Two Southern Writers

       One of these fine motivated mornings I may summon enough industry to buttress prejudice with sufficient research to address the question of what actually distinguishes southern writing, but today, in this modest maiden column, I remember two outstanding men worthy of the title southern writer whom I had the great pleasure of knowing.

      Andrew Lytle (1902-1995) and, more peripherally, Peter Taylor (1917-1994), were both connected with the Agrarian Movement (made famous by Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate at Vanderbilt University).  I leave it to the interested reader to peruse Wikipedia for listings of their works and awards.  In a happy circumstance for me, both Lytle and Taylor were associated with the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly and were close friends of my mother-in-law who, at 91, still lives in the Assembly.  The remarkable thing to me about the two men was their uncommonly gracious hospitality.

      Lytle, ever lamenting in his writings and conversation the passing of the agrarian South and what he called Christendom, lived alone, at the time I met him, in a heavily timbered log house with a wraparound veranda on which he was most afternoons to be seen at his ease, waving to passers-by, ever solicitous of a listening ear and any bold enough to share a small pouring of his 110-proof bourbon whiskey.

      “How do you like Jack Daniel’s, Mr. Lytle,” I ventured to ask the first time I sat on his veranda.

      “Not fit to drink” was his quick answer.  Never one to mince words, Andrew sipped his bourbon from a little silver cup—what, to his mind, it appeared, was a decided improvement on the mint julep.

      He spoke eloquently of the scourge of the industrial revolution which had produced “contemporary man,” a creature divested of his proper and natural bond with the land.

      “Contemporary man has no root,” Lytle explained.  “He’s always on the move, hopping about from place to place.  You see him here, then there.  He’s like a flea.”

      And yet he would wax most nostalgic when recounting how he loved riding the trains as a younger man, not at all embarrassed by the patent contradiction.

      Peter Taylor, not so quirky or controversial as his senior contemporary, was at least his equal in hospitality.  My wife and I had the pleasure of lunching with Peter at The Hospitality Shop in Sewanee, Tennessee, hearing him read from his acclaimed novel A Summons to Memphis, and having tea with him and his poet wife Eleanor Ross Taylor in a modest home they kept at Sewanee.  The extraordinary thing about Peter was his proclivity for turning the conversation away from himself, which was so in keeping with his keen interest in people.  At one point in the conversation he asked me the most incredible question.

      “So...what are you writing?”