Search

It is said we are in trouble, we humanists. “The humanities are under pressure all over the world, Rens Bod begins (xii). James Turner ends, “Without question, the humanities now face greater flux than they have routinely endured in the past century” (385). The trouble and the flux seem to take two forms. There is the usual business of intellectual disciplines forming and re-forming, of new paradigms restructuring institutions, a process that one might regard as discomforting but sometimes healthy. But there is the other business of universities being governed by anti-intellectuals, aficionados of the spreadsheet, counted beans, and the alumni dinner. These predators roam campuses, sneer at libraries, abolish departments, and plan the day when, the cost-effective triumphant, scholarship will be little more than a digital ghost. At the University of Essex, lately Marina Warner was coldly informed of this new order, defined by a “Tariff of Expectations” (seventeen targets to be met) and a “workload allocation” handed down from on high. There was an indifference to what had gone before, what creative people had once hoped for for Colchester. “That is all changing now,” the executive dean for humanities briskly explained. “That is over.” The past, that is. Fed up, Warner resigned, hearing too loudly “the tick of the deathwatch beetle” in the fabric of the house she wished to inhabit, a university that valued scholarship and the life of the mind, as it once had.

You may recall the old song by Kurt Weill and Maxwell An derson, which begins, "It's a long, long time from May to December, but the days grow short, when you reach September." I did, when read ing these two books together, since (in terms of their intellectual careers) Michael Kreyling might be said to have reached September, and Jennifer Greeson is still in May. The former writes as one of the South s preemi nent literary critics, a little battle-scarred, a touch elegiac, and not too bothered about loose ends. The latter seems self-confident, intellectu ally ambitious, and very concerned to be systematic. There is not much of a conversation between May and September, since neither mentions the other, though Kreyling is more conscious of the existence of younger voices who have challenged and changed his subject matter than Gree son seems to be of older voices, who merit a repudiation. Perhaps to her credit, Greeson writes as though all scholars agree with one another, even across generations. At issue is the existence and pertinence of the South, though Krey ling and Greeson approach the matter from very different perspectives. The former came of age when few doubted the compelling reality of southern culture and when positivist moralists governed, and the ur gent necessity was to reconceive allegiance to a South that Kreyling once

For some time, there has been reason for imagining that we live in neo-Victorian times. We are awash in restless evangelicals, profligate of stern and apocalyptic advice. We have had praying leaders who imagine that foreigners, usually with beards, require reform and invasion. Celts threaten secession and the Union is extolled. There is much talk of families, education, and the anxieties of class. Our novels grow long and vexed, and even have plots. Historians seek the common reader and write meandering narratives, full of metaphor, which may be purchased at railway stations.

There are four presidents carved on Mount Rushmore: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. The case of George W. Bush would seem to suggest that modern Americans do not like their presidents to be complex. If so, among the granite faces, only Washington and Roosevelt answer to this need. The former possessed what his admirers called republican simplicity, what his enemies (and even some personal friends) thought might be a lack of intellectual nimbleness. The latter had a violence of conviction so wondrous in its clarity that numerous psychologists have been enlisted to find something beneath its surface. Jefferson, by contrast, was dizzyingly complex, but he is also inaccessible, especially to modernists who find an eighteenth-century sensibility eerily polished and cold. Abraham Lincoln, however, was satisfyingly messed up. A broken family, a lost lover, an unhappy marriage, dead children, plus years of thwarted ambition, nightmares, melancholy, and suicidal impulse, all combine to make a man of nervous inadequacy, someone whom Oprah Winfrey would be glad to have back, again and again, as an icon of the perennial crises of masculinity.

Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 18101860. By Michael O'Brien. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xvii, 1354. Abbreviations, introduction, illustrations, tables, bibliography, acknowledgments, index. $95.00, in two volumes.) In Michael O'Brien's telling, the intellectuals of the Old South were complex, vibrant, profound, often cynical, sometimes prescient, perpetually ill-at-ease, and always longing for order. It bears noting at the outset, that to the considerable extent the southern intellectuals were conflicted, O'Brien finds little to connect their intellectual and emotional turmoil to latent-or apparent-guilt over the enslavement of other southerners. It seems to have been more the weight of modernity that so distracted and distressed southern thinkers. Living in an era of roiling and rampant change-economic, social, scientific, cultural, and political change-they groped for a means of finding, or creating, order in the midst of such chaos. These thoughtful southerners believed that relentlessly progressive modern science and philosophy would allow no certitude and that order had to be constructed from what they perceived as the best-if imperfect-western ideals and traditions. If the destabilizing forces about them, in science, economics, philosophy, religion, and politics summoned a sense of distress, these innovations also provided the incentive for extraordinary intellectual inquiry on the part of the thinking men and women of the South. It is among O'Brien's salient achievements that he grasps fully-and reveals in great detail-the intellectual energy of the South as it ranged itself adamantly, if ineffectively, against modernism. O'Brien makes no attempt to obscure or minimize the dark contours of southern intellectual life; he offers nothing like a glib or stylized assessment. But he does reveal a southern mind-the thinking part of that mind -that was far more critical and creative than has often been recognized. And in allowing southern intellectuals to largely speak for themselves, O'Brien allows readers to measure for themselves the real or imagined failings of the modernity that so many southern thinkers viewed with such disdain and dismay. In their novels, their science and theology, their political musings and formulations, these thoughtful, reflective southerners offered an alternative conjectured order of their own, even as their world was about to collapse. This is not to imply that O'Brien finds a stark or simple unanimity among the slave-state intellectuals. For instance, he is careful to mark the philosophical and theological divergences between a James Warley Miles and a James Henley Thornwell. …

Michael O'Brien. Sills: Selected Poems. Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2000. Rarely is a selected poems one's first introduction to a poet, but in the case of Michael O'Brien's Sills, I think we have to make a welcome exception. Although he published work by Frank Kuenstler, Rachel Blau, Serge Gavronsky, and many others in The Eventorium Muse in New York in the 1960s, O'Brien appears to be little known in today's circuit (for instance, the Muse isn't included in Granary's Secret Location on the Lower East Side). His earlier books are nearly impossible to find, so we need this collection to make clear what a strong voice it is that we've been missing. O'Brien is a younger contemporary of the NewYork School, but his poetry distinguishes itself from their sprawling, inclusive poetics by hearkening back to that leaner school of New Yorkers, the Objectivists. His early work is inflected with the influences of Hart Crane, French Symbolism, and Surrealism (he's translated Eluard), which is to say that he comes close at points to the nonce wit of Ashbery or Koch. But his general tendency is in a different direction, more contained and more precise. As this book traverses 40-odd years of the poet in city and country, alone and in company, at home and on the street, it traces an itinerary through what one poem calls "perceptual difficulties" (38) and what another calls "the world and its likeness" (75). These poems are stripped of decoration, and although the majority consist of short lines, O'Brien has a formal range that maintains a spark in a variety of configurations on the page, from pentameter lines to prose poems (the latter bearing none of the inertia that the form has lately been subject to). The first person pronoun appears in roughly half of these poems, although there's no doubt that someone moves behind those without it, setting them in motion: it would be impossible to conceive of them as less than lived. When the lyric "I" does appear there's usually an element of honesty in the voice, an unforced, relaxed reflexiveness, as in the following recognition of the limits of poetry as equipment for living (to use Burke's memorable phrase): I thought the poem Was a cotton I packed anger in But when morning cracked like a seed Wit was the foot I stood upon. (54) In these pages there is a Fennelosan tachography afoot that results in compressed lines with the connectives between them left out: "the best join's unseen" one poem prompts ( 111). The intervals between lines sometime link up, and sometimes do not-which is to say that this is a style that jumps and cuts between lines, leaving argument in the interstice and forcing the reader into the poem. O'Brien is more a disjunctive than a discursive poet, and there's a certain pleasure to be taken in the speed with which his poems unfold. There are clear links intermittently, but even when the join is uncertain, vagueness is held at bay by the persistence of particulars that supply a synapse between a lived world and a moving mind: A day without subtitles A line at the bank An attention blunted or dispersed An architectural ornament Seen out the window twenty times Till it compares to nothing (37) Such poetry runs the risk of mere annotation (a lineated diary), but O'Brien is fully cognizant of this: "Remarks is not literature," he writes in another poem, "Arrest is literature" (39). And arrest here comes when that architectural ornament is shifted off the shelf of the quotidian ("Seen out the window twenty times") and into the unique ("Till it compares to nothing"). The concern with comparison and with "images, "windows," "eyes," "light," and "shadows" recurs throughout Sills, suggesting that O'Brien is a poet interested in vision and animated by likeness, even while he's cautious with both. This attention to likeness and comparison comes with a strong engagement with Platonism, and a firm recognition of its limits. A quoted voice in "Skin" asks, "Why multiply entities? …

FORTY OR SO YEARS AGO, "the regional historian [was] likely to be oppressed by a sense of his unimportance" and to believe his moment was passing before the pressure of sweeping nationalisms.1 Feeling unimportant is something of a character trait for Southerners in American culture, but this pessimism proved not to be prescient, although the vitality of the regionalist idea has remained conflicted and uneven. Of late, historians of the American West have grown more interested in the idea, and the Midwesterners show signs of life, but the New Englanders are mostly indifferent, and those in the "Middle States" long since gave up the ghost. As usual, the Southerners have been most eager, most endowed with regional organizations, study centers, periodicals, publishers, tourist pilgrimages, and bric-'a-brac. Indeed, the South seems often to be looked to by other regions as a model of how to invent and sustain an identity, when the Western by comparison seems diffuse and the Midwestern etiolated.2 So a historian of the American South comes to these articles on European and Asian regionalism with mixed feelings, greatly pleased to see such intelligent synthesis, but mildly puzzled at the notion that all this is news. In Mississippi, regionalism is not "a less-than-familiar perspective." Professor Applegate skillfully rehearses the multifarious ways in which regionalism can be understood. Many echo how Southern history has been configured. Seeing locality as a safely subsidiary form of nationalism was the meaning of Henry Grady's "New South" and the "local-color" school of the late nineteenth century, while Howard Odum and his disciples around the 1930s published big, fat books on American and Southern regionalisms. Earlier, there had been Southerners, such as John C. Calhoun, who spoke of "Southern rights" but were Unionist, and who thought localism to be an underpinning of a federal nationality. There had been others, secessionists such as Jefferson Davis, who concluded that American nationalism had failed and who grounded a new state on a different landscape of localities. Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address described the South as the site of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary, and many Southerners have thought him right and watched their neighbors for the un-American thing. That national politics is an aggregation of particularist politics was something James

12 essays examine the phenomenon of autobiographies written by authors from the American South. Among the writers considered are: Mark Twain, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright and Edgar Allan Poe.

IF HISTORIANS of the American South prove as devoted to their penates as those of the American West, a considerable devotion ought to be laid before the reputation of C. Vann Woodward. Just as Frederick Jackson Turner pre-empted a generation of scholarship, Woodward is the only Southern historian of recent years to have come close to fashioning the discipline in his own image. His version of the Compromise of 1877, his conception of the Redeemer regimes, his account of the New South movement, Populism, and the rise of segregation have become the conventional wisdom. New study habitually takes his work on the postbellum South as the starting point. Historians may move to agree or disagree, but it is a tribute to his stature that one must begin with Woodward if the effort is to ring true. He has become the kind of figure about whom Richard Hofstadter once wrote: "If we are to have any new thoughts, if we are to have an intellectual identity of our own, we must make the effort to distinguish ourselves fromf those who preceded us, and perhaps pre-eminently from those to whom we once had the greatest indebtedness."' The factual issues raised by Woodward's books have already generated much commentary. Woodward himself, as a phenomenon in the intellectual history of the South, is also of some interest.2 He has, after all, fashioned the most compelling image of the American South offered by his generation.