Shortly following its official publication date of July 24, 1934, So Red the Rose established itself as a bestseller. It rose quickly to the number two spot on the fiction lists, close behind Anthony Adverse (which, until Gone With the Wind came along a few years later, was the all-time bestselling American novel), and went through twenty printings in the year that followed. Stark Young’s novel was widely and prominently and very favorably reviewed. Even the reviews with some serious reservations were genuinely respectful, only cautiously negative. The young Mary McCarthy, for example, reviewing the book for The Nation, gave it a mixed notice, summing up that it was “long, luscious, and finally cloying.” Paramount moved promptly to buy the movie rights for $15,000, which was an excellent price for those Depression years; and with a screenplay partly written by Maxwell Anderson, directed by King Vidor, and starring Randolph Scott and Margaret Sullivan (and introducing Robert Cummings) the 82 minute film was released in 1935. All the terms of an extraordinary success for the time were fulfilled.
Judging by Stark Young’s letters (elegantly selected and annotated in two volumes by John Pilkington—Stark Young: A Life in the Arts, Letters 1900–1962, L.S.U. Press, 1975), both the author and his editor, the celebrated Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s, were more than a little surprised by the commercial success of the book. Young had been publishing his work—plays, drama criticism, travel books, and three earlier novels, as well as fiction and non-fiction—in a wide variety of both popular and literary magazines, beginning in 1906 with his first book, a collection of poems, The Blind Man at the Window. Young was an editor and contributing writer, writing book reviews, drama criticism and other pieces, for The New Republic and Theatre Arts Magazine. He had, likewise, been the drama critic for the New York Times in 1924–1925 and, during the 1920’s, he had directed plays for the Theatre Guild. By that time of his life (he was born in Como, Mississippi in 1881), Young was in no way naive about the American literary scene, and, indeed, for some months prior to the publication of So Red the Rose he had been dutifully and carefully working in a variety of conventional ways to drum up support from friends and colleagues to help the book along its way. Had the book followed its anticipated “mid-list” course, as had his three previously published novels—Heaven Trees (1926), The Torches Flare (1928), and River House (1929)—all his preparation would have been well-spent, necessary, and might have paid off modestly in sales and attention. As it was, the astonishing success of So Red the Rose made all that personal effort irrelevant. It is quite clear that neither Stark Young nor Scribner’s, represented by the skilled and experienced Perkins, had any idea that this book would be such a major critical and commercial success. There was little precedent for it, though there had been significant fiction dealing with the Civil War both earlier and more recently. Young’s distinguished friend, Ellen Glasgow, had brought out The Battle-Ground in 1902; and Mary Johnston, herself the author of an enormously successful historical romance, To Have and To Hold (1900), had published two gritty and hard-edged sequential Civil War novels—The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912). (Essays about both Glasgow and Johnston’s novels appear in Classics of Civil War Fiction, edited by David Madden and Peggy Bach, Mississippi, 1991.) More recently there had been novels like James Boyd’s Marching On (1927), Evelyn Scott’s The Wave (1929), William Faulkner’s Sartoris (1929), and T. S. Stribling’s The Forge (1931), not to mention Stephen Vincent Benet’s bestselling poetic “epic,” John Brown’s Body (1928), or one of Stark Young’s favorite lyric poems, Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” which was in Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928). And in 1930 that influential and provocative gathering of the Agrarians, I’ll Take My Stand, had appeared, containing as its final essay Stark Young’s “Not in Memoriam, But in Defense.” In short, the subject of the South and the Civil War, its causes and long-term consequences, was, by the middle of the 1930’s, a kind of literary genre, legitimate, not without interest, but without clues, signs or portents that it might soon be a source of large profits for publishers and Hollywood. At the moment of its publication the success of So Red the Rose was almost unimaginable. Just over the literary horizon was Gone With the Wind, even more extraordinary in its impact, surely prepared for by So Red the Rose. Would the New York editor, Harold Latham, have bothered with Margaret Mitchell’s huge and confused mass of typescript if So Red the Rose had not already made publishing history?
Here it may be appropriate at least to mention the undeniable fact that in some sense the literary world of the early 1930’s, dominated as it was by the big cities of the Northeast and by an intellectual community that was often outspokenly unsympathetic to the ways and means of the South, seemed unlikely to accept passively and without question a southerner’s view of the past which challenged a host of fashionable political and social assumptions. We know now what was only suspected then—that much of the intellectual American Left was organized and collusive in its patronage and its systems of punishments and rewards to writers and artists of all kinds whose work was measured chiefly by and against the shifting standards of political party lines. Even working at The New Republic Stark Young managed to hold his own and to get along with his colleagues, including Malcolm Cowley, on the staff there. The only serious quarrel, one which popped up in print in the magazine, concerned Young’s objections to coverage of the notorious Scottsboro Case written by Mary Heaton Vorse, author of Strike: A Novel of Gastonia and member-in-good-standing of the writers of the Left. Though pressed, Young stood his ground and, in spite of various interoffice machinations, managed to keep his job at The New Republic. At exactly this time, 1933, he was busy writing So Red the Rose; and, knowing the rules of the road, he had every reason to anticipate an ambush of his book by some of the more politically minded literary critics. The risks were real, though the early success of the book seems to have surprised his potential critics as much as it did the author. At any rate, except for some more or less predictable pieces like Mary McCarthy’s in The Nation, So Red the Rose was spared the kind of socio-political mugging that was not uncommon in those years.
Even today it is difficult fully to understand the how and why, the essential mystery of So Red the Rose’s triumph in the marketplace. Its considerable literary and artistic virtues, splendidly delineated by Donald Davidson in his “Introduction” to the Modern Standard Authors’ edition of So Red the Rose (Scribner’s, 1953), are solid and significant. Technically Davidson points out and praises the constantly shifting points of view, depending on a large and complicated cast of characters and linked by the omniscient point of view of an adroitly neutral narrator, like one of the family, really, who happens to know a little more than everyone else. He takes note of Young’s remarkable ability to keep the large cast of characters continually in action, not only the Bedfords and McGehees but also “their kin, friends, visitors, slaves—the whole complex of plantation life and, by implication, of Southern life in general.” He deals with Young’s bold use of “real” characters—Sherman, Grant, Jefferson Davis—in cameo appearances which ring true. He argues persuasively that the dramatic form of exposition by which Young leads us directly into scenes and situations without elaborate explanation, allowing the reader to arrive at inferences and judgments on his own, a device Davidson labels “uncertainty of orientation,” works perfectly to give this story drama and concentration and a restraint defined as “a non-committal kind of implication.” In general terms Davidson especially praises Young’s “unique position” in the literary scene, the ways in which “he stood apart, independent of the cliques, doctrinaire movements, and bizarre literary fashions that rioted through the New York scene and flooded the hinterland.”
In addition to praising the art and craft of the novel, Davidson is especially concerned with its complex implications, its central meaning to readers here and now for whom, justly, the Civil War is merely an historical context. Davidson does not see So Red the Rose as only a Civil War novel. Rather: “It is the tragedy of a people, closely bound by ties of kinship and common feeling, who refuse to dissociate ‘the life of the affections’ from ‘what we mean by life,’ in desperate conflict with other people who insist that such a dissociation is not only proper but necessary to human progress.” Thus, in Davidson’s view, So Red the Rose confronts and concerns one of the great tragic conflicts of our times, then and now.
As a writer who had written successfully for the stage and for large magazine audiences, Young had certainly cultivated the capacity to create unforbidding, transparent, accessible prose, accessible to the imaginary general reader of the times, if not simple and easy. Young’s integrity of purpose and his dedication to his art, taken together with his direct and family experience of the dimensions of Southern history, serve to give his work a challenging depth and complexity. Because of his skill at crafting a clear and readable middle style, an omniscient voice to narrate a deftly told story, moving steadily forward scene by realized scene, readers are, in effect, politely invited and ushered into the center of a felt experience. That experience is a subtle and demanding one, yielding up its essential implications, its meaning, in direct response to the intelligent engagement of the individual reader. Which is a way of saying that Mary McCarthy was at least partly right in her mixed assessment. So Red the Rose is appropriately “luscious,” but the heart of it is as hard and cold as a broken rock.
Years later (1952), writing to Donald Davidson, who was preparing his introduction to the reprint of the novel, Young was as explicit as he could be in describing the basic intentions of his fictional rhetoric in So Red the Rose. “Instead of jabber and chatter and analysis and pretentious psychology or unintentional muddling I tried always for images that would convey the idea that underlay the moment. To my mind most things can be understood elementally at least by an average person, even sometimes a simple person—in a good sense. The business of a creative writer in such a case is to find what can express his idea, as a circle expresses circularity even in the moon or an orange; he is not able to rest till he finds a body for the soul of his matter” (Pilkington, p. 1216).
Young’s earlier novels had been set in the up country. In Faulkner: A Biography, Joseph Blotner tells us that The Torches Flare, for example, is “set in a thinly disguised Oxford,” the Oxford where Stark Young, half a generation older than William Faulkner, grew up and went to school. For So Red the Rose Young chose the Natchez area with its fine and well-known plantations and plantation houses, giving his story an elegant and resonant setting, deftly able to evoke the physical beauty of the place before the War. But there was something more that he was after, also, something he stated outright in a letter (February 4, 1934) to Alabama writer Hudson Strode in which Young said his story is “laid down there in the Natchez country where the ground knows tragedy.” The first lines of the epigraph selected by Young, taken from Edward Fitzgerald’s version of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, say it all:
I sometimes think that never blows so red
The rose as where some buried Cæsar bled;
That every hyacinth the garden wears
Dropt in her lap from some once lovely head.
Rich garden imagery, deriving naturally from the quotidian reality of the place, is a major thread in the whole story, steady and cumulative, echoing, by implication, the loss of Eden.
So Red the Rose, though it includes other characters, high and low, black and white, is mainly the story of two large and interconnected plantation families—the McGehees of Montrose and the Bedfords of Portobello. McGehee is an actual family name in Stark Young’s family line and, as a part of his research for the book, he had the use of many of their documents, papers, letters and diaries. It should be noted, in passing, that the research is so refined, as a result of Young’s method, that it does not “show” or interfere with the dramatic presentation, depending (not surprisingly for a dramatist) as much or more on scene and dialogue than on expository narration. What the intense research gave him was a subtle and powerful authority. The narrator/author seems to have lived through the whole experience, a sense which adds up to authenticity and credibility without distancing the reader with the smoke and mirrors of too many superficial details. The basic things—shelter, clothing, what they ate when and while they could, etc.—are all there; but it is the people and their flesh and blood humanity and the overwhelming impact of events that matter most. By no means saintly or even especially flawless in manner and behavior, the characters of these two families, each differently and distinctly, are shown to be decent, loving, worthwhile, and at times admirable people. We delight in their pleasures and, by the end, we are sorely wounded by their pains. Their way of life appears as neither perfect nor blameless. And yet when it is changed forever and largely lost, that loss seems irreparable like the disappearance of a beautiful species from the taxonomy of living things. Young puts it clearly enough in a letter to his friend Leonidas W. Payne (February 10, 1933), even as he was writing the novel: “The book is laid in Natchez from 1860 to the autumn of 1865, no scenes in other places but echoes from places here and there during the war. Sherman, Grant and Jefferson Davis are in it and what I can’t tell you about the history of the day is not worth telling! the letters and books I have read! I am making it a comment on civilization and living questions and the life of the affections and social standards, not a historical affair, but I need exact authenticity too. Pray for it. I want it to be a large, rich and beautiful canvas” (Pilkington, p. 449). So Red the Rose was not intended, then, to be “a historical affair,” but to deal with “living questions.” Neither is it, exactly, a war novel. The War, itself, comes late and suddenly and is mostly off-stage except for a few scenes when War arrives in brutal confusion with fire and sword and sudden pain and death. It is, finally, that image, an image of carnage, that concludes the story as the lady of Montrose, Agnes Bedford McGehee, remembers going away to the battlefield at Shiloh three years earlier, seeking, and finally finding, the body of her son, Edward. With night falling she stands at the edge of the killing fields as the world fades to silence: “She was at Shiloh; but now she heard nothing, only the silence; then, inside her body, she heard her heart beating. Edward was among them somewhere but the others too were hers. She stood there looking out across the darkness and the field where the dead lay, as if they were all sleeping.” The terrible carnage and destruction is not so much softened as it is converted, reconciled in the mind and memory of the immemorial tribal mother. The dead, on both sides, are their own monument. We know that life, the lives of the families go on. But the vision of Aunt Agnes remains: a sad, powerful, visionary ending to a story which commenced with the cheerful celebration of a birthday party.
Although Stark Young lived on until 1963 and continued to write short stories, travel pieces, drama criticism, and to translate and witness in production Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, The Sea Gull, The Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanya, regularly traveling in Italy and across his native South, he wrote no more novels after So Red the Rose. He remained active in literary affairs, personally and in his voluminous correspondence. The number of literary people he was regularly in touch with is truly extraordinary, not only close friends like Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, Ellen Glasgow, Donald Davidson, but also and including the likes of Alexander Woolcott, Julian Huxley, Francis Fergusson, Walter Kerr, Eric Bentley, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, John Hall Wheelock, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, Charles Edward Eaton and many others, not ignoring his fellow townsman William Faulkner. The relation between Young and Faulkner included a certain amount of competition and rivalry. Oxford was kinder to Stark Young. Young helped Faulkner in any number of ways—a place to stay in New York, a part-time job at the Doubleday bookstore, personal introductions that led to other things; but their friendship was uneasy. In letters to his mother Faulkner always referred to Young as “Mr. Stark.” Young, privately and not without a touch of sarcasm, called Faulkner “genius.” Both men were gifted with talent as painters and Young went on, later in life, to enjoy a second kind of career as a visual artist. Except for a few visits to New York and work time spent in Hollywood, Faulkner elected to stay at home. Though Young kept his place and roots in the South, he travelled widely and lived out much of his life in and around New York and died there in January of 1963. But he was buried in his homeplace of Como.
In 1951 Young had published The Pavilion, dedicated to Allen Tate, a memoir of the first twenty-one years of his life; and he had plans of writing about the rest of his life, a memoir others were eager for because he had known so many prominent people in the theater and in the literary world. He never found the time for it. What remains now is the drama criticism, still directly witnessing a great era in American theater, and So Red the Rose, his finest and final novel, whose subtle artistry and surprising success were influential beyond all expectation. This new edition allows him to exercise that influence on another generation of American readers and writers.
Charlottesville, Virginia |
GEORGE GARRETT |