Thirty years ago, in the fall of 1957, the Fugitive-Agrarian poet Donald Davidson delivered the first Lamar Memorial Lectures in a small auditorium usually reserved for piano recitals on the campus of Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. Those three lectures, published in a slender volume bearing the legend Southern Writers in the Modern World, have become essential reading for students of Southern letters because Davidson did not succumb to the temptation to reminisce about those fertile days in the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s which we now call the Southern Literary Renaissance. Rather, he traced the stream of history and ideas that made those days so fertile; and he allowed his audience access to that history and those ideas by explicating not his own work or the work of his Fugitive-Agrarian contemporaries, but the work of his forebears, from the Greek playwrights forward. Thereby he placed the Southern writers in a historical as well as a geographical context.
In the shadow of this famous lecturer—or, more accurately, casting his own shadow in the light of Davidson—stands Marion Montgomery, whose Possum, And Other Receits for the Recovery of Southern Being, marks the 30th anniversary of those same Lamar Lectures.
Those who have read other of Montgomery’s books, poems, or essays will not be altogether surprised by his summoning of the “lowly possum” to stand as metaphor in this recipe for Southern being. For the possum, like the Southerner, is an ancient beast, and —also like the Southerner—his way of life has been significantly altered on the asphalt and beneath the ever-rolling tires of Progress. But Montgomery would have us understand right away that his invocation of the possum is not entirely playful. Possum represents not only a small, white marsupial; it is also the word from the Latin lexicon which brings together the ideas of “being” and “doing.” It means “I am able” and is conjugated possum, posse, potui. And indeed the conditions of “being” and “doing” are the primary subjects of these lectures, especially as man’s “knowing” relates to his being and doing.
He points out, for example, that among man’s first actions was his naming of the animals. This action, Montgomery maintains, is archetype for a key ingredient in his recipe: a sense of the “relation between the word we give a thing and [the thing’s] reality, a relation to be ignored at the cost of spiritual chaos in each person and in family and in community.” Ignoring the relation between words and reality, Montgomery and many others (chief among them Richard Weaver, whom Montgomery calls a “second generation Fugitive-Agrarian”) have termed Nominalism. Montgomery concludes that the Southerner is “by nature an antinominalist,” demonstrating his antinominalism no more plainly than when he begins his recipe for possum with the instruction: “First, catch a possum.” But this antinominalism is not merely the result of a desire for precise instruction in the doing of a thing. Antinominalism—as the reference to the naming of the animals suggests—is the result of a sense of a thing’s being-ness, what Montgomery calls “the mystery of our peculiar possumhood.” Again, he is not being entirely playful, for it is exactly the tension between “being” and “doing” that gives rise to consciousness and language.
Montgomery would have us understand, too, that there is no way to talk of nominalism or antinominalism or any of a broad range of philosophical concerns without establishing a theological position. Both nominalism and antinominalism derive from respective positions as to the nature and efficacy of a creator. Montgomery implies that the nominalist is one who has, like the original animal namer, “become perversely gnostic through eager presumptuousness.” We labor still, he tells us, under this same presumptuousness, manifest in New Deals, New Souths, and other plans aimed at social perfection. “I am able becomes dominant,” Montgomery writes, “Lost is its complement, I am enabled.” And in this loss an Eden turns to Babylon.
Another ingredient in Montgomery’s receit is tradition. Of course, he is careful with his use of the word, mindful that misappropriation of the word and a manipulation of the record “dries the stream of history, leaving residually mint julips and hoop skirts.” His care is shown, for example, when he quotes T.S. Eliot’s famous distinction between the words tradition and orthodoxy, from Eliot’s own lectures at the University of Virginia (which were published in 1933 as After Strange Gods). Eliot writes that tradition “must largely be . . . unconscious; whereas . . . orthodoxy is a matter which calls for all our conscious intelligence.” Eliot holds tradition to be of a lower level than orthodoxy, saying that tradition “is of the blood . . . rather than of the brain.” Montgomery, who agrees with Eliot in most matters, takes exception with him here:
The point of our attention to After Strange Gods is to suggest that for the Fugitive-Agrarians, and especially for Davidson and Tate, there is an orthodoxy in tradition itself, requiring the intellect’s discovery of a validity in tradition deeper than merely its presence “in a social group.” To have been “Southern-born” was to have had a laying on of hands by tradition . . . affecting both blood and brain.
So for the Fugitive-Agrarians and, presumably, for Montgomery himself, tradition and orthodoxy are, if not one, at least “of a piece.” Montgomery attributes Eliot’s slowness to grasp this truth to his “Unitarian nee Puritan family origins” which left him “hard-pressed to discover any meaning to existence.” Donald Davidson, on the other hand, had by virtue of his Southern birth “inherited a community of understanding about man, nature, and God less desperately engaged than by [Eliot’s] New England intellectualism.”
It is worth noting at this point that just as not all those born in New England are victims of “New England intellectualism,” neither are all those born south of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi (or the Pecos) “Southerners.” Which is to say, too, that catching a Southern-born critter is not a necessary ingredient for Montgomery’s receit for possum. “I have argued,” he writes,
for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a “Southerner.” I have pointed to “Southern” concerns in people as diverse as Ezra Pound in the Cantos and William Carlos Williams in Paterson. . . . I have argued “Southern” concerns in Hawthorne no less than in Faulkner, in Henry Adams no less than in William Alexander Percy. There is a concern in the English-poet . . . David Jones . . . that makes him companionable to both Allen Tate and Donald Davidson. For Jones, too, attempts through art to recover to us anathemata, i.e., “the blessed things.”
Reducing Montgomery’s receit to a few key ingredients in no way does justice to Possum’s intent to “bring together St. Paul, St. Thomas, Yeats, Weaver, Eric Voegelin, Eliot, Davidson, Tate, and a host of others past and present in a resistance to the corrosive presence of gnosticism in community.” It is enough to say that he is to a remarkable degree successful in his attempt, and anyone who would “explore . . . principles . . . vital to any community, whatever the state or country or date in history” might find in Possum a nourishing meal indeed.
[Possum, And Other Receits for the Recovery of Southern Being, by Marion Montgomery; Atlanta: University of Georgia Press; $16.00]
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