Southern Man

I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners (that is the listed author, by the way—the book has 12 essays written by different people, and rather than listing the book by the name of an editor, the book is listed as being authored by Twelve Southerners—I can’t think of any other book with a listed author like that) was the book we read for my tutorial this week.  The book was published in 1930 as an attempt to articulate what is distinctive and important about the traditional Southern culture.  As such, it is largely a response to observations (by Mencken, for example) that the South was a cultural wasteland.  The general thesis is that Southern culture is marked by its Agrarianism, that an agricultural society is not only an important part often South, but the defining feature of the South, and that the culture born in the South is both superior to and threatened, probably fatally (and actually fatally as it turns out), by Northern Industrialism.  The book preaches the virtues of a simple agricultural life, with no ambitions for progress or increasing wealth, but a life in tune with Nature, and the rhythms of the seasons.  (“A farm is not a place to grow wealthy; it is a place to grow corn” (Lytle).) It’s a slow life in the South, and the Twelve Southerners liked it that way.

The book is, as one would expect in a book with twelve different authors, a mixed bag.  Some of the essays are terribly tedious, which oddly, may have been intentional—after all, if you are preaching the merits of slowing down, not rushing through everything, then what better way to do so than by writing in a thoroughly non-economical manner.  Indeed, if a point can be made in a sentence, then it may be better to make it last two pages.   The condensed version of this book—or what I suppose could be called the California version—might make it to about two dozen pages and not lose any content at all.  (The Northern version wouldn’t exist at all if the thesis of this book is correct—Northerners would have no interest in a book which argues, quite explicitly, that progress is a bad thing.  (I’m not entirely sure that the last sentence is accurate, though—being a Californian, I have never really been able to see all that much difference between Northerners and Southerners—they are all just a bunch of Easterners—though if the thesis of this book is correct, my inability to distinguish among varieties of Easterners may be due to the fact that Southerners are extinct, having been killed off by Northerners bringing their Industrialized ways to the geographical South.))

None of the students in the tutorial liked this book at all.  I tried gamely for a couple hours to convince them of the merits of the Agrarian Tradition, but I didn’t get very far.  Every one of them was convinced of the virtues of Progress and Industrialization and doing things and being busy.  I couldn’t even get any of them to entertain the idea of spending a day doing nothing but sitting in one place looking out over a lake, let alone imaging a life of deliberate slowness.  And I tried really hard.   

Of course, I have no patience for this Southern Tradition either.  Sure, the idea of being in touch with Nature is good—I find the modern inability of people to understand the source of food, for example, to be thoroughly odd.  And sometimes, I would like to spend a day at a lake—but, and this is important, only with a book in hand.  Being unproductive drives me crazy.  My definition of “productive” is quite catholic—watching football or reading mystery novels or writing meaningless ruminations on a blog all count as being productive, but daydreaming does not.  Why?  I have no idea.  It’s undoubtedly some cultural characteristic.  I also can’t stand inefficiency, and the South, as described in this book, is horribly inefficient. 

So, is I’ll Take My Stand a Great Book?  Not at all.  But it is an important book, and a book well worth reading.  Once. And Quickly.