The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–1950
by Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana
State University Press, 2009)

WILLIAM BEDFORD CLARK is Professor of English at Texas A&M University and General Editor of the Robert Penn Warren Correspondence Project.

Every serious student of the modern
South and its literature will recognize
the author of this study as a scholar
and critic of uncommon gifts and enviable
accomplishments. Professor Brinkmeyer
can read closely when argument
calls for it, penetrating beneath the surface
of imagery and rhetoric in new and suggestive
ways, and at the same time few of
his peers exhibit so inclusive a command
of the twentieth-century Southern canon
and the secondary material—historical,
cultural, and critical—that best enhances
our reading of it. The Fourth Ghost represents
his thinking and writing at its highest
level and will likely take Southern studies
in new and quite promising directions.
Its subject is a charged one to be sure, and
Brinkmeyer’s analysis is “historicized” to
varying degrees, but his enabling assumptions
have been appropriated, assimilated,
and applied in concrete, ultimately
humane, fashion. Although the author
seems moved on occasion to flash his progressive
bona fides, he is for the most part
commendably even-handed and largely
(though not entirely) free of the sanctimony
too many of his fellows display as
a matter of habit. His style is direct and
idiomatic, at times conversational, and
the reader stands to profit much from this
author’s prodigious powers as a researcher,
even when he remains dubious of a given
reading or conclusion. I found myself in
hearty dissent when it came to a number
of the author’s more sweeping assertions.
Brinkmeyer does ride his thesis hard, but
one need hardly agree with his less-thanmodest
suggestion that the writers he considers
are “perhaps best read” in the light
of their engagement with the stark facts of
European fascism to recognize the importance
and lasting value of this study.

As Brinkmeyer demonstrates in his
Introduction, the South, with its regional
insularity, valorizing of tradition, and preoccupation
with race, has been (and, one
might add, continues to be) particularly susceptible
to a tarring with the fascist brush.
No group of Southern intellectuals were
assaulted more vigorously in that regard
than the Agrarians. Thus Brinkmeyer
devotes his first chapter to an account of
their reaction to such indictments and their
counter-insistence that it was not Agrarian
subsidiarity, but the industrialized modern
state (Donald Davidson’s “Leviathan”) that
posed the real totalitarian threat. Brinkmeyer
lays out the unflattering history of
the Agrarian alliance with the self-proclaimed
fascist Seward Collins (a Yankee
patrician), but he balances this discussion
with an awareness of how the New Critical
aesthetic implicit in Agrarian social
theory privileged a democratic multiplicity
of contending voices and viewpoints
(tensions and ironies) over the univocal
demands of propaganda art. His nuanced
and sensitive reading of Allen Tate’s wartime
poetry brings an unexpected and
valuable dimension into play. Still, one
wishes he had pursued the implications
of the Pound-Bollingen controversy a bit
more fully. The issues surrounding that
impassioned affair remain vexing today,
and it is worThnoting that not only Tate
but Katherine Anne Porter and Robert
Penn Warren (each of whom warrants a
chapter in The Fourth Ghost) were members
of the jury that awarded Pound the
prize, a fact that might have been pursued
to advantage.

Brinkmeyer follows his account of the
Agrarians with a brilliant chapter on one
of their principal nemeses, W. J. Cash, in
which he recreates in detail Cash’s growing
obsession wiThperceived parallels
between Nazi Germany and his native
South and the role that compulsive exercise
in moral equivalence played in the
long and torturous making of The Mind
of the South. Brinkmeyer brings sympathy
as well as unfl inching honesty to his
portrayal of Cash. The same might be said
of his treatment of the planter-apologist
William Alexander Percy, whose elegiac
Lanterns on the Levee (as Brinkmeyer notes)
appeared the same year as Cash’s cranky
minor masterpiece (1941). There is indeed
a measure of genuine (albeit exasperating)
pathos in Percy’s inability to connect the
conditions operative in the refugee labor
camps he helped establish during the Great
Flood of 1927 with those he deplored in
German-occupied Belgium during the
First World War. Brinkmeyer demonstrates
how Percy’s characteristic pattern
of denial and evasion caused “this very
unsentimental man to construct a very distorted
and sentimental history of himself,
his family, and the Mississippi Delta.” If
Cash was only too ready to find a nascent
fascism in Southern institutions, Percy was
altogether too reluctant, though it is signifi
cant that boThmen, different as they
were, saw the resurgent Ku Klux Klan as
a band of proto-Storm Troopers. Lillian
Smith, the subject of Brinkmeyer’s fourth
chapter, offers an altogether different case
history, that of a quintessential Southern
radical whose consuming sense of social
justice, focused primarily on issues of race,
took her from pacifism and isolationism to
a direct confrontation with external totalitarian
threats from the right and the left.
By the end of Killers of the Dream (1949),
she had arrived at a view that anticipated
the hope most often associated with the
historian C. Vann Woodward and others—
that Southerners of probity and goodwill,
chastened by the burdens of history, might
serve as a light unto the nations.

Brinkmeyer’s chapter on Thomas
Wolfe, a Teutonophile whose serial trips
to Germany gradually forced him to see
Nazism for the evil it was and culminated
in the powerful tale-of-witness “I Have
a Thing to Tell You,” traces that author’s
growing awareness of and aversion to a
malignant ideology that, ironically, took as
its foundational “truths” many of Wolfe’s
own deep biases—a fierce anti-Semitism,
a pseudo-scientific racialism that glorified
Nordic stock, and a nativist xenophobia.
As Brinkmeyer shows, Wolfe’s recognition
of the German devils without proved
insufficient to purge the Southern devils
within, but charity compels us to acknowledge
that his premature death in 1938, the
year before Hitler’s Blitzkrieg shattered
Poland, meant that the project that was
Thomas Wolfe—Man-Writing—would
remain forever tentative and unfinished.
William Faulkner, on the other hand,
lived through the Second World War and
on into the 1960s, and in what is one of his
strongest chapters Brinkmeyer shows how
Faulkner’s creative enlistment against fascist
(and later communist) authoritarianism
brought about a fundamental sea-change
in his attitudes toward art and the artist’s
responsibilities. The committed modernist
craftsman brooding over his region’s tragic
past and decadent present grew increasingly
vatic and nationalistic in the last two
decades of his life, and Brinkmeyer’s handling
of Faulkner’s Hollywood labors in
this regard is especially welcome. The student
of modern Southern writing will be
equally grateful for Brinkmeyer’s discussion
of Katherine Anne Porter, an author
he knows intimately, having published an
imposing monograph on her work. Even
so, one must question his rather curt dismissal
of Ship of Fools as “a sad conclusion
to Porter’s career.” Indeed, I would argue
that a residual strength of that novel is its
insight into the human (all-too-human)
origins of systematic fascism latent in the
twisted corridors of the individual heart.

Of the nine writers he considers individually
and at length, Brinkmeyer recognizes
that Carson McCullers best fits
the critical template he employs, for she
proved “the most ambitious in juxtaposing
foreign and domestic concerns and in
depicting the operation of fascist principles
within Southern culture.” Brinkmeyer’s
reading of McCullers’s precocious early
stories and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
reveals him at his best. It is applied criticism
of a high order, although by chapter’s
end, still mining his thesis, he seems to
go a bit too far. McCullers’s fiction may
indeed have “thinned out” following the
Allied victory over Hitler and the coming
of the Cold War, but that was likely less
a consequence of an altered world-scene
than the result of the tormented author’s
increasingly debilitating physical and psychological
distress. Brinkmeyer draws to
advantage from Virginia Spencer Carr’s
biography of McCullers; some attention
to Josyane Savigneau’s more recent Carson
McCullers: A Life would have been
useful. The specter of fascism haunted
McCullers to be sure, but she had ghosts
enough in her own closeted spaces. Robert
Penn Warren was made of sterner stuff. I
am especially grateful to Brinkmeyer for
his sensitive attention to Warren’s letters
from Mussolini’s Italy and his discussion
of Eleven Poems on the Same Theme and
Proud Flesh (the verse drama that eventually
evolved into All the King’s Men).
Given his powers as a close reader and gift
for placing texts in suggestive historical
and ideological contexts, one cannot help
wishing he had found a place for at least
a brief look at Warren’s Brother to Dragons.
While the cutoff date in Brinkmeyer’s
subtitle is—rather arbitrarily—the year
1950, he is anything but bound by it in
other instances, and the omission seems all
the more regrettable. In any event, his final
verdict on Warren is a just one worthy of
full citation:

Straightforwardly instructive literature
for Warren was not a defense
against totalitarianism but the voice
of totalitarianism, and the best way
to silence that voice was to write
contested, complex, and ironic literature
whose very form embodied
and affirmed intellectual freedom
and democracy.

In radical contrast to Warren stands Lillian
Hellman, the subject of Brinkmeyer’s final
chapter, a confirmed Stalinist whose cam
paigns against fascism were largely pursued
in the interests of the Soviet Union
and various front groups. Strange to say,
Brinkmeyer treats her with an unwarranted
sympathy that at times verges on commendation—
silence constituting assent. Hellman
was far more than the “dupe” or “fellow-
traveler” her contemporaries alleged.
She was a doctrinaire and ruthless champion
of communism (that other totalitarianism),
an influential enabler whose words
and actions had lamentable consequences.
Brinkmeyer’s instincts, as registered in an
endnote, tell him that Hellman “probably”
never joined the Party in a formal way. That
matters little. For all her fear of fascism at
home, she was blithely complicit in the
Soviet repression of many millions abroad,
including fellow writers like Pasternak and
Solzhenitsyn. Brinkmeyer is severe in castigating
Thomas Wolfe for his sins, which
were essentially thought-crimes. On the
other hand, Hellman’s impassioned support
of Stalin was literal, pervasive, and
perennial. One is puzzled by the author’s
reluctance to take her to task.

In his “Coda,” Brinkmeyer treats two
Southern novelists of a subsequent generation,
Walker Percy and William Styron,
giving us characteristically insightful
readings of Lancelot and Sophie’s Choice.
Only in passing does he mention Percy’s
last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, yet
that work—given Brinkmeyer’s thesis—
cries out for attention, and a failure to
address it adequately constitutes a major
sin of omission in what is, on the whole,
a remarkably valuable study. Walker Percy
reminds us of an inconvenient and important
truth—that the culture of death at
the heart of Nazism was hardly dispelled
by the Allied victory at the end of World
War II. It remains very much with us at
the start of the twenty-first century, when
“progressive” governmental policy favors
and funds actions and research that once
came under the category of crimes against
humanity.