Wessex and Louisiana

While the peoples of Europe turn to mass murder, training in the science of murder, or defense against it, intelligent U. S. citizens are becoming solemnly aware that the arts, scholarship and precious thought of the West are in their keeping.

For in Europe's desperate atmosphere the free life of the intelligence is suspended where it has not been crushed.

June 2 was the 100th birthday of the English novelist Thomas Hardy. Neither in the little old town of Dorchester, where he lived, worked and died, nor in London, where his ashes rest in Westminster Abbey, was this anniversary marked so impressively as it was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There The Southern Review, solidest and most accomplished of U. S. literary quarterlies, devoted its summer issue entirely to essays on the work of Hardy.

Thomas Hardy's novels of "Wessex'' are unquestionably the greatest 19th-Century English fiction dealing with folk characters and a rural setting. Such characters and such a setting in the U. S. have been the chosen material of the South's most gifted modern writers. The Southern Review itself was founded five years ago by writers who thought seriously about "Agrarianism," i.e., rehabilitation of the land, return to the life on it, respect for its literary possibilities -- as a salvation for the South.

Their paradoxical benefactor was Louisiana's Huey Long, who had simpler notions of salvation. From the millions lavished by Huey to endow Louisiana State University with a nonpareil stadium, football team and campus, three ex-Rhodes scholars, named Robert Penn Warren, then 29, Cleanth Brooks Jr., 28, and Charles W. Pipkin, 35, managed in 1935 to get a cut of $10,000 a year for a quarterly review.

They have been getting it ever since.

And ever since, The Southern Review has been steadily outranging its merely regional beginning. Its appropriation, that Yould scarcely pay a first-rate football coach, has been large enough to pay the highest rates (1-c- a word for prose, 35-c- a line for poetry) offered by any similar magazine in the U. S. Its managing editors, bespectacled Brooks and redheaded Warren, have sought and printed not only the best Southern writing but the finest prose & poetry that U. S. writers of all sections could produce.

More exacting than the Yale Review, less staid than the Virginia Quarterly, richer than Ohio's new Kenyan Review, The Southern Review has applied no standards save excellence, has been subject to no political pressure whatever (Louisiana's politicians are apparently oblivious of the magazine). In more than one instance, its support has enabled a distinguished writer to live in frugal independence.

As a result, the Hardy Memorial issue of The Southern Review displays more studied insight and ability than any group of European writers would be likely to provide. It adds up to the most discerning criticism of Hardy's verse and fiction that has ever appeared. The essays of John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, Morton Dauwen Zabel, Donald Davidson, Katherine Anne Porter indicate that the stiff formality long typical of serious U. S. criticism is relaxing, gaining in spiritedness and ease. They testify to the breadth and integrity of U. S. literary talent. And they prove, if any proof was necessary, that there exists in the U. S. a national community of scholars and artists, alive to their own time and country, and capable of preserving the traditions of the West.

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