Allen Tate: Orphan of the South - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas A. Underwood, a native of Texas, teaches at Harvard University. A frequent lecturer on Southern history and literature, he has also taught at Columbia, Boston, and Yale universities.

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"Informed by a broad knowledge of Southern history, Thomas A. Underwood's biography restores Allen Tate to his rightful place as the greatest poet produced by the South and as a major American man of letters. At once brilliant and subtle, it is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the Southern Literary Renaissance."--David Herbert Donald, Harvard University

"This devious, passionate, intelligent, bull-headed, long-tailed, retrograde, fierce thinker receives justice here. Underwood's book is brave and well documented. For a writer of my generation, it reveals much literary history that we didn't know."--Robert Bly

"[An] immensely detailed and tirelessly literary investigation of Tate's early career. . . ."--Ian Hamilton

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"Informed by a broad knowledge of Southern history, Thomas A. Underwood's biography restores Allen Tate to his rightful place as the greatest poet produced by the South and as a major American man of letters. At once brilliant and subtle, it is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the Southern Literary Renaissance."--David Herbert Donald, Harvard University

"This devious, passionate, intelligent, bull-headed, long-tailed, retrograde, fierce thinker receives justice here. Underwood's book is brave and well documented. For a writer of my generation, it reveals much literary history that we didn't know."--Robert Bly

"[An] immensely detailed and tirelessly literary investigation of Tate's early career. . . ."--Ian Hamilton

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The little white house where Allen Tate was born sat near Lexington Avenue in Winchester, a vibrant town in Clark County, Kentucky? Between its founding in the 1790s and Tate's birth on November 19, 1899, Winchester had grown from a cluster of several log cabins into an expanding city of six thousand residents. Although the courthouse in the middle of town was, to the chagrin of proud locals, "not gorgeous,"the virgin timber, rich coalfields, and iron deposits in the surrounding bluegrass region lured businesses to the city, including sawmills, saloons, and even a music hall that featured both Shakespeare and blackface minstrels. Not long after one of the railroads crisscrossing Kentucky chose Winchester as a terminus, the adjacent hemp farms, horse ranches, and cattle ranges gave way to paved streets, electric wires, and streetcar tracks. Like many small towns in the South, Winchester was enjoying an economic boom.

No doubt it was lumber that brought Allen's father, John Orley Tate, to town in the mid-1890s. Orley had entered the business in 1887, when his new father-in-law brought him into the Illinois firm he owned. But Orley, only twenty-five years old at the time, took neither to the marriage with Nellie Varnell nor to the business—or for that matter to anything that interfered with his freedom to come and go as he liked. Having spent his youth living off an inheritance from his grandfather, he soon found that he was unable to get the few timber stands, mills, and farms he had taken over to generate much profit. He was well on the way to squandering the land he inherited, and had already begun bitterly—and falsely—claiming that his own uncle stole an enormous tract of mountain timber from him. The harder it became for Orley to earn a living, the more itinerant he became; soon he was dragging his growing family around the country in search of business opportunities.

Before arriving in Winchester, he and Nellie had not only produced two sons, Varnell, in 1888, and Benjamin, in 1890, but had wandered as far as Washington, D.C., and Texas, and back. In 1901, when Allen was two years old, Orley moved the entire family to Ashland in order to be closer to his lumber firm and to the business contacts he needed in an ill-fated job as a salesman for an Indianapolis tool company.

Though Allen sometimes found himself sympathetically recalling his father as an innocent young man whose uncle swindled him and betrayed the family by fighting against the South in the Civil War, he more frequently remembered his father as brutal and unpredictable, as someone given to explosive fits of violence, philandering, and drinking. Long after Orley's death, Allen stood in awe and terror of this powerfully fisted man, whose elegantly tailored suits and gentle blue eyes belied a volatile personality. Whenever Allen and his brothers misbehaved, he disciplined them with "the razor strap."

Orley had once been forced to resign from a local men's club for casting aspersions on the character of another member's wife, yet he played the role of an antebellum Southern gentleman anxious to defend his honor at any opportunity. Allen often described the horror he felt as a child of six when, at lunch with his parents, he watched his father attack a waiter in a hotel restaurant. When a young black man serving them spilled soup on the table, Orley jumped to his feet, lifted a nearby chair, and crashed it over the waiter's head, killing him—or so Tare came to believe. "I was afraid of him, and never ceased to be afraid of him," he reflected later.

For obvious reasons, Nellie Tate lived on the run from Orley. A short, tiny-footed, prim woman who wore white kid gloves and frowned upon Sunday entertainment and card-playing, she did her best to insulate herself and her three sons from a husband she differed from in every way imaginable. She probably sensed that he had married her for her beautiful dark eyes and sartorial splendor—and she may now have regretted the plumed hats and luxurious fur collars she had worn seductively in her youth. Both of her parents had opposed her marriage to him because he had a reputation for being a gambling rich boy who "followed the horses and women," and before long many of their fears were confirmed. In religion, Nellie found that Orley considered himself a Robert Ingersoll freethinker, whereas she assiduously studied the Bible, choosing to divide her loyalties between Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism. Although Orley's father was a pious schoolteacher, Orley never developed any interest in studying, and when it came to intellectual matters, Nellie found him dull in comparison to her father, who had attended law school. Nellie herself lacked an analytical mind, but she read voraciously, devouring novels from Thackeray to Twain to the sentimental works of Augusta Evans. Having once studied briefly at a convent in Georgetown that resembled a finishing school, she thought she was her husband's social and intellectual superior.

Next to their intellectual differences, the greatest source of tension between Allen's parents lay in the romantic feelings Nellie nurtured for her Southern ancestors. Conveniently overlooking the fact that she and Orley were of Scotch-Irish ancestry and were both born in Illinois, she tried using her family ties to Virginia and the Old South as a buffer against her husband. Nellie, whose full name was Eleanor Custis Parke Varnell Tate, claimed to have been born in Fairfax County, Virginia, June 7, 1865, on the Varnell's ancestral farm, Chestnut Grove.