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Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
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wood for him and hear him if he were to break a hip.
There were always those who saw it as a privilege, especially among the English majors. We were students at the University of the South, and Lytle was the South, the last Agrarian, the last of the famous “Twelve Southerners” behind I’ll Take My Stand , a comrade to the hallowed Fugitive Poets, a friend since youth of Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, a mentor to Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey and Harry Crews and, as the editor of The Sewanee Review in the sixties, one of the first to publish Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. Bear in mind that by the mid-nineties, when I knew him, the so-called Southern Renascence in letters had mostly dwindled to a tired professional regionalism. That Lytle hung on somehow, in however reduced a condition, represented a flaw in time, to be exploited.
Not everybody felt that way. I remember sitting on the floor one night with my freshman-year suitemate, a ninety-five-pound blond boy from Atlanta called Smitty who’d just spent a miserable four years at some private academy trying to convince the drama teacher to let them do a Beckett play. His best friend had been a boy they called Tweety Bird. The day I met Smitty, I asked what music he liked, and he shot back, “Trumpets.” That night he went on about Lytle, what a grotesquerie and a fascist he was. “You know what Andrew Lytle said?” Smitty waggled his cigarette lighter. “Listen to this: ‘Life is melodrama. Only art is real.’”
I nodded in anticipation.
“Don’t you think that’s horrifying ?”
I didn’t, though. Or I did and didn’t care. I didn’t know what I thought. I was under the tragic spell of the South, which you’ve either felt or haven’t. In my case it was acute because, having grown up in Indiana with a Yankee father, a child exile from Kentucky roots of which I was overly proud, I’d long been aware of a faint nowhereness to my life. Others wouldn’t have sensed it, wouldn’t have minded. I felt it as a physical ache. Finally I was somewhere, there. The South … I loved it as only one who will always be outside it can. Merely to hear the word Faulkner at night brought gusty emotions. A few months after I’d arrived at the school, Shelby Foote came and read from his Civil War history. When he’d finished, a local geezer with long greasy white hair wearing a white suit with a cane stood up in the third row and asked if, in Foote’s opinion, the South could have won, had such and such a general done such and such. Foote replied that the North had won “that war” with one hand behind its back. In the crowd there were gasps. It was thrilling that they cared. How could I help wondering about Lytle, out there beyond campus in his ancestral cabin, rocking before the blazing logs, drinking bourbon from heirloom silver cups and brooding on something Eudora Welty had said to him once. Whenever famous writers came to visit the school they’d ask to see him. I tried to read his novels, but my mind just ricocheted; they seemed impenetrably mannered. Even so, I hoped to be taken to meet him. One of my uncles had received such an invitation, in the seventies, and told me how the experience changed him, put him in touch with what’s real.
* * *
The way it happened was so odd as to suggest either the involvement or the nonexistence of fate. I wasn’t even a student at the time. I’d dropped out after my sophomore year, essentially in order to preempt failing out, and was living in Ireland with a friend, working in a restaurant and failing to save money. But before my departure certain things had taken place. I’d become friends with the man called Sanford, a puckish, unregenerate back-to-nature person nearing fifty, who lived alone, off the electric grid, on a nearby communal farm. His house was like something Jefferson could have invented. Springwater flowed down from an old dairy tank in a tower on top; the refrigerator had
There were always those who saw it as a privilege, especially among the English majors. We were students at the University of the South, and Lytle was the South, the last Agrarian, the last of the famous “Twelve Southerners” behind I’ll Take My Stand , a comrade to the hallowed Fugitive Poets, a friend since youth of Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, a mentor to Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey and Harry Crews and, as the editor of The Sewanee Review in the sixties, one of the first to publish Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. Bear in mind that by the mid-nineties, when I knew him, the so-called Southern Renascence in letters had mostly dwindled to a tired professional regionalism. That Lytle hung on somehow, in however reduced a condition, represented a flaw in time, to be exploited.
Not everybody felt that way. I remember sitting on the floor one night with my freshman-year suitemate, a ninety-five-pound blond boy from Atlanta called Smitty who’d just spent a miserable four years at some private academy trying to convince the drama teacher to let them do a Beckett play. His best friend had been a boy they called Tweety Bird. The day I met Smitty, I asked what music he liked, and he shot back, “Trumpets.” That night he went on about Lytle, what a grotesquerie and a fascist he was. “You know what Andrew Lytle said?” Smitty waggled his cigarette lighter. “Listen to this: ‘Life is melodrama. Only art is real.’”
I nodded in anticipation.
“Don’t you think that’s horrifying ?”
I didn’t, though. Or I did and didn’t care. I didn’t know what I thought. I was under the tragic spell of the South, which you’ve either felt or haven’t. In my case it was acute because, having grown up in Indiana with a Yankee father, a child exile from Kentucky roots of which I was overly proud, I’d long been aware of a faint nowhereness to my life. Others wouldn’t have sensed it, wouldn’t have minded. I felt it as a physical ache. Finally I was somewhere, there. The South … I loved it as only one who will always be outside it can. Merely to hear the word Faulkner at night brought gusty emotions. A few months after I’d arrived at the school, Shelby Foote came and read from his Civil War history. When he’d finished, a local geezer with long greasy white hair wearing a white suit with a cane stood up in the third row and asked if, in Foote’s opinion, the South could have won, had such and such a general done such and such. Foote replied that the North had won “that war” with one hand behind its back. In the crowd there were gasps. It was thrilling that they cared. How could I help wondering about Lytle, out there beyond campus in his ancestral cabin, rocking before the blazing logs, drinking bourbon from heirloom silver cups and brooding on something Eudora Welty had said to him once. Whenever famous writers came to visit the school they’d ask to see him. I tried to read his novels, but my mind just ricocheted; they seemed impenetrably mannered. Even so, I hoped to be taken to meet him. One of my uncles had received such an invitation, in the seventies, and told me how the experience changed him, put him in touch with what’s real.
* * *
The way it happened was so odd as to suggest either the involvement or the nonexistence of fate. I wasn’t even a student at the time. I’d dropped out after my sophomore year, essentially in order to preempt failing out, and was living in Ireland with a friend, working in a restaurant and failing to save money. But before my departure certain things had taken place. I’d become friends with the man called Sanford, a puckish, unregenerate back-to-nature person nearing fifty, who lived alone, off the electric grid, on a nearby communal farm. His house was like something Jefferson could have invented. Springwater flowed down from an old dairy tank in a tower on top; the refrigerator had
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