In the world of blue bloods and blue books, where nicknames like “Oatsie,” “Tootsie,” “Bunny,” and “Babe” abound, being called “Sister” isn’t particularly unusual. Even in her professional life. Sister Parish never used her given name, Dorothy May, though regarding her nickname she once commented, It has not been an easy cross to bear. My...
In Maryland, one naturally associates historical reenactment with the Civil War. Yet the only reenactor I know eschews the Civil for the Revolutionary War because, he says, “I don’t reenact events where the people are still fighting the war. They might use live ammunition!” Tony Horwitz’s account of the South’s continuing preoccupation with the War...
One of two epigraphs with which Elizabeth Spencer introduces her memoir of growing up in northern Mississippi is taken from the closing sentence of her story, “A Southern Landscape.” The narrator, looking back on her hometown from a far remove in place and time, acknowledges her need “of a land, of a sure terrain, of...
“Friendship is like two clocks keeping time.” —Anonymous Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 7, 1916, the eldest son of a prosperous lawyer and a Georgia socialite. In addition to patrician lineage, Percy enjoyed a birthright of wealth and privilege. With these amenities, however, came a familial predisposition...
“Nature I loved, and next to nature, art.” —W.S. Landor In October 1986, I heard Robert Penn Warren read a selection of his poems at an LSU conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Southern Review. He was 81 years old, exceeding frail, and suffering from cancer. About halfway through the...
When Camilla, the elderly spinster daughter of the infamous Captain Jack Fennel and matriarch of the Fennel family, sees her house guest holding an antique spyglass, she comments, “My father’s glass. Dr. Danvers. Are you planning a voyage?” Actually, the voyage is already underway for the young history professor who shows symptoms of seasickness the...
In his last novel, In the Tennessee Country, published the summer before Peter Taylor’s death on November 2, 1994, a man, the narrator’s cousin, “chucks” his family, his home, and his identity, and disappears. What is important about Cousin Aubrey, however, is not so much his mysterious absence from the narrator’s life as his lingering...
Despite its optimistic title, Recovering American Literature is really about the severity of illness, the magnitude of loss. In a book weighted with evidence, Peter Shaw shows literature has suffered by subverting art to politics. Substituting the dogma of political correctness for universal themes and metaphysical questions, academics since the 1960’s have been reinterpreting the...
Moving by fits and starts, this biography of the Southern novelist and wife of Allen Tate lacks focus and—ultimately—purpose. Veronica Makowsky’s is a dull account of an inherently interesting subject. This relatively small book is essentially a failure, rendering, as it does, a diminished, fragmented, and elusive portrait of Caroline Gordon. The book does include...