Mrs Tate is for me the most mysterious of writers.1 Others no doubt could explain her by her patriotism, her Southern days, her studies. But not these attributes alone can explain where she gets her calm self – the calm self that gets itself into her writings. Her outside-the-study activities are on the side of what the French call bruyant – a portmanteau word implying at once vivid, brilliant, clamorous, with a slight soupçon of exaggeration in all three attributes…. How much of the present predominance of Southern Literature in the Western World may not be due to Caroline Gordon’s public activities there is no knowing. Certainly she was early in the field. She must have been the first lady in New York to pull down her blinds and declare a public fast on Lincoln’s birthday.
All that is to the good. It can be of nothing but benefit to the world to have its attention called to a locality, provincial in itself, in which during five years of obscure mud-fighting, the fate of the whole world for seventy later years was coloured and decided – as certainly as it was at Thermopylae. But bruyant championing of Southern charm, manners, dialects, vegetation, landscapes, dog-run architecture, will, if left to itself, merely ensure the reaction usual to our age and situation. To have a permanent effect the Movement must be based on solid, on convincing, on erudite groundings. It must have its classical side.
And that is what is mysterious about Mrs Tate. Her writing is as quiet as Tibullus’. Her Southern mansions are burned by unimpassioned men from Michigan with no more outcry than will attend upon a Westchester public funeral. It is only when you have finished the reading that you realize that you have been present at a very horrid affair and one that you will not soon forget.
None Shall Look Back is most of all a landscape … as is the Iliad. Whilst you read you are suspended above a great territory of champaign, rivers, forests, marshes, monticules. Below you run men in grey or blue, goring the gentle bosom of the earth, or, by turns milking the cows and watching the weather. The men run, the bosom is gentle, you are suspended.
Then gradually you realize that what is going on beneath you is most horrible, the predestined passing of a civilization, the vain mirror of unavailing chivalries…. And beside you, as if herself watching, Mrs Tate remains mysterious, unimpassioned, almost impartial as the tragic destiny unrolls itself beneath you both. She writes with the knowledge of a man about the intimate details of men’s occupations. Yet you cannot say that she writes like a man – or, for the matter of that, like a woman. It is as if she were Pallas Athene, suspended above the Grecian hosts, knowing what destiny decrees, only at moments of agonized uncertainty intervening on behalf of a hero … watching.
In its method of attack Mrs Tate’s book resembles Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but lacking Tolstoy’s moral point of view and his rather transparent military solecisms it is really a better book against War as well as painting the Civil War with a sufficient military exactness to make you see that war as a numb and horrible thing. It has a peculiar quality of tranquillity; there is no single harrowing scene in Mrs Tate’s book, yet when you have read it your impression is that you have attended at an event that is mournful, monstrous, catastrophic, stupid, brutal … that is all of the gamut of the tragic futilities of Life and its attendant, Death.
I do not know of any other book that so vitally renders the useless madness of human contests ending in mass murder that is called war. There may be such books but I have read a great deal and have not come across them. But I am pretty sure that there is hardly any other book that so enforces the great lesson that all artists must learn before they can write tragedies – that if your approach to horror is not that of the quiet and collected observer and renderer you will fail in attaining to the real height of tragedy. I do not suppose that the book will find any great, hurried troops of readers but I am pretty sure that eventually it will have the support of a tenacious body of great admirers such as will not readily let it fall unnoticed to the ground.
Scribner’s Bookbuyer, 3:2, new series (April 1937), 5–6.
1 [The novelist Caroline Gordon, and her husband, the poet and novelist Allen Tate, were both friends of Ford.]