Marion Montgomery (1925–2011)

This commentary appears in the Winter–Fall 2012 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

The day before Thanksgiving 2011, Marion Montgomery died. Letters and phone conversations with him and reports from his gathered family and his priest convince me that he died a good death. His death, like his life, was suffused with grace, dignity, and joy. Living and dying, Marion was filled with gratitude toward God for the good gifts of creation and worthy traditions. Living and dying, and in his writing and personal conversations, he expressed faith in and hope for mankind’s redemption and resurrection through Christ, the Incarnate Word of God who takes away the sin of the world. This Christian faith and hope was an essential feature of his life and work.

He should be no stranger to readers of Modern Age. Beginning with a short story published in the third volume of the journal (“The Bear Paw,” Spring 1959) and continuing into the twenty-first century (the poem “Toward Grasmere: A Prospect from Natland-Green” appeared in the Fall 2004 number), Montgomery published more than twenty pieces in the journal. Sandwiched between the two creative offerings are essays on Solzhenitsyn, Flannery O’Connor, Eric Voegelin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Weaver, T. S. Eliot, Allan Bloom, and other figures, as well as investigations of Southern literature, “Tradition and Intellect,” and other topics. There is also an excellent ten-page assessment of Montgomery as critic (T. H. Pickett’s “The Truth of Things: Marion Montgomery’s Essentialist Criticism,” Spring 2002). While Montgomery wrote novels (The Wandering of Desire [1962], Darrell [1964], and Fugitive [1974]), poetry (three short collections: Dry Lightning [1960], Stones from the Rubble [1965], and The Gull and Other Georgia Scenes [1969]), and short stories (thirty of them), and while he won awards for this creative work, most of his writing the last thirty years of his life was devoted to literary and cultural criticism.

Probably his most impressive critical work is the three-volume study of Western modernism The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age (1981–84), an ambitious assessment of the social, cultural, political, literary, religious, and philosophical temper of the Western world since the Renaissance. While each volume in the trilogy focuses on an American fiction writer (Flannery O’Connor, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne), Montgomery treats, sometimes at length, Western figures from Hesiod to T. S. Eliot, with hundreds in between. Gerhart Niemeyer offered one of the best descriptions of this wide-ranging 1,500-page study: it is “a meditation, a sensitive man’s experiential journey” surveying literary and political ideologies and false consciousness, with the main focus on American aberrations. Niemeyer notes that this focus on American confusions fills a gap left vacant in studies by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Hans Jonas, Henri de Lubac, and Eric Voegelin.¹

In the trilogy and in other works, Montgomery combined a philosophic habit of mind (essentially Thomistic) with the poet’s imagination and the fiction writer’s attention to detail. This enabled him to see that everywhere the concrete, the particular, the regional illustrate the general, the universal, the cosmopolitan. Thus Montgomery describes Ralph Nader as “our decade’s Billy Sunday,” Puritans and Positivists as “kissing cousins in the family of Western thought,”² and O’Connor’s home-grown rationalists and existentialists as local reflections of European thinkers—for instance, Haze Motes is “Nietzsche as a Country Boy.”³ His tripartite perception (philosophical, poetic, and fictional) also enabled him to see the world whole. Consequently, his work has something to do with the front porch, the local bar, popular culture, the academy, the laboratory, the marketplace, and the Senate as well as with literary and philosophical works and ideas.

In his critical and his creative writings, Montgomery called his readers back to traditional and orthodox truths. Some of these known but forgotten truths can be listed here: ideas have consequences, and intellectual errors should be traced to their roots in time and place; spiritual concerns are compatible with realism in literature; being should be celebrated rather than subjugated; piety and openness to creation are the proper responses to existence; men are intellectual souls incarnate (neither essentially animals nor essentially souls); both reason and imagination are gifts that should be carefully exercised in life, faith, and art; and mind and heart, reason and feeling, are companionable faculties. In short, Montgomery defended a Christian vision of the world. His antagonist was modernity, an intellectual deportment that divorces man from both tradition and transcendence.

* * *

Recently one of Marion’s friends from Atlanta told me that he had often urged Marion to write something personal about his life and his religious faith. In response, Marion sent him a long essay (eighty-seven pages in typescript) titled “Credo.” The friend noted: “It is definitely not the gossipy thing I was frankly hoping for (for example, I remember sitting on his porch one afternoon, and he said something like, ‘When Cleanth Brooks was sitting where you are . . .’).”

My guess is that most of Montgomery’s readers are generally familiar with his work and the intellectual history behind it: the men of letters (St. Thomas, the neo-Thomists Maritain and Gilson, Fugitives, Agrarians, New Critics, and others) who influenced his criticism of modern literature and culture. So rather than further discuss his works and ideas, in the spirit of Marion’s friend’s interest, let me offer a few personal though not really gossipy anecdotes and memories about the man himself. These will at least partially reveal personal and humorous facets not always evident in Montgomery’s best-known writings.

While studying for the MA in literature with Russell Kirk in Mecosta, Michigan, I had the good fortune to meet Marion and Dot Montgomery, two Southern “Fugitives from Progress” (Kirk’s term for the many traditionalists who visited him). They came up to Piety Hill, Russell and Annette Kirk’s home, for an Intercollegiate Studies Institute seminar on the question “Can Virtue Be Taught?” Mr. Montgomery (back then he was always Mr. Montgomery to me) and Dr. Kirk took turns addressing the topic, and all lectures were in the Kirk library. On a hot Saturday afternoon following a large lunch, Mr. Montgomery was lecturing, and his lecture went on, and on, and on. Along with the afternoon sun, all the warm bodies in the library made the room hotter and hotter. Dr. Kirk, seated at his desk in the corner, and in full view of the assembled audience, began to nod and doze. Annette quietly sent her small daughter Andrea to awaken Dr. Kirk. This happened more than once, as the lecture went on some more. Finally, when Mr. Montgomery paused for a moment between thoughts, Dot cried out: “Marion, have mercy on these people!”⁴

Despite Mr. Montgomery’s very long and somewhat dense lectures at this Piety Hill/ISI seminar, I was so taken by his learning and perception—and by his down-to-earth attention to the local, the particular, the concrete, the personal—that I began to read his books and essays. I also followed Mr. Montgomery back down South, to the University of Georgia, where I studied with him for the PhD.

As Mr. Montgomery’s student, I discovered that he was extremely devoted to those he taught and mentored. He himself was very serious about the literature he read, taught, and wrote about, and he expected his students to be as well—to respond imaginatively and intelligently to what they read in his classes. The attention and the time he gave to student writing astonishes me. How could he spend so much time editing and commenting on it? I have before me two essays I wrote for him: a fifteen-page essay on T. S. Eliot’s Christianity and Culture and an eight-page essay comparing and contrasting Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.” The first essay has appended to it four and a half pages of single-spaced commentary from Mr. Montgomery’s pen; the second, four pages of his single-spaced commentary. Mr. Montgomery also edited both essays for style, suggesting ways to make the argument clearer and with more force and grace. In my nearly thirty years of teaching at the collegiate level, I have never seen anyone give so much careful attention to student writing.

This attention was not always comforting. I recall making a sweeping generalization in a draft of a chapter of my dissertation. Mr. Montgomery’s comment was terse: “You might spill a bit more ink on this one.” The point I made was for the most part true, but I had not earned the right to make the point by acquiring mastery of the material: I had not demonstrated it by argument and example. So I had to go back to the library, and after about two weeks of reading and several more days of writing, I earned, in Mr. Montgomery’s eyes, the right to make the same generalization.

Mr. Montgomery took so much time with his students and their work because he wanted to help them get at the truth of things. One of his favorite quotations, frequently occurring in his writings, is from St. Thomas: “The purpose of the study of philosophy is not to learn what others have thought, but to learn how the truth of things stands.” In his own Liberal Arts and Community: The Feeding of the Larger Body, he writes: “The truth of things, which must be our concern always, is revealed through words rightly used and rightly taken. That revelation is the art of all liberal arts.’’⁵ While he knew that words are tools that sometimes break in the hand, he also knew that speech is a gift given to man by God so that we might know the world and the creatures God placed in it. In one of the finest personal essays I have ever read, “To My Son, Going Away to School,” Marion the father (or “Dad,” as he signs himself) writes to Marion the son: “I remind you once more to remember that, whether the word be German, English, algebraic, ‘To use the wrong word is to bear false witness.’ Distinguish. Discriminate.”⁶ I share this passage with all  my freshman students at Hillsdale College, hoping it will startle them out of the slothful and careless misuse of words. Word choice is a moral choice, whether we like to admit it or not. By precept and by example, Mr. Montgomery taught this arresting and potentially life-changing principle.

One of my favorite Montgomery anecdotes he himself more than once told, the humor at his own expense. While giving a lecture at a literature conference in Virginia, he had his ubiquitous Marsh Wheeling cigar in hand, flourishing it to emphasize important points in his talk. He noted an older gentlemen in the audience, apparently listening to every word with great attention. Who might it be? He realized it was Malcolm Cowley, the great literary critic and editor of the New Republic. At the end of the lecture Cowley immediately came up to the podium, Montgomery thinking it was to discuss the finer points of his lecture. Instead, Cowley asked: “Is that a Marsh Wheeling cigar? Where did you get it?”

* * *

I hope these anecdotes will put some flesh and blood on a person most know only through his writings in books and periodicals. Glad as I am to have his books, and to understand some of them, they do not take his place. Much as I and others who knew him personally have learned from his books, I suspect we have learned much more from Marion in person, or from his letters to us. Marion in the flesh, in person, sitting on his porch at the big house in Crawford, Georgia—this means more to me than all the books.⁷

However, we do live for Eternity. In his books but also in his person (as teacher, friend, mentor, correspondent, confidant, indeed, as a father to many), Marion Montgomery has helped so many of us wayfarers to prepare for Eternity. God being with us, we shall meet him again. Thanks be to God for Marion. ♦

2      Marion Montgomery. Volume 3 of the trilogy: Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy (LaSalle, IL: Sherwood Sugden, 1984), 217, 278.

3      Volume 1 of the trilogy: Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home (LaSalle, IL: Sherwood Sugden, 1981), 397–408. See also the chapter titled “Ancient Manicheans in Rural Georgia—and Elsewhere,” 374–76.

4      Montgomery’s remarks at the seminar were expanded and turned into a book: Virtue and Modern Shadows of Turning: Preliminary Agitations, published in 1990 by ISI books. Like Homer, Mr. Montgomery liked to ramble. Also like Homer, he was never in a hurry to say what he had to say. Those who wonder why his lectures, periodical essays, and books are long and digressive should consult Gerhart Niemeyer’s previously mentioned Center Journal essay “Why Marion Montgomery Has to ‘Ramble’ ” (Spring 1985).

5      Marion Montgomery, Liberal Arts and Community: The Feeding of the Larger Body (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), xi.

6      This personal essay is collected in Montgomery’s, On Matters Southern: Essays About Literature and Culture, 1964–2000 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 195–98.

7       Numerous tributes to Marion Montgomery from students and friends have been collected in The Christendom Review 4. no. 1 (Summer 2012), an online journal. These tributes may be read and hard copies of the memorial issue can be obtained by consulting www.christendomreview.com.