Racism and the personal past in Robert Penn Warren.

Perkins, James A.

It is clear that the poetic career of Robert Penn Warren is divided into periods and that one of the major divisions is marked by a poetic silence from 1944 and the publication of Selected Poems, 1923-1943, until 1953 and the publication of Brother to Dragons, A Tale in Verse and Voices, or 1956 and the publication of Promises: Poems 1954-1956.(1)

This period of silence has always fascinated me. I have wondered what caused it to begin and more importantly what caused it to end. Although we can not establish either cause with any certainty, I would like to revisit these issues (especially the end of the period of silence) and propose a new possible contributory cause: Robert Penn Warren's physical and emotional disconnection from and reconnection with the South through the writing of nonfiction about the race issue. Warren's interest in the problem of race in America, which occupied at least part of his attention from 1954 until 1965, led him to an emotional reconciliation with the South and allowed him to recover his childhood memories as a subject for poetry.

Conventional wisdom concerning the period of silence holds that Warren turned his attention to his fiction, which during the forties was at its most popular.(2) Conventional wisdom concerning the end of the period of silence holds that it was due to a combination of changes in Warren's personal life.(3)

Certainly personal events contributed to the reemergence of Warren as a lyric poet in the mid-fifties. The birth of his children must have reemphasized for Warren the importance of family, the sense of place, and the idea of home. Warren himself seems to have accepted these events as the main causes of his poetic reawakening. In March of 1977, in an interview with Peter Stitt, he discussed the writing of Promises, his break-through volume of poetry, in a ruined castle on the Italian coast:

We had a wonderful time there, for two summers and more, and I began writing poetry again, in that spot. I had a whole different attitude toward my life, my outlook was changed. The poems in Promises were all written there. (Talking, p. 239)

The problem with this statement is that Warren was not on the Italian coast during that whole period. He was there for the summers. Part of that time, for several months during the spring of 1956, "Warren traveled through big city and back-country areas of the Deep South and border states, talking with hundreds of white and colored Southerners"(4) about the Supreme Court Decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. These interviews, which Warren had been conducting for over a year ("Divided South," p. 98), became the basis for Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, which was published in 1956.

When Warren says, as he did in the interview with Stitt, "There were memories and natural events: the poems wander back and forth from my childhood to my children" (Talking, p. 239) in talking about the composition of Promises, he overlooks the fact that he had recently spent considerable time in the South, considerable time pondering the fundamental problem that has plagued the South since 1619 when a Dutch slave ship "set down twenty Africans at the colony of Jamestown"(5) and considerable time stirring up memories of his own past.

From the beginning of his writing career, the problem of race in America was never far from Warren's attention.(6) His first book, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), chronicles the obsession and excess of a man who believed he was right about the problem of race in America. Perhaps no single piece of Warren's writing has caused as much controversy as "The Briar Patch," which appeared in I'll Take My Stand (1930). Now seen by some as an apology for segregation (Talking, p. 384), "The Briar Patch" has not been well served by the passage of time. Warren said of the epoch in which it was written, "This is what the Supreme Court saw. This is the way the world was. At the same time many people were uncomfortable with it, many whites" (Talking, p. 158).

The law of the land in 1930 was based on the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which articulated the concept of separate but equal. Not until Thurgood Marshall would a man stand before the Supreme Court, as Marshall did in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and imagine out of the fabric of the United States Constitution another kind of social contract between blacks and the rest of America.

It was the Brown decision that sent Warren into the South in 1955 to seek out responses to the court ruling. In discussing the writing of Segregation, William Bedford Clark, in The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren, calls Warren, as he heads back to the South, "the self-exiled southerner living in suburban Connecticut" (p. 112). Robert Penn Warren was born in the South, in the small railroad center called Guthrie, Kentucky, and he had strong feelings for the region:

I wanted to live in the South, you see; I'm a refugee from the South, driven out, as it were. The place I wanted to live, the place I thought was heaven to me, after my years of wandering, was middle Tennessee, which is a beautiful country, or it was a beautiful country - it's rapidly being ruined. But I couldn't make it work. (Talking, p. 272)

James Justus has referred to the writing of Segregation as a "conscientious exploration of a race and its problems, a response both moral and aesthetic to this writer's own cultural situation as a child and young adult in which the Negro simply did not occupy a central place" (p. 41).(7) Following his report on how the South was responding to the Brown decision, Warren said, in the final interview in Segregation, an interview with himself:

A. I don't think the problem is to learn to live with the Negro.

Q. What is it then?

A. It is to learn to live with ourselves.

Q. What do you mean?

A. I don't think you can live with yourself when you are humiliating the man next to you.(8)

Four years after the publication of Segregation, the man next to Warren was an anonymous white pulled from a lunch counter during a sit-in in Nashville, Tennessee. Three pictures of the event appeared on page 43 of the U.S. News and World Report for March 24, 1960, with the following running cut line:

Violence flares in Nashville, Tenn., when a white sympathizer joins a Negro at a dime-store lunch counter where Negroes are not served. You see in the pictures below the sequence of events that touched off a near-riot in the store, led to the arrest of 16 persons. It all started quietly enough . . . There was a sudden pull backwards . . . the sympathizer, down, was kicked.

In response to those three pictures Warren sat down and wrote a ten-page holograph, then typed a five-page manuscript titled "Episode in the Dime Store," which he never published. Warren's manuscript is angry in tone:

It is important to me because the event narrated in the three photographs robs me of something: my identity. For 18 years I have lived out of the South, but I have always felt myself identified with it. . . . It was the world by which I had to account for myself. More specifically, the city which is the scene of the three photographs is the city I know - or knew - best in the world, the city which more than any other, with all the thinking of old ties and the work of time, was still "home."(9)

Warren goes on to misquote Robert Frost on the subject of home ("Home, Robert Frost has written, is where they have to take you in." ["Episode," p. 2]) and then says,

It is a shock to realize that in Nashville, Tennessee, I can no longer sit where I like. Somebody might pull me off a stool. By the sight of the three photographs I am deprived of a common right - a public right in a public place - which I had assumed to be inalienably mine. In other words, I am deprived of citizenship in that place which I had felt myself most fully a citizen. (p. 2)

Toward the end of the manuscript, Warren reverses his argument and suggests that he is wrong in assuming that he has lost his citizenship:

Perhaps I am wrong in feeling deprived. Perhaps I can still be a Southerner, after all. Perhaps. I can aspire to be a humble member of that Southern society which has always existed, & exists today, . . . When I say this, I am thinking of a few things said by a well known Southerner about a hundred years ago. ... (p.4)

The Southerner Warren then quotes is Robert E. Lee, General, C.S.A.: "A man of honor feels humbled himself when he cannot help humbling others" (p. 5). This statement recalls the one quoted earlier in this paper from Segregation: "I don't think you can live with yourself when you are humiliating the man next to you." It also resonates with Warren's recollection, in an interview with Tom Vitale, of his father's statement: "I don't know a man black or white who, I treated him decently, did not try to treat me decently" (Talking, p. 392).

Warren ends his essay with two questions (the second of which was added in pencil in the manuscript and may well be the reason he never published the work): "But would he [General Lee] be allowed to sit on the stool in that dime store? If he would not be allowed to do so, why should I complain?" ("Episode," p. 5). Warren's second question implies that there are at least two white societies in the South: the one represented by the rednecks in the dime store, and the one represented by General Lee. He aligns himself with General Lee, because, as he said at the end of Segregation:

A. If the South is really able to face up to itself and its situation, it may achieve identity, moral identity. Then in a country where moral identity is bard to come by, the South, because it has had to deal concretely with a moral problem, may offer some leadership. And we need any we can get. If we are to break out of the national rhythm, the rhythm between complacency and panic. (pp. 66-67)

Warren's interest in the problem of race in the South continued into the sixties. In 1985, Warren said of the book Segregation, "It wasn't big enough because I got too interested in the question. So I went, or my agent went, to Look and made a contract with them. They would pay all expenses for two years or so of travel, and all the expenses of interviewing and so forth, if I would devote my time to it and mix in some poems, and I was in Mississippi and all over the place and talked to everybody" (Talking, p. 393). Warren did go "all over the place," he did talk "to everybody," and he did "mix in some poems." He mixed in poems, as he had since the appearance of Promises, which drew heavily on his personal past, on his memory of childhood.

Warren wrote thirty-one poems after he began his interviews for Segregation, which (based on internal evidence or dates in the titles) may be identified as childhood memories.(10) Many of these poems merge two poetic modes, the meditation and the anecdote. In "Episode and Anecdote in the Poetry of Robert Penn Warren," Cleanth Brooks explores Warren's method of combining these two modes in some of his most effective poems:

I do not want to imply that these meditative and anecdotal modes are sharply separate. They are not. The lyric "Speleology," that I have just discussed really combines the two modes - thus, the memory of the boyhood incident provokes in the grown man, long afterward, the meditation on the meaning of life.(11)

In the anecdotes in these poems there is always some startling detail ("Against the wounded evening matched, / Snagged high on a pitchfork tine, he will make / Slow arabesques till the bullbats wake") or snatch of remembered conversation ("By God, they deserved it,' he said") that moves the poem from the panorama to the closeup, from the general to the specific, from the universal to the personal, some sparkling nugget that convinces the reader that the poem has moved from the ordinary realm of creativity to the magic of memory.

Many of these are poems for which Floyd Watkins has provided such useful notes in his Then and Now: The Personal Past in the Poetry of Robert Penn Warren. Perhaps most useful for this discussion is the comparison Watkins makes of "Pondy Woods," Warren's early (1928) use of material surrounding the lynching of Primus Kirby, and "The Ballad of Mr. Dutcher and the Last Lynching in Gupton," a 1974 poem based on the same material.(12) Like Eudora Welty's haunting story "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" Warren's second use of the material focuses its attention on the psychological make-up of the "grey man" who organized the lynching. Mr. Dutcher, who is bland enough to be "everyman," reminds us that we have all had our hand on the rope. Warren's second use of the material exposes much more emotional commitment. This is true of all the anecdotal-meditative poems which were written after Warren began the interviews for Segregation.

Warren's emotional commitment is clear in "Last Meeting," an anecdotal-meditative poem in which he recounts his last encounter with the black woman who helped raise him and introduces "Jim Crow" in a matter-of-fact way:

A Saturday night in August when Farm folks and tenants and black farmhands Used to crowd the street of a market town To do their "traden," and chew the rag, And to hide the likker from women hung out

Behind the poolroom or barbershop - If you were white. If black, in the alley.(13)

Another of these poems, "The Day Dr. Knox Did It," deserves special attention in a discussion of Warren's interest in the issue of race. The poem recounts a suicide and the adult narrator's memory of his childhood reaction to the events. In the first draft of the fourth section of the poem, the narrator is shown the spot where the event took place. The couplet that ends that fourth section of the manuscript version of the poem reads:

I kept thinking how the straw looked clean. I kept wondering who cleaned up the mess.

But the second line is crossed out and replaced with:

And thought how some nigger must have cleaned the mess.(14)

By the second draft of the poem, the "straw" in the first line becomes "hay" to be consistent with the rest of the poem, and that curious second line is replaced by the one crossed out originally. I cannot look at that manuscript page without hearing General Lee or Robert Penn Warren on the subject of humiliating others, or without remembering a passage from Portrait of a Father:

I remember very distinctly the moment later on when one of the children (I may have been the child) used at home a word possibly picked up on the school playground: nigger. My father very slowly and objectively said: "That word will never be used in this house." It never was again.(15)

In "The Interim," a poem published as section V in "Tale of Time" in Selected Poems: New & Old 1923-1966, the psychological result of Warren's reconnection to the South becomes evident as the poem describes a visit by Warren to the home of a former family retainer who is near death:

Her hand rises in the air. It rises like revelation. It moves but has no motion, and Around it the world flows like a dream of drowning. The hand touches my cheek. The voice says: you.

I am myself.

The hand has brought me the gift of myself.(16)

When Wyatt Tee Walker, an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, asked Warren why he was involved with the interviews which led to Who Speaks for the Negro?, Warren's answer was clear and direct: "I wanted to find out about things, including my own feelings."(17) Later, in talking to Roy Newquist about Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren answers a similar question and makes what is perhaps the best statement about the process of discovery that he had been engaged in since the mid-fifties, a process that resulted in his reemergence as a lyric poet:

The key motive was to find out about that world as deeply as I could, to find out about myself as deeply as I could. The only way of "finding out" is to write a book or a poem; if you are a writer you will only do your thinking because you are writing. I must say I have never had a more fruitful experience. (Talking, p. 90)

Warren's journey into the world of the Negro, into the world of the South, into the world of his own past was a fruitful experience. That journey gave us Segregation, "Episode in the Dime Store," and Who Speaks for the Negro?; and, by allowing Warren access to his childhood experience, it gave us many wonderful anecdotal-meditative poems.

1 Charlotte H. Beck argues effectively in "The Postmodernism of Robert Penn Warren" in "To Love So Well the World" A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren, ed. Dennis Weeks (New York: Peter Lang, 1992) that in Brother to Dragons Warren forged a bridge to a postmodern poetics which he then perfected in Promises (p. 211). From a vantage point near the end of the millennium, it seems clear that modernism (with its love of the abstract, its use of the general, its impersonal and distanced voice, its interest in form, and its view of man in society) was, at least in part, a reprise of eighteenth-century British literature; on the other hand, it seems clear that postmodernism, as described by Beck and others, is a return to the basic lyric power that has driven poetry in English, perhaps since the publication of Tottle's Miscellany in 1557, surely since the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. 2 All the King's Men appeared in 1946 and World Enough and Time, A Romantic Novel appeared in 1950 and though these two works are Warren's most popular works of fiction, there are oilier events in his life that may account for his poetic silence. One such event is his departure from Louisiana State University. As he told Louis Rubin in an interview printed in Talking with Robert Penn Warren, (ed. Floyd C. Watkins, John T. Hiers, and Mary Louise Weaks [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990!):

... I left Louisiana only because I felt I wasn't wanted. I felt pressure to leave. It wasn't a choice. I had settled myself down and bought a house in the country - settled down for life, I assumed. I left, shall we say, under pressure of some kind or other. I wasn't fired. I left out of pride (p. 272).

Thomas W. Cutrer, Parnassus on the Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984) states that the reason was money: "Warren announced his resignation from LSU simultaneously with the announcement of the demise of the [Southern] Review" (p. 252). 3 As Katherine Snipes in her Robert Penn Warren (New York: Fredrick Unger Publishing, 1983) puts it, "The literary impact of his personal situation as husband and father was striking to say the least. What emerged from the poetically reawakened psyche was Promises: Poems 1954-1956, which won the National Book Award for poetry, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry" (p. 24).

4 Robert Penn Warren, "Divided South Searches Its Soul," Life, July 9, 1965, p. 98.

5 Cleanth Brooks, R.W.B. Lewis and Robert Penn Warren, eds., American Literature: The Makers and the Making, 2 vols (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), 1, 1165.

6 For useful discussions of Warren's continuing interest in the subject of race see William Bedford Clark, The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), pp. 99-132; Hugh Ruppersburg, Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 129-160; and James H. Justus, The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren (Baton Rough: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), pp. 136-156.

7 Justus is correct in this observation. I too grew up in Kentucky. In 1954 when the Brown decision was rendered, I was thirteen years old, and the only black I had ever talked to was the janitor at our church. The lives of Willie Morris and Bill Moyers support Justus's observation as well. They each, along with many another Southern intellectual, Warren said, "because a Southerner by not being there" (Talking, p. 383). As Warren told Rubin, The farther I got away from the South, the more I thought about it" (Talking, p. 279). The short-story writer Robert Drake, who also went North to discover the South, once old me. "A writer has to leave home so he can tell where he leaves off and the landscape begins."

8 Robert Penn Warren, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (New York: Random House, 956), p. 63.

9 "Episode in the Dime Store" appeared in the Fall 1994 issue of the Southern, Review. I am using the five-page revised typescript from the University of Kentucky library special collections as the most recent, most authoritative text of the unpublished manuscript; "Episode in the Dime Store," p. 1.

10 This list of poems is based on unpublished research begun by Carol Dodd of Richmond Community College, Hamlet, North Carolina, during an N.E.H. Summer Seminar with R.W.B. Lewis in the summer of 1989. The poems are listed in the order of their first periodical appearance and grouped under the volume in which they were first collected. Promises: "Court Martial," "School Lesson Based on Word of Tragic Death of Entire Gillum Family," "Boy's Will, Joyful Labor without Pay, and Harvest Home (1918)," "Gold Glade," "Country Burying," "Summer Storm (circa 1916), and God's Grace," "Dark Night of," "Dragon Country"; You, Emperors, and Others: "Ballad Between the Boxcars (1923)"; Tale of Time: "The Day Dr. Knox Did It," "What Were You Thinking, Dear Mother?"; Audubon: A Vision: "Tell Me a Story"; Or Else: "There's a Grandfather Clock in the Hall," "Blow, West Wind," "Time as Hypnosis"; Now and Then: "American Portrait: Old Style," "Orphanage Boy," "Evening Hour," "Old Flame," "Boy Wandering in Simms' Valley," "Amazing Grace in the Back Country"; Being Here: "Boyhood in Tobacco Country," "The Moonlight's Dream," "October Picnic Long Ago," "Speleology," "When Life Begins"; Rumor Verified: "Dead Horse in Field"; Altitudes and Extensions 1980-1984: "Last Meeting," "Old-Time Childhood in Kentucky," "True Love," "Why Boy Came to Lonely Place."

11 Yale Review, 70 (Summer 1981), 553.

12 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 19820, pp. 71-80.

13 Robert Penn Warren, New and Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 1985), p. 51.

14 Holograph manuscript in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, p. 7. This material appears here with the kind permission of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

15 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), p. 14.

16 (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 27. I am indebted to Randy J. Hendricks, who drew my attention to this poem through a discussion of it in "Warren's Wandering Son," South Atlantic Review, 59 (May 1994), 78.

17 Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 232. I was directed to this passage by a discussion of it in Harry S. Ashmore, Hearts and Minds (Washington, D.C.: Seven Locks Press, 1988), p. 460.