The Fathers

By Allen Tate

The Fathers is the powerful novel by the poet and critic recognized as one of the great men of letters of our time, Alan Tate.

Old Major Buchan of Pleasant Hill, Fairfax County, Virginia, lived by a gentlemen’s agreement to ignore what was base or rude, to live a life which was gentle and comfortable because it was formal. Into this life George Posey came dashing, as Henry Steele Commager observed, “to defy Major Buchan, marry Susan, betray Charles and Semmes, dazzle young Lacy, challenge and destroy the old order of things.”

“Great novel of the broken South.”—George Steiner in The New Yorker

“A psychological horror story…concerned with life rather than death, with significance rather than with futility.”—Henry Steele Commager

“The story displays so much imagination and such a profound reflection upon life that it cannot be neglected by anyone interested in contemporary literature.”—Edwin Muir

“A masterpiece of formal beauty…deserves to be recognized as one of the most outstanding novels of our time.”—Janet Adam-Smith in The New Statesmen

“It is one of the most remarkable novels of our time...[It] is in fact the novel GONE WITH THE WIND ought to have been.”—Arthur Mizener

• Language: English
• Publisher: Golden Springs Publishing
• Release date: Oct 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781787201026

Allen Tate

Allen Tate (1899-1979) was born in Winchester, Kentucky, and spent much of his adult life teaching first in the South, then in Minnesota. He is also the author of the novel The Fathers.

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Text originally published in 1938 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE FATHERS

BY

ALLEN TATE

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ARTHUR MIZENER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

INTRODUCTION 5

PART ONE—PLEASANT HILL 11

PART TWO—THE CRISIS 72

PART THREE—THE ABYSS 118

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 180

INTRODUCTION

The Fathers was published in 1938. It sold respectably in both the United States and England, perhaps because people expected it to be another Gone With the Wind, whereas it is in fact the novel Gone With the Wind ought to have been. Since its publication it has received very little attention, considering that it is one of the most remarkable novels of our time. Its occasion is a public one, the achievement and the destruction of Virginia’s antebellum civilization. Within that occasion it discovers a terrible conflict between two fundamental and irreconcilable modes of existence, a conflict that has haunted American experience, but exists in some form at all times. The Fathers moves between the public and the private aspects of this conflict with an ease very unusual in American novels, and this ease is the most obvious illustration of the novel’s remarkable unity of idea and form, for it is itself a manifestation of the novel’s central idea, that the belief widely held today, that men may live apart from the political order, that indeed the only humane and honorable satisfactions must be gained in spite of the public order, is a fantasy.

The formal ordering of The Fathers which makes this unity possible is quite deliberate. I wished, Mr. Tate has written, ...to make the whole structure symbolic in terms of realistic detail, so that you could subtract the symbolism, or remain unaware of it, without losing the literal level of meaning...but if you subtract the literal or realistic detail, the symbolic structure disappears. The central device for achieving this end is the book’s narrator. Lacy Buchan is an old man who, as a boy, had participated in the events he is describing. He allows Mr. Tate to move back and forth between the mature but removed judgment of the old man and the partial understanding but direct sensuous reflection of the boy whom the old man remembers. In my feelings of that time, as Lacy says, there is a new element—my feelings now about that time...the emotions have ordered themselves in memory, and that memory is not what happened in the year 1860 but rather a few symbols, a voice, a tree; a gun shining on the wall.... It is thus that every event of the novel is made at once psychologically probable and symbolically significant. So complete is this process that even the young Lacy Buchan is a realization of the novel’s theme: the life of the Buchan family at Pleasant Hill has half completed the slow process of civilizing him, but I shared, as he says, [George Posey’s] impatience with the world as it was, as indeed every child must whose discipline is incomplete.

This narrator also allows the events of the narrative to be presented out of chronological order without loss of probability whenever their meaning demands it. Thus, the novel opens on the day of Mrs. Buchan’s funeral at Pleasant Hill in April, 1860. After we have seen Lacy’s brother-in-law, George Posey, refuse to attend the funeral, Lacy’s mind jumps, quite naturally, back to a point two years earlier, when George was wooing Susan Buchan. This recollection then fills in for us the whole two years between that time and the day of Mrs. Buchan’s funeral, though it is in its turn thrice interrupted, again quite naturally, by incidents that occur on the day of the funeral, in order that these events may be communicated to us in juxtaposition with events of the time two years before with which they are significantly related. During the whole of this double narration we are aware that Mrs. Buchan’s funeral occurred fifty years ago and that what we are hearing is not a contemporary account of it but an old man’s memories of it. Complex as it may sound in this description, this is only the familiar narrative procedure of the epic done realistically. Its purpose is to provide the opportunities for non-temporal patterning that the novel’s meaning requires without destroying our sense that we are observing actual events occurring in actual time. By its means the novel’s meaning takes on the probability of the novel’s events and becomes, not so much the author’s, as life’s.

The central tension of the The Fathers, like that of its structure, is a tension between the public and the private life, between the order of civilization, always artificial, imposed by discipline, and at the mercy of its own imperfections, and the disorder of the private life, always sincere, imposed upon by circumstances, and at the mercy of its own impulses. We see, on the one hand, the static condition a society reaches when, by slow degrees, it has disciplined all personal feeling to custom so that the individual no longer exists apart from the ritual of society and the ritual of society expresses all the feelings the individual knows. We see, on the other hand, the forces that exist—because time does not stand still—both within and without the people who constitute a society, that will destroy the discipline of its civilization and leave the individual naked and alone. People living in formal societies, says the narrator, lacking the historical imagination, can imagine for themselves only a timeless existence. So it is with Major Buchan. But George Posey, for all his great personal gifts—his generosity, his kindness, his charm—must receive the shock of the world at end of his nerves because, living in no society, he is wholly unprotected. He is a man who, having nothing to tell him how to act or where to go, is always in violent motion; without understanding quite why, Lacy always sees him as a horseman riding over a precipice. Excessively refined persons, he thinks as an old man, remembering the difference between the Posey family and his own, "have a communion with the abyss; but is not civilization the agreement, slowly arrived at, to let the abyss alone?"

The richness of life with which The Fathers realizes this theme is remarkable; it makes one suspect that, if The Fathers is ever read with attention, Mr. Tate may become very unpopular in The South, for he knows he is not Major Buchan and never can be, knows that he is as completely excluded from the world of Pleasant Hill as George Posey was, and therefore shares George’s sense of its radical absurdity. But he also understands that world and sees that, though time has—inevitably, perhaps even rightly—destroyed it, it was civilized in a way our life is not. This attitude is very like that of the speaker in the Ode to the Confederate Dead; it takes account of an astonishing range of feelings, even on the smallest occasions. When, for example, Major Buchan leads his family, single file, into a hotel and says to the clerk, We need rain, sir! we are at once charmed by the perfection of his manners, astonished by the innocent confidence with which he performs them, and amused, not very creditably, by his simplicity—for it is this same simplicity that makes him leave his place in his wife’s funeral procession to take the brown hand [of his wife’s maid] to lead her into the line and make her take her place ahead of us just behind the body of her mistress. Major Buchan’s manners are like Cousin Custis’ literary effusions, of which Major Buchan says, Custis is a most accomplished gentleman. A very fine artist, sir! In the heroic style. And an elegant speaker. They are like the prayer of Dr. Cartwright over Mrs. Buchan’s grave, "just a voice, in the ore rotundo of impersonality, no feeling but in the words themselves."

This same complexity of feeling flows out from the details of the novel into the pattern of its incidents—and, ultimately, into its whole structure. Consider, for example, what we are made to feel when the drunken John Langton challenges George Posey after the tournament. As Major Buchan is an embodiment of the best possibilities of his civilization, so John Langton is an embodiment of its worst, a bold and insolent man who deemed himself an aristocrat beyond any consideration for other people. When he and George meet on the field of honor, George first makes a magnificent practice shot and then, suddenly, throws his pistol away and knocks Langton down. I never did like Langton, from the time we were boys, says Jim Mason, his second. But that ain’t the point....Mr. Posey agreed to come here and there was only one thing to come for. Not for this. He is right. As always, George cannot objectify his feelings in the terms of the world he must live in, because he is not a part of it. For all his personal splendor, the heightened vitality possessed by a man who knows no bounds, he has failed to realize himself; his defeat is far worse than John Langton’s, for all Langton’s personal vileness.

The implications of this scene are further complicated by the fact that we watch it with Lacy Buchan, from under the pavilion. There Lacy has found a contemporary, Wink Broadacre.

God damn, he said. "Son of a bitch. Bastard. Say,

Buchan, cain’t you cuss? Jesus Christ. He lay on his elbow gazing at me with a smirk. You want some of it?"

And he points to a half-grown mulatto girl with kinky red hair and muddy green eyes in a pretty, Caucasian face who is lying on her back a short distance away. This episode is a prologue to the duel; its sexual and social evil, like Langton’s malicious arrogance, is a part of civilization, and we have to face that fact squarely. Yet there is something almost humorous, almost Tom-Sawyerish, about Wink Broadacre (Say, Buchan, cain’t you cuss?). Like Langton’s, this is the unintended and limited evil of an otherwise ordered world; before we condemn that world because it contains such evil, we must contemplate the equally unintended but unbounded evil produced by the wholly personal sincerity of George Posey’s love for Susan Buchan that involved him in the duel. There is no doubt, as the narrator says, that [George] loved Susan too much; by that I mean he was too personal, and with his exacerbated nerves he was constantly receiving impressions out of the chasm that yawns beneath lovers; therefore he must have had a secret brutality for her when they were alone. In the end he drives Susan mad.

The first part of The Fathers is an ordered sequence of scenes which show us the contrast between the old and still dominant way of life and the new. There is a sense in which, because of the date of the action, these scenes demonstrate the concealed change that had already defeated the Virginia way of life before the War, just as there is a sense in which every realistic fiction is, and intends quite seriously to be, history. As such, however, these scenes are also an account of how time, working within a civilization and its members, destroys it. This contrast between old and new comes to a climax in the scene where George does not ask for Susan’s hand but says, Major Buchan, I intend to marry your daughter. At the scene’s beginning, Major Buchan has put George in his place, as firmly as he knows how to; he has failed to ask after George’s family, the first thing he always did when he met anybody, black or white, and he has told George that I don’t know that we are entitled to your kindness—no sir, I don’t know that we are. But George is not put in his place; he was incredibly at ease, the way a man is at ease when he is alone. Confronted by this imperviousness, Major Buchan is helpless and can only look as if someone entitled to know all about it had denied the heliocentric theory or argued that there were no Abolitionists in Boston. This is high comedy, comedy filled with tragic implications. Our lives, Lacy thinks, were eternally balanced upon a pedestal below which lay an abyss I could not name. Within that invisible tension my father knew the moves of an intricate game that he expected everybody else to play. That, I think, was because everything he was and felt was in the game. His helplessness before George Posey’s refusal to play reminds Lacy of the only time I had ever seen my father blush; somebody had tried to tell him his private affairs, beginning, ‘If you will allow me to be personal,’ and papa had blushed because he could never allow anybody to be personal. In the same way, Major Buchan’s inability to conceive of a competitive society makes him helpless before the financial conception of property.

But money, though he hates it as such, gives George Posey a sense of reality; he even thinks of Yellow Jim, his half-brother and slave, as liquid capital and sells him, an attitude toward slavery that shocks the Buchans, who cannot understand the wholly personal attitude of a man who will give ten dollars to a beggar woman, and embarrass himself in the progress, but will not pay his free labor enough to buy bacon and meal. George’s contribution to. the Confederate cause is smuggled goods, shrewdly purchased in the North, and, satchel full of money in hand after one of these sales, he says to Cousin John, Mr. Semmes, your people are about to fight a war. They remind me of a passel of young ‘uns playing prisoners’ base. Yet the man and the world that ignore the rules of Major Buchan’s game, or some such game, as George Posey does, are left to the mercy of random impulse. George Posey is unprotected, from what is outside and, even worse, from what is inside him.

Lacy once recalls for us how his mother dealt with a child’s question about why a bull had been brought to Pleasant Hill. ‘He’s here on business,’ my mother said, and looking back to that remark I know that she was a person for whom her small world held life in its entirety, and who, through that, knowledge, knew all that was necessary of the world at large. But when George Posey, walking with Major Buchan, comes on a young bull that has been turned into a herd of cows—

I looked at George Posey. He was blushing to the roots of his hair. He looked helpless and betrayed. I saw papa give him a sharp and critical glance, arid then he said, Mr. Posey, excuse me, I have some business with Mr. Higgins. I will ask Lacy here to take you back to the house. Papa’s eyes were on the ground while George Posey mastered himself.

The Poseys, as the narrator remarks elsewhere, were more refined than the Buchans, but less civilized.

There is the same contrast between the Buchans and George Posey in the face of death. Major Buchan was crushed [by his wife’s death] but in his sorrow he knew what everybody else was feeling, and in his high innocence he required that they know it too and be as polite as he. So great is his pride in his own dignity and honor that he is even polite to George when George, after refusing to attend the funeral, turns up again. It teaches the young Lacy a great lesson.

It seemed plain [at my age] that a great many people had to be treated, not as you felt about yourself, but as they deserved. How could you decide what people deserved? That was the trouble. You couldn’t decide. So you came to believe in honor and dignity for their own sakes since all proper men knew what honor was and could recognize dignity; but nobody knew what human nature was or could presume to mete out justice to others.

But George flees the funeral because he needed intensely...to escape from the forms of death which were, to us, only the completion of life, and in which there could be nothing personal. When George returns, he greets Semmes Buchan, who is a medical student, with agonized brutality: I reckon you’ll be cutting up your cadavers again this time next week; and he says to Lacy: ‘By God they’ll all starve to death, that’s what they’ll do. They do nothing but die and marry and think about the honor of Virginia.’ He rammed his hands into his pockets and shouted: ‘I want to be thrown to the hogs. I tell you I want to be thrown to the hogs!’ (At the end of The Fathers only the devoted propriety of Mr. Higgins saves the body of Major Buchan from the hogs.) As to all unprotected persons, Lacy understands later, death was horrible to him; therefore he faced it in its aspect of greatest horror—the corrupted body. When his uncle says to George at his own mother’s death, Nephew, it pains me to greet you in these melancholy circumstances. Your mother—— George, looking at him as if he were a child, interrupts him: She’s dead, ain’t she? When death could be like this, Lacy thinks, nobody was living. If [the Poseys] had not been of their Church, they would have thrown one another at death into the river. And, indeed, George does throw his half-brother, Yellow Jim, into the river after Semmes has shot him. This is the consequence of having grown up in a world in which the social acts became privacies.

Because George Posey cannot live in the objective world of custom and ceremony that exists, he must always try to invent, on the spur of the moment, some world he can live in, some gesture that will realize what he is. He has no resource except his impulses and can realize himself only in improvised and violent action. He is alone, as grandfather Buchan says, like a tornado, possessing nothing with which to face experience except his terrifying personal sincerity. He cannot face death at all; he makes a tragic mess of his passion for Susan; and, having shot Semmes Buchan on an impulse that astonishes him, he tries to explain to Major Buchan why he did it. Brother George, Lacy thinks, had been sincere...had been appallingly too sincere.

Between George Posey and Major Buchan stands the figure of Susan, George’s wife and the Major’s daughter. She could not have known [before her marriage] that George was outside life, or had a secret of life that no one had heard of at Pleasant Hill. To Susan the life around her in childhood had been final. But after she has lived with George and his family—each of them isolated in his room and the shell of himself, hardly knowing, as George’s uncle does not, whether it is day or night—she learns that these are not just peculiar old people; they are not really old at all; they are people who have dropped out of life and forgotten how to get back through the looking glass except by smashing it, like the Alice of Mr. Tate’s poem. This discovery makes Susan determined to prevent her brother’s marrying Jane Posey; and she does, by allowing—indeed almost making—George’s colored half-brother attack that sister. As a result, Semmes, like a good Buchan, shoots Yellow Jim; George, like himself, shoots Semmes; and Susan goes mad.

Why, the narrator wonders, cannot life change without tangling the lives of innocent persons? Why do innocent persons cease their innocence and become violent and evil in themselves that such great changes may take place? For they had all been innocent and they had all, in different ways, become more or less evil. Thus, either because of changes in themselves that made the world unbearable to them, as with George, or because of changes in the world about them such that unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism, as with Major Buchan, or because of both, as with Susan, time and change manifest themselves concretely in the action of the novel.

Such, then, is The Fathers, a novel with an action of a certain magnitude that satisfies the demands of probability and is, at the same time, a sustained, particularized, and unified symbol. Because it is, its meaning is not merely a lyric and personal response to experience but takes on the full, public life that only a probable action can give, as George Posey’s self could not, as Major Buchan’s did. The motive of The Fathers’ action is a meaning, and the life of that meaning is an action. It is an imitation of life.

ARTHUR MIZENER

PART ONE—PLEASANT HILL

IT WAS ONLY TODAY as I was walking down Fayette Street towards the river that I got a whiff of salt fish, and I remembered the day I stood at Pleasant Hill, under the dogwood tree. It was late April and the blossoms shot into the air like spray. My mother was dead. Crowds of the connection had arrived the night before; and I had come, a boy of fifteen, after breakfast, out into the yard. Under the tree I could still taste the salt of the roe herring that Aunt Myra Parrish had kept serving to the kin and friends from Washington and Alexandria. There was old Uncle Armistead, my father’s brother and twenty years his elder, born at the end of the Revolution and older than even his eighty years: who deaf and half blind said only Hanh? to remarks directed to him, and he never asked a question. My mind now echoes Hanh? to the smell of the herring and I can see the black coffin of my mother lying in the hush of the front parlor, a white, long room.

My name is Lacy Gore Buchan, the third son and the last child of my parents. My father was the late Major Lewis Buchan, a native of Spotsylvania County, Virginia, who died as I shall relate at the beginning of the War, in Fairfax County at Pleasant Hill, a place that came to us through his mother, who was a Lewis of Spotsylvania. My father, through his father Dr. John Buchan, was the grandson of the immigrant, Benjamin Buchan, a Scots adventurer who ordinarily must have followed his compatriots west of the Blue Ridge had he not won the hand of Mary Armistead the very year of his landing, I think 1741; Mary Armistead thus became my great-grandmother, and by means of certain dower properties to which she fell heir—after her father’s displeasure with the adventurer had been conquered by the grave—the name of Buchan, obscure in origin, became assimilated to that unique order of society known latterly as the Virginian aristocracy.—Of my mother’s people I know, firsthand, much less. She was Sarah Semmes Gore of the Valley of Virginia; on the Gore side, Scotch-Irish; on the Semmes, of Maryland stock that had migrated to the Valley around 1800. My mother might have said of my father, Thy people are my people, for she became a pure Buchan—in all but religion; she could not have added, and thy God my God. She remained a Presbyterian.

The death of my mother is a suitable beginning for my story. There, for the last time, I saw our whole family assembled from that region, down to the fifth and sixth degree of kin, besides three or four of the Poseys, the family of my remarkable brother-in-law, George Posey from Georgetown, who had the year before married my lovely sister Susan. A year later came the war; we were uprooted from Pleasant Hill, and were never together again.

Of the Poseys I shall have a good deal to say hereafter. They were a respectable family of Anne Arundel County, Maryland, quiet, presentable, and at one time, in the day of old Samuel Posey, George’s grandfather, possessed of considerable landed property and servants; but otherwise, like the Buchans, undistinguished. Mr. Rozier Posey, George’s father, moved down to Charles County, and in George’s boyhood the family left the land and settled permanently in Georgetown, in a tall red brick house on Vista Avenue, overlooking the Potomac. The family, I say, was unexceptional. I cannot understand why they came out, in the old phrase, at the little end of the horn, as they grievously did.

That, perhaps more than anything else, is the reason why an unmarried old man, having nothing else to do, with a competence saved from the practice of medicine, thinks he has a story to tell. Is it not something to tell, when a score of people whom I knew and loved, people beyond whose lives I could imagine no other life, either out of violence in themselves or the times, or out of some misery or shame, scattered into the new life of the modem age where they cannot even find themselves? Why cannot life change without tangling the lives of innocent persons? Why do innocent persons cease their innocence and become violent and evil in themselves that such great changes may take place?

These questions must go unanswered. I have a story to tell but I cannot explain the story. I cannot say: if Susan had not married George Posey then Susan could not have known Jane Posey and influenced her. But of course I might not have known Jane either. Could I have known her without Susan, I might have married her, for I loved her. That no doubt was the life I wanted. But what I wanted and did not get would not have changed the events by which all these people were tortured. It would have all happened in some other way.

I see figures on the lawn that morning at Pleasant Hill, I hear voices. Of that large company I remember the ordinary tone of the conversation, the hospitable anxiety of the nearer connection for the comfort of the more distant kin and friends; it was like a family infare but that my sister sat in the back parlor with my poor father and the kindly smiles never broke into laughter. Only Uncle Armistead sat in the front parlor by the coffin all day. Aunt Myra—his sister and my father’s—went in to him, or took the kin in to the presence of the dead: a small decisive woman, Aunt Myra, with deep eyes and a long straight nose: she would say to Uncle Armistead: Brother, go into the chamber and lie down. The chamber was my own mother’s bedroom where the family sat informally. But Uncle Armistead only replied, Hanh? and took another toddy from Sam, the little colored boy he had brought with him from Falls Church.

But as I went aimlessly about the lawn, a mysterious exile from the other children, I seemed to see the home of my childhood with new eyes. I could feel that people were waiting, waiting; but it was different from our waiting for my mother, over many days, to die. The waiting was hurried; there was hurried deliberation in Aunt Myra’s managing everything. Out of this changed tempo trivial incidents emerged, and were fixed in my memory: and changed even was the air of the place.

I remember George Posey coming out into the yard, not restlessly but inquiringly, swinging a riding crop and looking from tree to tree and off into the slanting fields. How big and mature he was! He was actually only eleven years older than I was—a man of twenty-six, married a year to my sister and the father of a baby girl in whom I took no interest. He was a good six feet three, and standing he always rested squarely though easily on both feet, his head back, his arms limp at his sides: he seemed taller than he was because he looked at you from the angle of his backward tilted head. He stood looking at the long gallery, two storeys, on slender square posts, across the whole front of the house; and his lips moved. I thought he had spoken to me. I ran nearer.

Brother George! I cried.

He motioned me to him, put his hand on my head, and smiled down at me.

You’re my friend, Lacy boy.

He resumed his gaze. I too looked up at the gallery sagging at one end, at the cracked paint on the weatherboarding, at the wisps of smoke struggling out of the big red end-chimneys, then off up the ridge towards the negro cabins, a pink brick row, and towards the stables and, back of them, near the woods, the big unpainted tobacco bam. I looked at Brother George but he was as fixed as a marble in Mr. Corcoran’s gallery. A phrase of my father’s comes to mind, for at that moment Brother George’s face was a study. His eyes roved to my mother’s garden, down towards the lower end of the ridge by the side of the house: the garden was a big square bordered by box, the inside a tangle of shrubs from which now I saw the first shoots of April green. And on the hither side of the garden I saw the horseblock, an old millstone standing on edge and half buried in the ground: there began the long line of gnarled cedars winding with the muddy lane along the side of the ridge, the mile and a half to the old Ox Road, the big road