A few months past there came to visit us for a weekend, at our house in the backwoods, Mr. Andrew Lytle, man of letters, aged 87 years. Although there are not many big houses farther north than ours, and although Mr. Lytle is very much a man of the South, he felt at home here. For, as he writes in his essay “The Backwoods Progression” (first published in 1933), the American backwoods “is the one feature, along with pioneering, that is common to the different sections of this no longer commonly-minded country.”

Mr. Lytle, despite having seen the defeat of the South and the secularizing of what once was Christendom, remains wonderfully cheerful. In his youth, as he says, he was “a dancing man,” and an actor. He dances in conversation still. Novelist, essayist, critic, and for years editor of The Sewanee Review, that best of literary quarterlies, Andrew Lytle is the last living member of that circle of social and literary men called the Southern Agrarians. (This well-edited collection includes his piece “They Took Their Stand: The Agrarian View After Fifty Years,” first published in 1980.) His father’s plantation of Cornsilk, twelve hundred acres “which the T.V.A. stole and covered up with water,” is long sunk out of sight; but the wit and wisdom of Lytle will not be easily drowned. New York’s reviewers notwithstanding.

“The appearance of From Eden to Babylon reminds us that there is another American conservatism, one which the Framers would have recognized.” So writes M.E. Bradford in his introduction to this lively volume; he contrasts Lytle’s political imagination with the views of alleged conservatives who are “centralizers and egalitarians on every subject but money.” Lytle speaks for the old America, and what remains of it today, in which “The Small Farm Secures the State”—an essay of his first published in 1936. As Bradford continues, “The virtue of private property is not wealth but its capacity to resist Leviathan and to secure the ‘peace of the family.’ Because of Southerners like Andrew Lytle, this understanding of conservatism still survives among us in a dark, utilitarian time.”

Lytle’s social and political principles were expressed at the beginning of the 19th century by John Taylor of Caroline; and his essay (first published in the long-vanished American Review, back in 1934) on that Virginian planter-writer is the most illuminating piece ever written about Taylor. Here is the thesis, in Lytle’s words:

The early republican leaders of the Revolution had manoeuvred to make the Union a medium pliable but strong enough to generate such well-being. It was understood by these men that private property must be generally distributed throughout the body politic; otherwise the state is corrupted by its core and is destroyed by the very agency which, with better luck, would have given it life. They failed—but not until after a long and bitter fight. Their failure is our tragedy, for it has robbed posterity of its inheritance. Now there is everywhere such general discontent, so much criticism of those who have transferred to their aimless use the energies of millions of people, that all earnestly look for a way out.

Therefore Lytle resurrected Taylor of Caroline, “a gentleman who exerted his talents and strength to oppose the trend taken by American affairs.” A similar impulse and motive moved this reviewer, 17 years later than Lytle, to raise up from the grave Taylor’s eloquent ally, John Randolph of Roanoke.

Taylor denounced the “Paper-and- Patronage Aristocracy” that arose after the War of 1812; Lytle reproaches the 20th-century equivalent of that urban industrial and financial web. But he knows that our tribulations of today are not industrial and political merely: he is one of the more moving Christian men of letters of this century. In “A Christian University and the Word” (his Founder’s Day address at the University of the South in 1964), he upholds the Christian understanding of social order:

The worid’s plight is so precarious that we can not survive without a return to order and for us this can only be Christian order. Christendom was not a commonwealth; it was a god’s wealth. The king was God’s secular overseer; the bishop His spiritual. . . . The castle and cathedral stood for every eye to see, symbols both of physics and metaphysics. This entire order was held together, in the right order of relationship, by the Word, the eternal Word, for God said “Before Abraham was, I am,” that is to say, I am pure being, pure creation, which is forever. The Word was God in His Creative function. . . . A Christian university can begin to restore to language its meaning: first by definition which defines, makes more accurate the vocabulary of the various branches of learning, keeping them in their right order and relationships. This is the beginning of recovery, for without knowledge there can be no apprehension of the divine creative promise of the Word. There are words still with symbolic lustre, like sine and cosine, and honor.

As historian and biographer, Mr. Lytle is spirited. His essays on Lee, Calhoun, and especially General Nathan Bedford Forrest are calculated to convert practically anybody into a Southern partisan. The picture of the typical Southern family farm in his famous essay “The Hind Tit”—that farm before industrialization—is marvelously winning; it tempts this northern reviewer to taste sallet, or turnip greens.

Andrew Nelson Lytle does not despair. “The South may well become the salvation of this country yet, both at home and abroad,” he writes in “How Many Miles to Babylon” (first published in 1953). “Private property, controlled by the proprietor, may be the only restraining influence to remind us that the great corporate business has something private about it. The time will come, otherwise, when it will seem more efficient for the state to take over.”

The South has become the backwoods of centralized industrial America—though deprived, for the most part, of the old backwoods physical setting of forests, Indians, wild animals, and treacherous rivers. And yet the Southern backwoodsmen remain potentially powerful; and the Southern states may have “enough form left to shake off their lethargy when the walls of steel and concrete tumble down upon our heads; when the electric webs break loose from their poles to dart and sting like scorpions.”

Like Nathan Bedford Forrest, Andrew Lytle charges undismayed the outnumbering regiments of paper and patronage. He is of the number of those who take heaven by storm.

 

[From Eden to Babylon: The Social and Political Essays of Andrew Nelson Lytle, Edited and Introduced by ME. Bradford (Washington: Regnery Gateway) 290 pp., $19.95]