcilable modes of existence, a conflict that has haunted American experience, but exists in some form at all times. The Fathers moves between the public and the private aspects of this conflict with an ease very unusual in American novels, and this ease is the most obvious illustration of the novel’s remarkable unity of idea and form, for it is itself a manifestation of the novel’s central idea, that “the belief widely held today, that men may live apart from the political order, that indeed the only humane and honorable satisfactions must be gained in spite of the public order, “is a fantasy.”
—From the introduction of The Fathers


"A masterpiece of formal beauty … deserves to be recognized as one of the most outstanding novels of our time." - Janet Adam-Smith
"Great novel of the broken South." - George Steiner
"A psychological horror story … concerned with life rather than death, with significance rather than with futility." - Henry Steele Commager
"The story displays so much imagination and such a profound reflection upon life that it cannot be neglected by anyone interested in contemporary literature." - Edwin Muir

This is Putnam's headliner among newcomers. Allen Tate may be a newcomer as a novelist, but his writing shows the results of years of experience in various fields of writing, he is no novice with the pen. He shows himself too as a thorough student of the Civil War -- where his previous writing has been along biographical and critical lines, he has adapted his understanding of underlying motives to the needs of fiction, and given the sense of conflict an authenticity that enhances the drama. There is vitality and robustness in the picture of the life, with its chivalry, its conflicting codes of morals and accepted digressions, its social standards, its loyalties. The vast canvas of a family with all its ramifications and the community background of Georgetown, Alexandria, Washington -- before and at the start of the war. The form in which the story is told gives it a unique character; though at times it seems confusing, bit by bit the pieces fall into place, as after events clarify the past for young Lacey Buchan, through whose eyes the story is enacted. One dominant figure emerges, George Posey, fascinating, somehow a trifle sinister, egotistic, loving power, generous, hot-headed, a rebel against the dictates of his caste and his times. It is a tragic story -- tense with currents of animosity and conflict restrained -- and it holds the interest even when it is not wholly clear...The publishers plan an extensive promotion campaign, -- giant books, posters, envelope stickers, paper books. This is one of the books included in the plans for a letter contest among booksellers. Write Putnam for particulars.
- Kirkus Reviews


The Fathers was Tate’s only novel and he had great difficulty writing it. He said he would have been happy to throw away this moment if I were not a sharecropper who must pay back the advance from his landlord. He was even critical of it before publication – They [the reviewers] will say that the narrator beats about the bush for a hundred thousand words but never comes to grips with the characters. Tate was too hard on himself for though still underestimated, this is undoubtedly one of the best Civil War novels.
The hero is Lacy Buchan, who is telling the story as an old man, though, during the story he is still a fifteen-year old boy. The story starts with the funeral of Lacy’s mother. Lacy worships his older brother-in-law, George Posey, and can only admire him when Posey rides off from the funeral. However, there is a contrast between Posey and Lacy’s father, Major Buchan, who is”old-fashioned” and conservative. Indeed, Lacy’s father feels that nothing should change and sees his home – Pleasant Hill – as a place where everything will remain the same. - The Modern Novel
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However onerous history’s burdens become, history itself grinds on. Even amidst the ruin wrought by a catastrophe like war, what’s left behind is already transforming itself into new ground, a kind of alchemy that turns ashes into earth. By such cycles nations and cultures renew themselves, their recreation often arriving with a new patina of sorrow, the inevitable heritage of war. The scourge that was the American Civil War produced such a fracture in the young country’s history. The literature that was part of its new culture was profuse but mainly the factual record of its disasters, whose eventual telling was to produce more books than any other subject in the national lexicon.
The serious fiction of the Civil War, however, has been a thin and lonely genre. At its best—in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, for instance, and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain—it’s a literature that takes the near destruction of an entire region as a backdrop, and pores over its manifold consequences. A generation and more was usurped not only from their families, but their anchoring traditions, and plunged into wrenching change. Before it was finished, the four years of killing would darken the American heart as it had never been darkened before. The Civil War’s victims and survivors would require, in the end, more from it than a mere chronicle. They would need touchstones that carried the force of myth and symbol, powerful, imaginative creations that had the ability to reveal the truths underlying the aberration of internecine conflict. They needed great novels.
That syllabus of great Civil War fiction, tiny though it is, must have near its head Allen Tate’s almost forgotten novel, The Fathers. Tate was a native Kentuckian who grew up with a strong consciousness of the South, its unique traditions and its history. It was not only table talk at dinner, it was an obsession, especially for Tate’s mother, who spooned up a version of the family genealogy that she constantly fed to her son. By the time he sat down to write what would be his only novel, he did it, among other things, to untangle the truths and fictions of what he’d been told. He was already a celebrated poet and critic by then, known by his contemporaries as a man given to contention and polemics. He relished a good literary fight. In appearance he was lean and dapper, with an immense cranium that made him stand out physically, a fitting distinction for one whose obvious brilliance had to come, it seemed, from a well deep within. (In a poem, his friend Robert Lowell described him as having “an enormous brow,” the “cannonball head of a snowman.”)
His early marriage to novelist Caroline Gordon began as a knockabout affair in which the two, often literally penniless, moved from place to place and situation to situation, making their living as writers by their wits and their gifts. Finally, Tate’s brother Ben, a successful businessman, bought a house for the couple in Tennessee which they teasingly dubbed Benfolly, simultaneously imitating the habit of the gentry for naming their estates and gently poking fun at the practical brother for investing in the future of a poet. Of all the Southern writers who were his contemporaries, Tate was possibly the most Southern in his temperament and in his sympathies. In politics he drifted further and further to the right as he aged, sometimes championing ideas, especially about race, that caused even his friends dismay. In childhood, his mother had led him to believe that he came from a line of Southern aristocrats. That notion, which turned out to be his mother’s illusory effort at self-dignity, caused him to think of himself as remarkable and thus to carry himself in the world as the issue of patricians.
The realization that a lie was at the heart of his sense of self turned Tate into a kind of orphan, as his biographer, Thomas A. Underwood, put it. Though the loss of his fictional ancestry was not the same as actual loss, it was a loss to his ego, and it made him wonder who he really was. It was not until he was a student at Vanderbilt in Nashville that he felt the stirrings of a true self. At Vanderbilt he recklessly threw himself into the life of the mind, distinguishing himself as a student and as a young poet, ultimately exchanging the illusory pedigree of high birth for a Phi Beta Kappa key.
Whatever the validity of his own lineage, Tate had come to identify strongly with and to profess the world view of the Southern aristocrat. He believed that bloodlines were the most reliable test of human character, that family must act at all times as both bulwark and ark, that the possession of land is a matter of husbandry and perpetuation, not a vehicle for commerce and wealth. The Civil War had sounded the death knell for that way of thinking, and Tate believed that only an artist—in his opinion, a novelist—had the tools to expiate and redeem a doomed inheritance. He put that melancholy belief into service when he sat down to write The Fathers, a task he had long delayed and would frequently abandon. The finished novel was highly autobiographical, calling on his own family’s history and the history of its relations. The novel’s narrator and central character, Lacy Buchan, was a version of Tate himself, the thinker in a family whose members valued action over thought.
The Fathers is set in 1860, at Pleasant Hill, the family seat of Major Lewis Buchan, in Fairfax, Virginia, though by means of an intricate interior design, Tate makes the novel traverse half-a-century and the breadth of an entire state in its telling. The opening scene takes place on the day when Sarah Semmes Gore Buchan, the mother of Lacy Gore Buchan, is to be laid to rest. Lacy recalls the day’s events—he was a boy of fifteen then—from the vantage of fifty years later, by which time the old doctor he has become will have weighed the novel’s story and asked of it the satisfactions a teller of tales expects. The funeral of Sarah Buchan has drawn family members from far and wide, called to attendance by ancient funerary rites, making them the players in a ritual that stresses the communal importance of family and its dance of progenitor and progeny. It’s to be the last time young Lacy will see his family in assembly. “A year later came the war,” Lacy ruefully notes; “We were uprooted from Pleasant Hill, and were never together again.”
George Posey is at the funeral, too, Lacy’s brother-in-law, a dashing interloper on horseback who’s forged his way into the Buchan clan as the husband of Susan, the Buchan’s only girl child. But Posey has no use for the Buchans and their outdated ways. To him, the only respect due a thing was its monetary worth. A horse was as good as what it could fetch in a trade; land was valuable only for the marketability of the crops it produced; a slave was worth the selling price of his back. At Sarah Buchan’s funeral, George Posey shows disrespect for the Buchans by arguing with his wife, and then riding off in a disdainful whirl, leaving the gathered mourners, including some of the Buchan’s slaves, scandalized. Old Major Buchan, Tate’s embodiment of the Old South, is scandalized, too, offended by his son-in-law’s impudence.
The plot that follows is essentially a gloss on that opening scene, an extension and explication of the manners and motives of characters poised at an abyss they don’t know is before them, an elegy to what became the dissolution of the fabric of the Old South. “Why,” Lacy Buchan asks himself, “cannot life change without tangling the lives of innocent persons? Why do innocent persons cease their innocence and become violent and evil in themselves that such great changes may take place?” Tate bravely if reluctantly documents the change that flows from that moment on Pleasant Hill, taking a panoply of characters through war, making them confront slavery and its attendant evils, including miscegenation. He also shows us the warfare within a family rocked by sudden change, an old guard being destroyed from within.
The Fathers is anything but a schematic treatment of good versus evil, old versus new. It witnesses both and allows each to have its moment at center stage. Complex and demanding, the novel wants the full attention of its readers. It’s also a deeply formal work whose design and writing borrows from the style of another century. (A reader first dipping into it might think it written by Melville or Hawthorne). At one point he ingeniously employs classical mythology, magically bringing in pieces of the legend of the Golden Fleece as a plot device. Tate does not hesitate to take the reader into dark places, whether it’s the battlefield or the human heart. Some of book’s most moving moments are filled with presentiments of the disaster it tells so brilliantly:
At dawn next morning I heard a big forest tree fall, the trunk breaking the branches off the other trees with a crackling thunder. Another tree fell and I turned over in bed. Then another and still another until the entire big woods…had fallen down. I put my feet upon the floor and listened. There was a lull and it began all over again. In a few minutes as I put on my clothes I ceased to hear it, being aware of it as one occasionally acknowledges after awhile the presence of a storm. - Roger Sauls
http://porterbriggs.com/allen-tates-the-fathers/


Barry T. Wireman: The Abyss in Allen Tate’sThe Fathers:What Can be Seen in the Darkness of American Literature? (pdf)





Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades, ISI Books; 3rd ed. ed., 1999.
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This classic collection of nearly fifty essays by one of the century's most acclaimed poets and literary critics speaks poignantly to the concerns of today's students, teachers, and general literature readers alike. It covers the broad sweep of Tate's critical concerns: poetry, poets, fiction, the imagination, language, literature, and culture.


Allen Tate is one of the best poet-critics of our time. He ranks with John Crowe Ransom and Randall Jarrell, both of whom have been his associates at one time or another, while behind all three stand the example of Eliot, their acknowledged master. One stresses these relationships since the background of Essays of Four Decades is so heavily a part of the modernist sensibility and the development of contextualist criticism (or as it is popularly called, the New Criticism). Many of the pieces here (the earliest dates from 1928) have surely influenced more than one generation of graduate students, and some of Tate's once radical ideas are accepted theoretical dictums, e.g., ""The meaning of poetry is its 'tension,' the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it."" Nowadays Tate stands out (perhaps anachronistically) for his almost obsessive concern with aesthetic and moral unity, his hatred of secularist or naturalist ""heresy,"" and his anguished search (always apparent beneath his Southern gentleman prose) for absolute values or ""truth,"" which eventually brought about his conversion to Roman Catholicism in the Fifties. Surprisingly, ""Christ and the Unicorn,"" his most interesting and inflamed apologia for neo-orthodoxy is not included here, though his famous tributes to Poe and Hart Crane, two extremely unorthodox poets (and, oddly enough, his favorites), are very much present. A major retrospective.  - Kirkus Reviews


Thomas A. Underwood, Allen Tate: Orphan of the South


About Allen Tate