Imagining Our Time: Recollections and
Reflections on American Writing by
Lewis P. Simpson (Baron Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2007).xv + 264 pp.

MARK ROYDEN WINCHELL (1948-2007) was Professor
of English at Clemson Univeristy and director
of the Great Works of Western Civilization program.
Author of numerous critical biographies and scholarly
studies in literary criticism, his most recent book
is God, Man, & Hollywood (ISI Books, 2007).

The story of the original series of the
Southern Review has been told often and
well. (The most comprehensive treatment is
to be found in Thomas W. Cutrer’s Parnassus
on the Mississippi [1984].) Perhaps that is
because it is a tale with a discernible beginning,
middle, and end. The beginning occurred
in February of 1935 when Louisiana
State University president James Monroe
Smith approached a recently hired assistant
professor of English named Robert Penn
Warren about the feasibility of publishing a
literary magazine on the LSU campus. A
crony of Huey Long, Smith was probably no
more a man of letters than was his political
patron, but both the Kingfish and his hireling
sensed that an intellectual review could bring
welcome publicity to the university. Money
was flowing freely, and the first issue of the
Southern Review was published by the end of
the summer.

Although Long was felled by an assassin’s
bullet on Labor Day weekend and Smith was
soon in the penitentiary for misappropriating
university funds, the Southern Review,
under the inspired leadership of Warren and
Cleanth Brooks, was a spectacular success,
regularly publishing some of the best poets,
critics, and fiction writers of the time. In
fact, in 1940, a writer for Time magazine
observed that the literary center of the western
world had moved “from the left bank of
the Seine to the Left bank of the Mississippi.”
It was perhaps inevitable that a new president,
who had previously served as commandant
at West Point, would put an end to
all of this. Because a literary quarterly was
considered a needless luxury in time of war,
the Southern Review was abruptly suspended
in 1942. As has been frequently observed, the
operating subsidy for the magazine was almost
exactly equal to the cost of feeding the
football team’s tiger mascot.

What is less well known is that the Southern
Review was revived in 1965 and has now
lasted six times as long as the original series.
Lewis P. Simpson was instrumental in this
revival and served as co-editor of the magazine
from 1965 until his retirement in 1987.
During that time the review was actually two
magazines. The issues produced by Simpson’s
co-editor Donald Stanford were dedicated
to spreading the gospel of Yvor Winters, in
particular, and neo-formalist poetry in general,
while Simpson himself was more concerned
with Southern literature and intellectual
history. Both of his interests are amply
demonstrated in Simpson’s posthumously
published collection of essays Imagining Our
Time.

The volume begins with a long and densely
argued essay relating Julien Benda’s controversial
polemic “The Treason of the Clerks”
to the philosophy of Eric Voegelin. Simpson’s
speculations are all the more fascinating for
the fact that Voegelin makes no reference to
Benda in his own voluminous writing. But,
when Simpson tried to check “The Treason
of the Clerks” out of the LSU library, he
discovered that Voegelin had the book (available
only in the original French) checked out
and that it was long overdue. (At approximately
the same time that the original series
of the Southern Review was being published,
Voegelin, Richard Weaver, and Willmoore
Kendall were all at LSU!) The “clerks” to
whom Benda refers are members of the
intellectual class, who once served God before
defecting to the realm of secular ideas
and then eventually selling out for political
power and influence in the early twentieth
century. Simpson is surely right when he sees
this downward trajectory roughly matching
Voegelin’s view of the decline of Western
Civilization.

Curiously enough, the burden of Simpson’s
volume would seem to contradict the gloominess
of Voegelin and Benda. After the initial
entry, each of the essays is an appreciation of
individuals who spent their lives in what can
loosely be called the Republic of Letters.
Although Walker Percy eventually became a
lay member of the Benedictine Order, none
of these writers was a cleric, and most maintained
no more than an ambivalent relationship
with the university. Consider, for example,
the subjects of Simpson’s second essay—
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin
Franklin. Although he studied at William and
Mary and prided himself (on his tombstone)
as being “the Father of the University of
Virginia,” Jefferson did not have a university
degree. Franklin, of course, was the paradigmatic
autodidact. Nevertheless, both were
men of ideas. What is perhaps even more
significant is their contribution to the myth
that America is a propositional nation,
founded on ideas rather than shared customs
and bonds of kinship. Although paleoconservatives
instinctively react against this notion,
the geographical immensity and cultural
diversity of these United States may
suggest that we live in either a propositional
nation or no nation at all.

The next “clerk” with whom Simpson
deals is the literary critic and former Communist
Malcolm Cowley. Rather than indicting
Cowley for his long career as a fellow
traveler and his failure to do proper penance
for his errors in judgment, Simpson indulges
Cowley’s nostalgia for the Red Decade as
recorded in his memoir The Dream of the
Golden Mountains (1982). (One can almost
hear Barbra Streisand humming “The Way
We Were” in the background.) Cowley
responded more in bewilderment than outrage
to the Moscow Show Trials and the
Hitler-Stalin Pact.

(The one insight that bears on the general
theme of Simpson’s book is Cowley’s surmise
that “the symbolic murders [in the American
Communist Party]…would be real murders
if the intellectuals controlled the state apparatus.”)
But, for all his political naïveté, Cowley
was more than a mere Stalinist hack. He had
a genuine understanding and appreciation of
literature as an art and almost single-handedly
revived Faulkner’s reputation with the publication
of The Portable Faulkner in 1946.
Writing into his late eighties, he was the last
surviving member of the Lost Generation.

Simpson turns his attention back to Thomas
Jefferson in a discussion of the two
versions of Robert Penn Warren’s booklength
poem Brother to Dragons (1952 and
1978). This “tale in verse and voices” is based
on a grisly incident in the lives of two settlers
on the Kentucky frontier—Jefferson’s nephews
Lilburne and Isham Lewis. On the night
of December 15, 1811, Lilburne—with the
assistance of Isham—butchered a servant boy
in full view of his other slaves. The lad’s
offense had been to break a pitcher prized by
his master’s dead mother, Lucy Jefferson
Lewis. In an effort to evade the law (which,
Simpson points out, forbade the murder of
slaves, even if it did not guarantee them
liberty or the pursuit of happiness), Lilburne
and Isham agreed to shoot each other over
their mother’s grave. Isham, however, survived,
spent some time in jail, escaped, and
apparently died in the Battle of New Orleans.
Lacking an historical record of
Jefferson’s reaction to these incidents, Warren
created an imaginative one.

Because Brother to Dragons is a poem of
ideas, Warren (like Jefferson) belongs to the
tradition of clerks. The central question here
is the extent to which Jefferson’s belief in
human virtue might have been altered by this
act of brutality in his own family. An important
secondary concern is whether Jefferson’s
moral optimism may have left another kinsman,
Meriwether Lewis unprepared for the
treachery and violence he encountered on
the frontier. Warren even has Jefferson blame
himself for Meriwether’s suicide.

Whatever may have been the case historically,
Simpson is shrewd enough to realize
that Warren (particularly in the second version
of the poem) is actually writing a parable
for our own time in a form eerily reminiscent
of the Book of Job—from which the poet
incidentally derives his title. “This was the
time of the greatest crisis in our national
identity since the Civil War:” Simpson writes,
“the agonizing epoch that began in the
American response to North Korea’s invasion
of South Korea, that reached a climax in
the disastrous historical trap of the misadventure
in Vietnam, and that, as daily events
unmistakably indicate, now reaches toward
its culminating historical expression in the
American imperial spirit’s drive toward the
‘globalization’ of American culture.”

Although Warren was a university professor
for most of his adult life, his success as a
writer freed him from financial dependence
on the academy. This was not the case with
his friend Allen Tate and even less true of
Columbia’s Lionel Trilling. Although Trilling
would have preferred to live as an independent
writer and critic, the opportunities
for such a career were beginning to dry up
when he reached early adulthood in the
1930s. Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley,
born just a few years earlier, may have been
the last generation able to survive solely as
literary intellectuals.

Without the knack for popular writing
shared by his fellow Jewish intellectuals Saul
Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Bernard
Malamud, Trilling was fated to spend his life
not as a writer who taught but as a teacher
who wrote. In the process, he broke
Columbia’s tradition of anti-Semitism, produced
literary criticism that helped shape the
sensibility of his time, and greatly influenced
several generations of students. Not content
with these achievements, Trilling distanced
himself from the role of professional academic,
by resigning from the university’s
graduate faculty and returning exclusively to
the undergraduate classroom, where he ceased
teaching American literature altogether—
believing that he could not teach American
writers and be one at the same time. If this
clerk was guilty of any treason to his vocation,
it was in seriously undervaluing his own
accomplishments.

Simpson’s discussion of Lionel Trilling’s
wife Diana may well be the most interesting
and accessible essay in the book. Perhaps
because she was not a professor, Mrs.Trilling
did not suffer her husband’s ambivalent relationship
with the academy. She began her
career as a critic writing unsigned fiction
reviews for the Nation in 1941. (Although
Lionel had gotten her the assignment, she
soon distinguished herself in her own right.)
Early and late, Diana Trilling’s cultural criticism
is characterized by the sort of moral
seriousness her husband discerned in Victorian
literature. For most of her career, Mrs.
Trilling was a liberal anti-Communist, a
position that became increasingly unpopular
among literary intellectuals during the
McCarthy era. Without either turning to the
hard Right or allowing her youthful flirtation
with the Party to fade into a Cowleylike
nostalgia, she maintained her animus
toward the knee-jerk Left and her disdain for
the fashions of anti-anti-Communism. Politically
incorrect long before that term had
even been coined, Diana Trilling believed
that it was the clerk’s function to perceive the
chaos of one’s time while using the critical
sensibility to impose some order on that
chaos.

Although not without interest, Simpson’s
essays on three fellow Southerners—Louis D.
Rubin, Jr., Andrew Lytle, and Eudora
Welty—are the shortest and slightest entries
in his book. Each of these figures found a
special niche in the Republic (or Confederacy)
of Letters. A professor at Johns Hopkins
and later at the University of North Carolina,
Rubin is best known for his criticism
and his role in institutionalizing the study of
Southern literature since the mid-1950s.
Nevertheless, he spent his early career as a
journalist and devoted much of his time after
retiring to establishing the Algonquin Press
of Chapel Hill, a commercial venture that
promoted Southern literature with particular
emphasis on the work on young writers.
Simpson’s focuses on none of these things, or
even on Rubin’s identity as a Southern Jew,
but on his subject’s lifelong passion for sailing
and boatbuilding. There is apparently a metaphorical
significance here that may be lost on
those who do not know Rubin as well as
Simpson did.

Andrew Lytle’s connection with the academy
was more equivocal than Louis Rubin’s.
The one Agrarian who tried hardest for the
longest period of time to make a living as a
farmer, Lytle kept coming back to the university
(principally the Iowa Writer’s Workshop,
the University of Florida, and Sewanee.)
As both critic and novelist, he was greatly
admired by a small but discriminating audience.
In his later years, Lytle became a kind
of living monument to a by-gone era in
Southern letters. Living into his nineties, he
was literally the last Agrarian.

Although Eudora Welty may have been
the last of the great Southern writers to live
primarily on her royalties, she was no stranger
to the university campus. Until age and ill
health made her a virtual recluse, she gave
frequent campus readings and spoke at literary
conferences throughout the South. Moreover,
her critical writings indicate an
Apollonian consciousness of craft. (It is altogether
fitting that she got her start as a writer
in the original series of the Southern Review.)
In addition to having a flawless ear for
language, Welty was one of our most acutely
visual writers. In making this point, Simpson
begins with a reading of Welty’s story “No
Place for You My Love” and concludes with
a discussion of her role as a photographer for
the WPA during the 1930s.

Imagining Our Time concludes, quite appropriately,
with a monograph-length discussion
of Walker Percy. The only essay not
previously published elsewhere, it explores
the life and career of one of the most faithful
clerks of our time. Trained as a physician
until a bout with tuberculosis ended his
medical career before it began,

Percy became a philosopher of language
and, finally in middle age, an important
American novelist. Although he was not
“discovered” by the new Southern Review,
Percy’s career was almost exactly contemporaneous
with Simpson’s editorship of that
magazine. Philosophically, Percy was virtually
a European novelist—a devout Roman
Catholic writing about ideas and values for a
post-modern world that he understood without
embracing. The bleakness of his vision
was leavened by a wicked sense of humor that
made him one of the most entertaining
novelists of his time.

Simpson’s essay on Percy is, by turns, both
deeply personal and closely analytical. Although
Percy remains best known for his first
novel The Moviegoer (1961), Simpson focuses
on his later work—particularly Lost in the
Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983).
Masquerading as a pop-culture parody, this
grab-bag of philosophical meditation,
fabulistic narrative, and social commentary
focuses on a problem that is cosmological in
the ancient sense of the term—the need to
understand the cosmos and one’s place in it.
Paradoxically, what makes this task difficult
is also what makes it possible at all—the fact
that man is conscious of himself as a self. This
is a theme one finds running throughout
Percy’s work, including a long philosophical
essay that Simpson published in the Southern
Review.

Although Imaging Our Time was certainly
not meant to be a refutation of Benda, it
reminds us that—even in our own troubled
age—a few intellectuals have not sold out to
power, mammon, and political fashion. The
fact that a minority has remained faithful to
the clerk’s true vocation makes it all the more
imperative that we acknowledge their presence
among us. Unfortunately, with the
exception of Louis Rubin, Simpson’s subjects
are all dead. With his own passing in
2005, a remarkable generation of writers and
critics is pretty well gone. But the record they
left behind is still with us. That alone should
give us hope that they were not the last of the
clerks.