THOMAS H. LANDESS was for many years a professor of English at the University of Dallas.

Those of us who valued Mark Winchell’s
friendship and good company share in
the grief of his wife and two sons. We too will
miss him. A victim of cancer at the age of
fifty-nine, he was one of those people who
should live to be a hundred, not only because
of his warmth and wit and enormous capacity
for friendship, but also because he fought
the good fight and carried the scars of numerous
encounters with the Old Enemy. His
death leaves yet another gap in our alreadyragged
line of defense.

For many years, Mark taught at Clemson,
which began as an agriculture college and
over the years evolved into a politically
correct university. Today Clemson boasts
almost as many ideologues teaching the humanities
as you’re likely to find at the leading
Ivy League schools. Yet Mark managed to
direct a program called the Great Works of
Western Civilization without being burned
at the stake by his colleagues.

In the last few years of his career, he grew
increasingly disturbed by the sea change
taking place locally and on campuses nationwide.
Clemson University was bouncing and
rattling behind the rest of academia like a
pull-toy jerked along by an insolent child.
Mark recoiled, not so much from the grind of
paper grading, impertinent students, and
faculty meetings (the nearest thing to hell on
earth), but from the hijacking of truth and its
devastating effect on the minds of students.

Though born in the North, Mark lived in
South Carolina for twenty-three years and
learned more about the region’s history and
culture than all but a handful of Southernborn
academics. Among his friends were
scholars like Clyde Wilson of the University
of South Carolina and Donald Livingston of
Emory, who explored the complexities of the
region to counter the more simplistic and
agenda-driven depictions by Stanley Elkins,
Kenneth Stampp, and other leftist
mythmakers. Mark’s virtues as a scholar—
thoroughness, objectivity, and an openness
to the nuances of language and human conduct—
moved him to throw in with the
Southern conservatives rather than the leftleaning
revisionists; and at one point he
tentatively titled a collection of his essays
Confessions of a Copperhead. He even delivered
a paper at a New Orleans gathering of
the Philadelphia Society in which he tackled
the Confederate flag controversy, dissecting
the rhetoric of the opposition with lighthanded
irony.

On the other hand, in his biography of
Fugitive-Agrarian Donald Davidson he gave
a sternly disapproving account of Davidson’s
involvement with the Tennessee Federation
for Constitutional Government, an organization
that sought to block desegregation of
the state’s school system by filing legal challenges
in federal court. Mrs. Davidson, who
had a master’s degree in law, wrote some of
the challenges. The courts dismissed them.
The schools were duly integrated. The many
Vanderbilt alums who studied under Davidson
and idolized him might have been tempted
to airbrush this episode in his life. Mark
covered it in raw detail.

That kind of hardboiled integrity, along
with an aptitude for empathy rare among the
professorial class, made him one of the best
biographers the academy has ever produced.
Two of Mark’s works—Cleanth Brooks and
the Rise of Modern Criticism and Where No Flag
Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance—
are definitive and will probably stand
alone into perpetuity. A third—Too Good to
Be True: The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler –
deals with a figure dramatically different
from Brooks and Davidson and demonstrates
Mark’s ability to write a fair and riveting
biography of just about anybody, from
Osama bin Laden to the third man on the
garbage truck. These three serve to represent
the consistently high quality of his work.

Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism
came as a surprise to Brooks himself, who
never imagined that anyone would want to
write a biography of a mere critic. When he
was finally persuaded to sit for his portrait, he
cooperated fully and in good cheer. Those
who know that Brooks’s closest friend was
Robert PennWarren, sometimes assume that
the two agreed on the basic things. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Warren was
an atheist; Brooks was a committed Christian
who left the Episcopal Church when it departed
from strict orthodoxy. Warren was a
political and social liberal; Brooks was a
conservative, who—at a meeting commemorating
the fiftieth anniversary of I’ll Take My
Stand—told fellow panelists, “Let’s get something
started again.”

In this biography, Mark uses Brooks’s life
to focus on twentieth-century literary theory,
and particularly the “New Criticism,” known
also as “aesthetic formalism”—a method of
approaching poetry and fiction through a
close reading of the text, the exploration of
connotation as well as denotation, multilevel
meanings, irony and allusion—and with
little or no attention to the author’s life. Prior
to the rise of the New Criticism, English
teachers in high school and college typically
lectured on the lives of the poets or fiction
writers, then pointed out how specific events
influenced specific works. In taking up “Ode
on a Grecian Urn,” for example, biographical
critics would tell students about Keats’s
relationship with his fianceĂŠ, Fanny Brawne.
In contrast, Cleanth Brooks wrote a lengthy
essay exploring the poet’s use of tone and
imagery, diction and syntax, paradox and
irony that enabled readers to understand the
rich complexity of that poem for the first
time ever. This essay epitomizes the New
Criticism and is regarded as one of its finest
achievements.

Mark traces this approach to literature
from its beginnings in the informal meetings
of the Vanderbilt Fugitive Group, to its
dominance of the classroom for decades, and
finally to its downfall at the hands of the New
Left, whose leadership saw literature not as an
end in itself, as did the New Critics, but as
one more means to further the revolution. In
his summary of the struggle between competing
critical theories (and ultimately competing
ideologies), Mark—well-versed in
this surprisingly esoteric subject—is fair to all
sides (even to Alfred Kazin, F. O. Matthiessen,
and Leslie Fiedler),—despite his commitment
to Brooks and the New Criticism.

He bolsters his opinion by explicating
Brooks’s major works in detail, chapter-bychapter,
point by point. Of particular significance,
is his discussion of Understanding
Poetry and Understanding Fiction, the two
textbooks—written with Robert Penn Warren—
that transformed the teaching of literature
in America.

In the end, Mark affirms the central theme
of his biography—that Brooks had a brilliant
creative mind, that he was the prime mover in
the rise of the New Criticism, and that those
with a different point of view understood
precisely what he stood for, which is why they
attacked him so fiercely. Linking
the man with his work,
Mark said of Brooks, “He combined
a tough mind and a kind
heart better than anyone else I
have known.”

Where No Flag Flies: Donald
Davidson and the Southern Resistance—
a project he inherited
when Mel Bradford
died—will surely suffice until
the Rapture. Here, he takes a
subject who ordinarily would
be of little interest to anyone
but a remnant of literary scholars
and makes of his life a paradigm of the
outsider—a poet, critic, and historian who,
during a long career, deliberately chose the
losing side, knowing the cost and accepting
defeat before it ever arrived on his doorstep.

Davidson—a shy and ostensibly colorless
academic—remained at Vanderbilt while
fellow Fugitive-Agrarians John Crowe Ransom,
Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate
went North to establish national reputations.
Davidson refused to abandon the principles
of Agrarianism and wrote non-modernist
poetry when the hue was not the wear. He
also attacked industrialization at a time when
America’s greatest heroes were its Captains
of Industry. To many, he seemed diffident
and passionless. Yet an unquenchable flame
burned in his heart. In his soft-spoken classroom
lectures—always focused on the literary
work, never polemical or hortatory—
Donald Davidson probably attracted more
students to the conservative cause than did
the rest of the Agrarians combined.

No one could ever figure out the riddle of
how he did it. Peabody—then a teachers
college located across the street from
Vanderbilt—would send over spies to take
his classes and, like Delilah, discover the
secret of his strength. The spies would come
back with empty notebooks:
“I don’t know. He just talks.”

If Mark’s biography
doesn’t answer that riddle, he
provides readers with valuable
clues to solve the larger
mystery of this complex and
highly private man. To accomplish
the task, he had to
become a wide-ranging historian
of the period; a critic
who understood not only the
literary currents of the early
twentieth century, but also
the subtleties of poetic diction
and prosody; a political and
social philosopher who confronted the 220-
year-old oxymoron of E Pluribus Unum;
and a tough yet sympathetic interpreter of
the human mind and heart.

Mark is at times severe with Donald
Davidson, exposing the flaws in his poetry
when he finds them and addressing Davidson’s
occasional lapses into mulishness and petulance.
But even in dealing with these episodes,
his account is circumspect. In this volume, he
accomplishes the goal of every serious biographer,
which is to define his subject so precisely
that he or she will come alive for both the
present and the future. Davidson—who as a
teacher and critic influenced some of the most
formidable literary figures of the twentieth
century—deserved a first-rate biographer.
In Mark Winchell, he got one.

Norman Podhoretz and Richard Kostelanitz,
among others, speak of two American “literary
families”—one Jewish, the other Southern.
In some respects the families are similar.
In others they are crucially different. After
writing biographies of two prominent Southern
family members—both products of small
towns, both political and social conservatives,
both conventional academics—Mark
also examined the life and works of a prominent
member of the Jewish family—a product
of the seamier side of Newark and New
York City, a fierce Trotskyite, and a highprofile
rattler of academic cages.

Too Good to Be True: The Life and Work of
Leslie Fiedler is an unlikely subject for a
conservative to tackle, either as author or
reader. Most conservatives, North and South,
probably believe that Love and Death in the
American Novel is less about Herman Melville
and Mark Twain than about a hyperactive
egotist who should never have been allowed
to read Freud. Among other accomplishments,
Fiedler, an enfant terrible into old age,
taught American critics and readers to find
twisted sexual relationships in every literary
work from Moby Dick to Rebecca of Sunnybrook
Farm. You would think the man who wrote
the definitive biographies of Brooks and
Davidson would have crossed the street to
avoid this one.

Yet Too Good to Be True is a joy to read,
and Fiedler emerges as a delightful figure.
When researching biography, Mark was a
diligent investigative reporter and a quiet
and attentive listener. He asked few questions
and was tolerant of lengthy, circumlocutory
replies. He seldom interrupted and throughout
his interviews maintained a mask of
objectivity. This demeanor encouraged his
subjects to babble on and reveal more than
they might have otherwise intended.

After reading this book, one can imagine
how the sessions with Fiedler must have
gone: Mark, his face an enigma, nodding
while Fiedler, a world-class raconteur, talked
on and on, interrupting one anecdote to start
another, each crowded with sharp detail.
You can see the results of those conversations
in this entertaining and at times highly idiomatic
narrative: the youthful Fiedler, learning
about sex and alcohol while working in
the neighborhood shoe store; hanging out
with bums in the park; reading Thoreau at
the age of twelve and Marx at thirteen; his
best friend’s love affair with his fiftyish Latin
teacher; refusing to salute the flag when the
ROTC marched by. All of these are rendered
in prose that is intense and at times
scatological. You can almost hear Fiedler’s
voice in its cadences. When the narrative
moves beyond the personal, however, the
voice is again Mark Winchell’s.

Particularly interesting is an account of
the intellectual warfare between Trotskyites
and Stalinists. To early twentieth-century
establishmentarians, they were both “reds”
or “commies”; but the situation was more
complicated. They hated each other. The
Trotskyites not only hated the Stalinists but
hated the Soviet government as a consequence.
Mark reports this conflict in the
same discreet, non-judgmental way he reports
disagreements among the Fugitive-
Agrarians—as if he had friends on both sides.
Likewise, he explicates Love and Death in the
American Novel and Fiedler’s other critical
works and fiction with an eye toward their
virtues as well as their shortcomings, his
conservative face all but unseen, except,
perhaps, in a few paragraphs, where the smile
of the Cheshire cat floats in the branches.

Depending on how you count them, Mark
wrote some twelve to fifteen books Most were
literary biographies, including studies of Joan
Didion, William F, Buckley, John Gregory
Dunne, William Humphrey, and Horace
McCoy. (The last three are pamphlets in the
Boise State Western Writers Series.) He was
by no means the first to fold critical commentary
into a literary biography; but the careful
attention he gives to each work and the length
of his explications mark his studies as special
and unique, something close to a new genre.

He also wrote extensively on Southern
politics. Books on the region include The
Cause of Us All: Cultural Politics and the
American South; Reinventing the South: Versions
of a Literary Region, a collection of his
essays; Talmadge: A Politician’s Legacy, A
Politician’s Life (co-authored with Senator
Herman Talmadge of Georgia); and maybe
fifty essays on the subject. Most of these,
along with pieces that focus on other areas
and issues, deserve to be published posthumously
in several volumes.

Mark was also interested in popular media.
His recently published book, God, Man.
and Hollywood: Politically Incorrect Cinema
from Birth of a Nation to The Passion of the
Christ, examines films that promote a traditional
view of America, religion, and the
family. And his marvelous piece on Jerry Lee
Lewis—written for the pop-music crowd
and full of rock ‘n’ roll idiom—can still be
found on the Internet.

Finally, he wrote and published
Neoconservative Criticism: Norman Podhoretz,
Kenneth S. Lynn, and Joseph Epstein and—
with his wife, Donna Haisty Winchell—
Ideas in Conflict, Writing about the Great Issues
of Civilization. These round out the long and
diversified bibliography of a highly prolific
scholar.

In reflecting on Mark’s life, those who
didn’t know him can mourn the loss of the
many more literary lives he might have
chronicled, the political commentary left unwritten,
the silencing of a distinctive voice in
defense of the permanent things. No more
brilliant surprises from that quarter. His body
of work—a substantial achievement for someone
twenty years older—is now complete.

For those of us who knew him, the loss of
artistry and craft is, as always, troubling and
sad—but not nearly as painful as the loss of a
friend. Sooner or later we all say goodbye to
each other; but as the years pass, it doesn’t get
any easier. Mark Winchell: Requiescat in
pace.