The Rootless Wither

Something surprising, so unexpected, began to happen in America about seventy years ago. From the most impoverished area of the country – continually chastised by “cultural elites” (usually resident in NYC) as backward and unprogressive – the South gave birth to much of this nation’s greatest literature in the twentieth century. And not only literature, but penetrating literary criticism as well. This did not go unnoticed, even if it took many a New Yorker off guard. C. Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, described the reaction to this sudden burst of Southern creativity in his collection of essays, The Burden of Southern History: “With the establishment of [the Southern Review] in 1935 the center of the avant garde of American literary criticism shifted temporarily to the banks of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge. Gradually the pundits and critical moguls of the Hudson began to alter their tone about the ‘Sahara of the Bozart.’ An occasional note of praise, then of cautious respect, was succeeded by fulsome acclaim and eventually by a sort of awed puzzlement at this sudden flowering of the cultural desert.”

Woodward looks to Allen Tate, Southern literary critic and writer, for an explanation: “the peculiarly historical consciousness of the Southern writer” was “the secret spring of creative energies that has fed the whole literary movement in the South” during the decades following 1930. “[Tate] suggests that after the First World War the South arrived at a crossroads of history where an old traditional order was being rapidly obliterated and a new modern order was being simultaneously brought to birth. Caught at these crossroads, the Southerner was made more keenly conscious at once of the present and of the past. His sensibilities to the current change heightened his awareness of past differences, and his intensified remembrance of things past added corresponding poignancy to his awareness of things present. As Tate put it, ‘that backward glance gave us the Southern renascence, a literature conscious of the past in the present’.” This “backward glance” is the motif of the famous novel Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe, one of North Carolina’s own.

To illustrate this, Woodward contrasts the Southern novel with the more “all-American” novels of the Mid West: “the characters in the novels of [Theodore] Dreiser, [Sherwood] Anderson, and [Sinclair] Lewis appear on the scene from nowhere, trailing no clouds of history, dissociated from the past. They seem to have left it behind them in New England, or Norway, or Bavaria, and along with their past they checked their forebears, their historical roots and associations. One has the feeling that they considered that heritage a good riddance.” But it is in Hemingway, doubtless a great writer, where “the historical perspective is even more flat”: “Hemingway’s characters appear to live completely in the present. To emphasize their historical rootlessness they are invariably pictured as expatriates, as wanderers, as soldiers or adventurers. They are temporarily in Italy, Spain, in France or Africa, in Cuba or the Florida Keys. A Hemingway hero with a grandfather is inconceivable, and he is apparently quite as bereft of uncles, aunts, cousins, and in-laws, not to mention neighbors and poor relations.” In like manner New England’s writers too – with the wonderful exception of such as Nathaniel Hawthorne – “regularly pictured the individual starkly alone with his problems, his wilderness, or his God.”

But the South, well, was just different. Pulitzer prize winning, Virginia novelist Ellen Glasgow expressed it in her autobiography: “I had been born with an intimate feeling for the spirit of the past, and the lingering poetry of time and place.” Glasgow wrote her books at the end of the 19th century up until the 1930s. Then, the South was different, but that is hardly so anymore. Even so it takes a Southern writer to capture in story this new phenomenon of rootlessness in the modern South, something Walker Percy, from Alabama, did in his novels, especially The Moviegoer.

The rootlessness of a Hemingway character is now everywhere. But Hemingway’s characters wither; they seem unable to connect, to relate, and ultimately to be happy. Rootlessness is their perceived means to a freedom that ever recedes before them. The past and the constrictions of a home place are things from which to be unburdened, and this unburdening of oneself from time and place “blossoms” in our day into the riddance of the “burden” of aging parents, a disappointing spouse, unborn children, and friendship itself, the art of which is all but gone.

Strange it is that even though we Americans are about to celebrate our Independence Day, more and more young people are clueless as to its history: what we owe to the past and the people who populated the times before us, even to the English from whom we received the principles of representative government. And even more damaging, in the long run: the modern Christian finds it difficult to imagine – with something like a William Faulkner’s historical imagination – that his faith is traced back to, and grounded in, a certain time and place, a little village, still there, in the Holy Land. Our Catholic Faith has roots in that place, in real historical characters who are kept alive for us in a living Tradition that communicates “the past in the present.” Religious rootlessness has the same effect as in the general culture – it’s “fruit” is a withering, a drying up of the sap of life, a loss of direction, an aimlessness. Christians try to live the faith only in the light of present circumstances, and instead of handing on the Story of all stories, they, rootless, end up parroting the shibboleths of our time, most of which are not really worth repeating. “As therefore you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so live in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving” (Colossians 2:6, 7).