A Southern Agrarian Writer
RORTY, JAMES
A Southern Agrarian Writer A Novel, a Novella and Four Stories. By Andrew Lytle. MacDowell, Obolensky. 327 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by James Rorty Author, "His Master's Voice"; contributor....
...Reader's Digest," "Harper's" IN HIS NEW COLLECTION Andrew Lytle again presents himself as perhaps the most accomplished and interesting of the Southern Agrarian writers, with the possible exception of William Faulkner...
...However, one failure balanced by four notable successes is a score which few contemporary writers can hope to equal...
...Not even Lytle's art is sufficient to persuade the reader that the Southern gentleman in this fable is anything but a swine and that his Lady, who witnesses and approves the obscene duel, is anything but a vicious fool...
...Hence this fiction must be termed unsuccessful, judged by the very criteria which he espouses in his excellent foreword to the collection...
...Imagine what Hollywood would do with such a scenario...
...The worst and most shocking of the four is "Mr...
...Obviously, this is not the reaction Lytle intended...
...A writer buys a run-down plantation in what might be Lytle's home country of Middle Tennessee...
...Major Brent is seen both by the narrator and by a Negro handyman...
...The novel, A Name for Evil, is a ghost story, told in the first person by a narrator who persuades himself and, almost, the reader that the apparitions are real...
...McGregor," in which a Southern gentleman farmer wrestles, gouges and knifes to death a Negro slave whose wife he has previously whipped...
...The ghostly evil triumphs in the end when the narrator's pregnant wife is killed in the collapse of the garden house in which Major Brent's six wives lie buried...
...The novella is a documentary which retells the story of Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Empire...
...As he attempts to restore it, he finds himself challenged and opposed by the former owner, a Major Brent, who, after expending the lives of six wives and many slaves to perfect the tilth of his fertile acres, decreed that the estate be returned to wilderness...
...a hunting story in a genre of which Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway have provided comparable examples...
...Dealing for the most part with similar material, but abstaining from Faulkner's stylistic eccentricities, Lytle gives us fictions which could easily become melodrama or farce if attempted by a less skillful writer, but which he makes seem wholly authentic and uncontrived...
...Of the four short tales the best is "The Mahogany Frame...
...The latter's extra-sensory awareness does not, however, extend to a second ghost, the narrator's nephew and heir, who manifests himself three months after his death on a Korean battle-front...
...On the whole, Lytle's reconstruction is more successful than Archibald MacLeish's attempt in "Conquistador" to re-work similar archival material into verse...
...In this instance he has failed to create the reader who, he points out, is essential to the total experience of art...
...Yet so skillfully does Lytle establish the extrasensory dimensions of his tale that the story remains credible to the end within the conventions of his art...
Vol. 42 • April 1959 • No. 16
