The old saw tells us that all things come to those who wait. And what a joy it is to find Andrew Lytle, in his vigorous 80’s, receiving his just due, however late. The Richard Weaver Award by The Ingersoll Foundation, a generous grant by the Lyndhurst Foundation for his contribution to his Southern culture, honorary degrees from colleges hither and yon, and the recent appreciation of the Southern Agrarian Movement, with all its literary and social implications, all testify to his stature as a man and a writer. A full literary biography is in the making, his books are being gradually republished, and now we have at last the first complete critical appreciation of Lytle’s contribution to American writing.

Mark Lucas’ The Southern Vision of Andrew Lytle is, I believe, only the second book devoted exclusively to Lytle as an artist in his own right rather than as a member of a now-celebrated group of writers. There have been bibliographies, scattered essays, and a fine collection of criticisms edited by M.E. Bradford, all of which attest to his standing in the world of letters. As novelist, critic, and editor, Lytle has enjoyed a career spanning over 60 years. If the appreciation is late in coming, if he has sometimes labored in the shadows of his friends and cohorts—John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren—then the belated celebration is all the more welcome.

Lucas’ title, however, The Southern Vision, is somewhat misleading. Lytle’s family background is Tennessean; he was an intimate with the Vanderbilt Fugitives and one of the most aggressive of the Agrarians; his art almost always deals explicitly with the South of his experience, but Lytle is first and always an artist, and like Faulkner, Wolfe, and Warren, his work transcends his regional topicality. If his “vision” has a Southern accent, it also has a universal appeal. Few writers have been so sophisticated in their knowledge and application of the craft of writing. His devotion to that “craft”—one of Lytle’s favorite words—is the subject of Lucas’ study.

The Southern Vision does the obvious. Mixing criticism with useful biographical information, Lucas works chronologically through the Lytle oeuvre from his biography of Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest through selected essays developing his Agrarian and Southern sympathies, short stories, and his four novels which best show the breadth and depth of Lytle’s art. The Long Night is as bloody a tale of vengeance as our literature can come up with. At the Moon’s End, on the other hand, increasingly my personal favorite but long out of print, recounts the trek of Hernando de Soto through the 16th-century Southern wilderness. The invasion of the Spanish conquistadors—nominally in the name of Christendom and civilization, but actually in a quest for elusive gold—is a great allegory of corruption and hubris. And A Name for Evil has often been called a Southern version of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. It is probably Lytle’s least satisfactory work, but Lucas discusses it interestingly in the context of Lytle’s attempt to restore an old and isolated country home for his family during the 1940’s. Lytle considers The Velvet Horn his masterpiece, and this underappreciated novel which Caroline Gordon called “a landmark in American fiction, unique in its greatness and originality” is treated with due respect here. (But the best, and really incomparable, study of this novel is Lytle’s own account of its writing. “The Working Novelist and the Mythmaking Process” is as fascinating and frightening an account of the creative process as has ever been offered by an author on his own work.)

If I might suggest a novel way to read Lucas’ admirable study—and a different way to approach Lytle himself—the last chapter makes a good beginning. Under the heading of “Coda,” Lucas discusses Lytle’s late family memoir A Wake for the Living. Lytle writes that the book was intended to “tell his daughters who they are and where they come from.” A veritable gold mine of anecdotes and tall tales, Lytle’s book is a marvelous introduction to the writer whom Robert Penn Warren has called the “best story teller in America.” In his The Southern Vision of Andrew Lytle Lucas leads us to a writer who is finally receiving the wide appreciation he has always deserved.

 

[The Southern Vision of Andrew Lytle, by Mark Lucas; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press]