Glimpses of Seasons
~
A Pilgrimage to the Birthplace of
Robert Penn Warren
First published in the Fall 2008 issue of Southern Quarterly magazine
As the traveler nears the Tennessee line southwest of Russellville, the green rolling landscape of tilled fields and cattle pasture that one has been traversing since Bowling Green abruptly flattens out. Cast suddenly out of the hills by the highway’s impetus the motorist achieves a sense of being heaved up on some final shore after miles of soothingly oceanic dips and curves. Far into the distance there stretches a low and level plain of field and woodlot, farmhouse and silo.
A short time ago, during a wild April rainstorm, I drove down the narrow concrete strip of Kentucky State Highway 79 through a smoky seascape of grays and blues, bound for the hamlet of Guthrie. The early spring foliage was being battered by opaque sheets of rain hammering the pastures and woods on either side of the road. To the northwest and southeast were spread the handsome vistas of a still-functioning rural economy, thick brushy fence lines bordering broad expanses of winter wheat. Last summer’s tobacco stalks, awaiting the tiller, jutted despondently from fallow fields of goldenrod, while thick white petals knocked from roadside dogwoods floated the stormwater down the road’s eroded shoulder. American kestrels, small and vibrant falcons, were occasionally seen hunkered on the power lines strung overhead, glaring hungrily out into the murk.
I was entering Robert Penn Warren country, the formative geography of America’s first poet laureate and arguably our finest poet during the latter half of the twentieth century. The only writer to win Pulitzers for both fiction (All the King’s Men) and poetry (Promises: Poems, 1954-1956 and Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978), a playwright, teacher, and the author of critical essays, children’s books, a biography, short stories and influential academic texts, Warren (1905-1989) was according to the literary scholar R. W. B. Lewis “the most important man of letters in our time.”
Born in the formerly vigorous railroad town of Guthrie, Warren would show his intellectual precocity at an early age, graduating from high school at 16 and from Vanderbilt University (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) at 20. While at Vandy, Warren helped initiate the Fugitive movement with John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, thereby creating a revolutionary approach to literary interpretation that helped to usher in New Criticism, an analytical style that emphasizes fiction’s textual substance rather than the author’s socio-cultural background. As interested in history and politics as in literature, Warren later became a founding member of the Agrarians, a prescient group of Southern thinkers which urged the retention of agriculture, pastoral landscapes and native tradition in defiance of the accelerating mechanization and urbanization that was, and is, taking place in the “New South.” Warren went on to achieve in graduate work at the University of California, on a fellowship at Yale, and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.
Warren’s chief literary milestones include the novels All the King’s Men and World Enough and Time, and perhaps most importantly his Collected Poems, recently assembled by John Burt and published by Louisiana State University. Warren had taught at LSU in the 1930s where he developed a close relationship with Cleanth Brooks, with whom he would write groundbreaking textbooks and found the Southern Review. Warren’s literary interests were profoundly classical – he spent several years in Italy where he learned to read Dante in the original – and it is his juxtaposition of the epic Miltonian theme with his native Southern soil that makes Warren’s work highly accessible to the common reader, yet the profound continuation of a grand inherited tradition.
A native Kentuckian myself, I had first come across Warren’s work through extraneous reading in college and was immediately impressed with his multidisciplinary approach to literature and life. But it was not until my late twenties that I became acutely interested in poetry, and in Warren I found both a world-class poet and a reputable guide to the larger poetic canon of which I was for the most part ignorant. Warren’s literary essays helped me to pin down my own major interests, and in his fiction and poetry I located the same current of dark sublimity that permeates the worldviews of Melville and Faulkner, Coleridge and T. S. Eliot.
Guthrie itself proved to be precisely what I had expected: a small country crossroads huddled among the cornfields and tobacco barns of Todd County, easy enough to overlook en route to the comparative metropolis of Clarksville, Tennessee. Once an energetic center of rural mercantilism known as the “crossroads of railroads in America,” Guthrie started to wilt when the Louisville and Nashville Railroad (the president of which was a Mr. James Guthrie) pulled out, another victim of freight trucking and the interstate highway system. In the words of an old bluegrass song, the L & N don’t stop here anymore, and Guthrie, like many other towns once dependent upon rail commerce, has never recovered.
One approaches the city limits via a side road off 79, clayey plowed fields giving way to blockhouses and side streets of cracked asphalt and gravel. A series of washed-out tract houses of the Eisenhower period leads into the downtown proper, which is an encouraging repository of historic edifices and nineteenth-century brickwork. A roadside marker, improbably defaced with gang hieroglyphics (et in Arcadia ego), directs the seeker toward Cherry Street and the Warren birthplace. Splashing along the brimming pavement of Park Avenue I pass the Golden Rule Lumber Center and the American Café, and then a typically lackluster Great Society-era post office. I turn left on Third Street at the Guthrie Bank and then left again onto Cherry. In the yard of a steeply gabled two-story brick house is a bronze-lettered historical signpost. Warren had been born here a century ago, and I’d come on this frank pilgrimage to get some sense of the man’s ultimate origins, seeking to trace the root of his genius down through the red clay underpinnings of southern Kentucky.
The Robert Penn Warren Birthplace House, as it is officially titled, claims to be open five days a week for about four hours a day, but calling ahead is recommended as the historic site is privately owned, understaffed and poorly funded, supportive of the notion that slow years must often roll by for true creative greatness to be properly appreciated. Warren, a chronicler in his visionary poetics of Time as impersonal agonist, might have appreciated this.
I had spoken with Jeane Moore, Director of the Birthplace, a few hours previously and was expected. Ms. Moore and her co-host Ann Alexander operate the memorial out of love, belief, and hope, for despite Warren’s global reputation and a growing recognition of the permanence of his work, the Birthplace operates on a negligible budget and is dependent on scattered grants and the generosity of like-minded individuals.
The front of the small house displays a deep red brick exterior with a curious stained-glass frontispiece over the picture window facing the street. Two high chimneys rose into the rain, and the front porch and exteriors were smartly trimmed in white. The porch ushers one into a small foyer which leads to a narrow shotgun-style hallway with rooms branching off right and left; here my hosts greeted me as I shucked off my streaming raincoat.
Jeane Moore is an energetic middle-aged lady who has almost singlehandedly kept the Birthplace afloat during its regular periods of privation. Jeane’s pride in being a native of Warren’s hometown was tangible as she enthusiastically welcomed me into her domain. She had fought hard to keep the house anchored here in Guthrie when Western Kentucky University (to which Warren left his personal library) brazenly proposed having it pried off its foundations and shipped up to Bowling Green, leaving on the shorn foundation, Jeane exclaimed with jaunty indignation, “a tiny little plaque or something saying ‘Robert Penn Warren was born on this spot.’ Can you imagine?”
As Jeane was just leaving for another of her perpetual fundraising efforts I was delivered into the careful custodianship of her colleague Ann, who had been hovering quietly in the background while Jeane was welcoming me. Ann is older than Jeane and much more reserved, with the soft diffident serenity seen in Southern countrywomen who over the years have reached a certain accord with life. After Jeane rushed out into the storm Ann and I stood contemplating one another for a moment before she softly asked if I’d like to “have a look around.” Having driven through a torrential downpour to get here I allowed to Ann that I was prepared to commence at once, and she benignly gestured toward the adjacent sitting room on our left.
I could tell at a glance that the house was even smaller than it had looked from outside. This room, where the Warren family had presumably relaxed through cool spring evenings like this one, seemed somewhat close but looked comfortable enough, with horsehair-stuffed period sofas and monthlies from the 1890s laying naturally on a coffee table. The room had been tastefully transformed into a fin-de-siècle homage to Warren’s earliest era and specifically to his parents, with formal portraits in bulky hardwood frames hanging on three walls. Robert Franklin Warren and Anna Ruth Penn Warren were pictured soon after their marriage, an attractive and hopeful-looking young couple facing the new century together. Robert Franklin Warren worked in a hardware store and had sincere but unrealized hopes of becoming a published poet himself, and his son would later suffer from vague misgivings about his own literary talent and rising reputation. Robert Penn would escape from Guthrie, though it would remain a bedrock influence on his work, while his father would never find the magic key to unlock the artistic development and recognition he yearned for.
A crowd of about forty schoolchildren of all ages was pictured on one wall, and Ann pointed out a slight pale freckled lad in the first row, smaller and obviously younger than any of his classmates and a jolting contrast to the hulking, craggy éminence grise of academe that Warren would become. Like a glimpse into another America, Warren and his schoolmates are shown barefoot and in neatly pressed dungarees and gingham dresses, posing awkwardly outside the Guthrie School in the intense sunshine of spring.
The next room featured a tribute to Warren’s formidable academic record, with local press articles detailing his progress at Vanderbilt, his inscribed dorm key, his diplomas and a few letters home. In his freshman portrait he looks even younger than sixteen. On the far wall, somewhat out of place, was a black and white portrait of a shirtless Warren in his late 60s by pop photographer Annie Leibowitz, whose unequivocal style somewhat recalls that of the late lamented Robert Mapplethorpe. Ann made it clear that she didn’t care at all for this picture.
On the other side of the hallway was a shelf of Warren’s collected works, including exotic translations. As always I was stunned by his output. A children’s book on the Alamo, according to Ann, had been required reading in Guthrie schools and espoused an historic viewpoint “different from what you usually hear about the Alamo,” by which I understood that she felt the book transcended the usual bellicose John Wayne-style triumphalism.
Anne drew my especial attention to a display along the center wall, murmuring “I want you to read this; it’s my favorite poem by Robert Penn Warren.” She gestured to a glass-encased dais upon which lay an open book, two faded black-and-white snapshots – one of a lovely teenage girl and another of a gleaming Model A on a gravel road before a storefront – and a crumbling newspaper clipping announcing the wedding of a local debutante named Ruth Northington. Ann insisted that I read the poem then and there:
“True Love”
In silence the heart raves. It utters words
Meaningless, that never had
A meaning. I was ten, skinny, red-headed,
Freckled. In a big black Buick,
Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat
In front of the drugstore, sipping something
Through a straw. There is nothing like
Beauty. It stops your heart. It
Thickens your blood. It stops your breath. It
Makes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath.
I leaned against a telephone pole, and watched.
I thought I would die if she saw me.
How could I exist in the same world with that brightness?
Two years later she smiled at me. She
Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead.
Her grown brothers walked with the bent-knee
Swagger of horsemen. They were slick-faced.
Told jokes in the barbershop. Did no work.
Their father was what is called a drunkard.
Whatever he was he stayed on the third floor
Of the big white farmhouse under the maples for twenty-five years.
He never came down. They brought everything up to him.
I did not know what a mortgage was.
His wife was a good, Christian woman, and prayed.
When the daughter got married, the old man came down wearing
An old tailcoat, the pleated shirt yellowing.
The sons propped him. I saw the wedding. There were
Engraved invitations, it was so fashionable. I thought
I would cry. I lay in bed that night
And wondered if she would cry when something was done to her.
The mortgage was foreclosed. That last word was whispered.
She never came back. The family
Sort of drifted off. Nobody wears shiny boots like that now.
But I know she is beautiful forever, and lives
In a beautiful house, far away.
She called my name once. I didn’t even know she knew it.
Warren’s profound empathy for Dante had inspired this subjective paean to La Vita Nuova with Ruth Northington as his youthful Beatrice, a glimpse of beauty forever inaccessible but placed through art in the desperate firmament of a boy’s ingenuous desire. It seemed evident that Ann had assembled this portion of the memorial herself, and I was somewhat surprised at her reaction to this aching portrayal of lost innocence and love’s denial.
But I could see that she felt it deeply. By reading the poem any number of times over long still afternoons in this rarely visited place, Ann seems to have been transported across the decades to her own moment of mortal reckoning, some biting elemental instant now remembered as bitter or sweet which she would experience but once and, like most of us lacking the means to personally capture an eternal essence, must now reach back to savor through a beloved intermediary. Glancing over I saw that Ann’s eyes had grown clouded as she gazed out into the rain. I moved quietly to the other side of the room.
On the opposite wall clusters of dried tobacco leaves wreathed several pictures of Guthrie in the early 1900s. Groups of men on horseback paraded through crowded dirt streets, wearing white sashes and felt hats. Some wore menacing black hoods. “Those are the Night Riders,” Ann said behind me in a low voice. “Sometimes Guthrie folks who come through the Birthplace say ‘I think some of my relatives may have been involved in that,’ but nobody wants to talk much about it.” The Night Riders were a loosely connected group of vigilantes who initiated the Black Patch War of the early 1900s; their violent activities were the subject of Warren’s first novel, Night Rider (1939).
Operating throughout south-central Kentucky and adjoining counties in Tennessee, the Night Riders captured police stations, set up roadblocks and cut off towns from outside contact. They intimidated, beat and sometimes killed city officials and those warehouse owners who bought less expensive tobacco from farmers not members of the Dark Leaf Tobacco Planters’ Protective Association, a coalition formed to counter the monopolistic buying practices of the Duke consortium. In doing so the Night Riders created one of the last (thus far) major instances of armed civil unrest in U.S. history. Warren’s appropriation of this local episode, still fresh history when he was young, was greeted by critics as the strong first step of a major new talent.
The Birthplace offered for sale a selection of books by and about Warren, and having become fond of Ann and Jeane, who now rejoined us, I was eager to contribute what I could by picking up the few Warren volumes I didn’t already have. Unfortunately the site’s meager budget disallowed the use of credit card transactions so I was forced to limit myself to a single cash purchase: the University of Kentucky edition of Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back, Warren’s 1979 recounting of the ex-Confederate States President’s agonizing postwar years. Davis had also been born in Todd County – a forlorn concrete obelisk rises high above the cornfields near here.
As I stood talking quietly with these two gracious ladies I was conscious of the rainwater flowing freely down the windows and of the long drive ahead to meet other commitments. Jeane asked me to send a letter to the Postmaster General urging the creation of a Robert Penn Warren postage stamp (since approved). I assured her I would, that I wished I could do more, and to hang in there, keep scraping by until the wheel of time revolves sufficiently so that Warren’s rightful claim to posterity is acknowledged by the powers that be. “One day you’ll both be famous,” I said smiling, “like those people who saved Keats’s apartment in Rome, or the Levy family that preserved Monticello against all odds.” My friends smiled too, declining to assume such mantles, and urged me to come back and visit them again.
I walked off the porch and back into the deluge, got in the truck and drove away into the tempestuous dusk, thinking of the power of identification inherent in great literature that offers a transcendence of time and place, allowing us to momentarily leap into the writer’s mind and heart and thereby awaken memories and dreams of our own past selves. The lasting strength of Warren’s artistic legacy could be epitomized in the lost look of almost youthful wistfulness on Ann’s face when she reread for the umpteenth time his poem of love and denial.
The sky was a turbulent wind-whipped froth when I pulled back onto 79, squalls of driven rain shoving my vehicle from the center line to the shoulder and back again. As I turned north onto the highway a red-tailed hawk stared down at me from the top of a great oak, then leapt into the wet billowing air and rowed powerfully through a glorious beam of sunlight that broke brightly through the storm clouds like old love suddenly remembered.
A short time ago, during a wild April rainstorm, I drove down the narrow concrete strip of Kentucky State Highway 79 through a smoky seascape of grays and blues, bound for the hamlet of Guthrie. The early spring foliage was being battered by opaque sheets of rain hammering the pastures and woods on either side of the road. To the northwest and southeast were spread the handsome vistas of a still-functioning rural economy, thick brushy fence lines bordering broad expanses of winter wheat. Last summer’s tobacco stalks, awaiting the tiller, jutted despondently from fallow fields of goldenrod, while thick white petals knocked from roadside dogwoods floated the stormwater down the road’s eroded shoulder. American kestrels, small and vibrant falcons, were occasionally seen hunkered on the power lines strung overhead, glaring hungrily out into the murk.
I was entering Robert Penn Warren country, the formative geography of America’s first poet laureate and arguably our finest poet during the latter half of the twentieth century. The only writer to win Pulitzers for both fiction (All the King’s Men) and poetry (Promises: Poems, 1954-1956 and Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978), a playwright, teacher, and the author of critical essays, children’s books, a biography, short stories and influential academic texts, Warren (1905-1989) was according to the literary scholar R. W. B. Lewis “the most important man of letters in our time.”
Born in the formerly vigorous railroad town of Guthrie, Warren would show his intellectual precocity at an early age, graduating from high school at 16 and from Vanderbilt University (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) at 20. While at Vandy, Warren helped initiate the Fugitive movement with John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, thereby creating a revolutionary approach to literary interpretation that helped to usher in New Criticism, an analytical style that emphasizes fiction’s textual substance rather than the author’s socio-cultural background. As interested in history and politics as in literature, Warren later became a founding member of the Agrarians, a prescient group of Southern thinkers which urged the retention of agriculture, pastoral landscapes and native tradition in defiance of the accelerating mechanization and urbanization that was, and is, taking place in the “New South.” Warren went on to achieve in graduate work at the University of California, on a fellowship at Yale, and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.
Warren’s chief literary milestones include the novels All the King’s Men and World Enough and Time, and perhaps most importantly his Collected Poems, recently assembled by John Burt and published by Louisiana State University. Warren had taught at LSU in the 1930s where he developed a close relationship with Cleanth Brooks, with whom he would write groundbreaking textbooks and found the Southern Review. Warren’s literary interests were profoundly classical – he spent several years in Italy where he learned to read Dante in the original – and it is his juxtaposition of the epic Miltonian theme with his native Southern soil that makes Warren’s work highly accessible to the common reader, yet the profound continuation of a grand inherited tradition.
A native Kentuckian myself, I had first come across Warren’s work through extraneous reading in college and was immediately impressed with his multidisciplinary approach to literature and life. But it was not until my late twenties that I became acutely interested in poetry, and in Warren I found both a world-class poet and a reputable guide to the larger poetic canon of which I was for the most part ignorant. Warren’s literary essays helped me to pin down my own major interests, and in his fiction and poetry I located the same current of dark sublimity that permeates the worldviews of Melville and Faulkner, Coleridge and T. S. Eliot.
Guthrie itself proved to be precisely what I had expected: a small country crossroads huddled among the cornfields and tobacco barns of Todd County, easy enough to overlook en route to the comparative metropolis of Clarksville, Tennessee. Once an energetic center of rural mercantilism known as the “crossroads of railroads in America,” Guthrie started to wilt when the Louisville and Nashville Railroad (the president of which was a Mr. James Guthrie) pulled out, another victim of freight trucking and the interstate highway system. In the words of an old bluegrass song, the L & N don’t stop here anymore, and Guthrie, like many other towns once dependent upon rail commerce, has never recovered.
One approaches the city limits via a side road off 79, clayey plowed fields giving way to blockhouses and side streets of cracked asphalt and gravel. A series of washed-out tract houses of the Eisenhower period leads into the downtown proper, which is an encouraging repository of historic edifices and nineteenth-century brickwork. A roadside marker, improbably defaced with gang hieroglyphics (et in Arcadia ego), directs the seeker toward Cherry Street and the Warren birthplace. Splashing along the brimming pavement of Park Avenue I pass the Golden Rule Lumber Center and the American Café, and then a typically lackluster Great Society-era post office. I turn left on Third Street at the Guthrie Bank and then left again onto Cherry. In the yard of a steeply gabled two-story brick house is a bronze-lettered historical signpost. Warren had been born here a century ago, and I’d come on this frank pilgrimage to get some sense of the man’s ultimate origins, seeking to trace the root of his genius down through the red clay underpinnings of southern Kentucky.
The Robert Penn Warren Birthplace House, as it is officially titled, claims to be open five days a week for about four hours a day, but calling ahead is recommended as the historic site is privately owned, understaffed and poorly funded, supportive of the notion that slow years must often roll by for true creative greatness to be properly appreciated. Warren, a chronicler in his visionary poetics of Time as impersonal agonist, might have appreciated this.
I had spoken with Jeane Moore, Director of the Birthplace, a few hours previously and was expected. Ms. Moore and her co-host Ann Alexander operate the memorial out of love, belief, and hope, for despite Warren’s global reputation and a growing recognition of the permanence of his work, the Birthplace operates on a negligible budget and is dependent on scattered grants and the generosity of like-minded individuals.
The front of the small house displays a deep red brick exterior with a curious stained-glass frontispiece over the picture window facing the street. Two high chimneys rose into the rain, and the front porch and exteriors were smartly trimmed in white. The porch ushers one into a small foyer which leads to a narrow shotgun-style hallway with rooms branching off right and left; here my hosts greeted me as I shucked off my streaming raincoat.
Jeane Moore is an energetic middle-aged lady who has almost singlehandedly kept the Birthplace afloat during its regular periods of privation. Jeane’s pride in being a native of Warren’s hometown was tangible as she enthusiastically welcomed me into her domain. She had fought hard to keep the house anchored here in Guthrie when Western Kentucky University (to which Warren left his personal library) brazenly proposed having it pried off its foundations and shipped up to Bowling Green, leaving on the shorn foundation, Jeane exclaimed with jaunty indignation, “a tiny little plaque or something saying ‘Robert Penn Warren was born on this spot.’ Can you imagine?”
As Jeane was just leaving for another of her perpetual fundraising efforts I was delivered into the careful custodianship of her colleague Ann, who had been hovering quietly in the background while Jeane was welcoming me. Ann is older than Jeane and much more reserved, with the soft diffident serenity seen in Southern countrywomen who over the years have reached a certain accord with life. After Jeane rushed out into the storm Ann and I stood contemplating one another for a moment before she softly asked if I’d like to “have a look around.” Having driven through a torrential downpour to get here I allowed to Ann that I was prepared to commence at once, and she benignly gestured toward the adjacent sitting room on our left.
I could tell at a glance that the house was even smaller than it had looked from outside. This room, where the Warren family had presumably relaxed through cool spring evenings like this one, seemed somewhat close but looked comfortable enough, with horsehair-stuffed period sofas and monthlies from the 1890s laying naturally on a coffee table. The room had been tastefully transformed into a fin-de-siècle homage to Warren’s earliest era and specifically to his parents, with formal portraits in bulky hardwood frames hanging on three walls. Robert Franklin Warren and Anna Ruth Penn Warren were pictured soon after their marriage, an attractive and hopeful-looking young couple facing the new century together. Robert Franklin Warren worked in a hardware store and had sincere but unrealized hopes of becoming a published poet himself, and his son would later suffer from vague misgivings about his own literary talent and rising reputation. Robert Penn would escape from Guthrie, though it would remain a bedrock influence on his work, while his father would never find the magic key to unlock the artistic development and recognition he yearned for.
A crowd of about forty schoolchildren of all ages was pictured on one wall, and Ann pointed out a slight pale freckled lad in the first row, smaller and obviously younger than any of his classmates and a jolting contrast to the hulking, craggy éminence grise of academe that Warren would become. Like a glimpse into another America, Warren and his schoolmates are shown barefoot and in neatly pressed dungarees and gingham dresses, posing awkwardly outside the Guthrie School in the intense sunshine of spring.
The next room featured a tribute to Warren’s formidable academic record, with local press articles detailing his progress at Vanderbilt, his inscribed dorm key, his diplomas and a few letters home. In his freshman portrait he looks even younger than sixteen. On the far wall, somewhat out of place, was a black and white portrait of a shirtless Warren in his late 60s by pop photographer Annie Leibowitz, whose unequivocal style somewhat recalls that of the late lamented Robert Mapplethorpe. Ann made it clear that she didn’t care at all for this picture.
On the other side of the hallway was a shelf of Warren’s collected works, including exotic translations. As always I was stunned by his output. A children’s book on the Alamo, according to Ann, had been required reading in Guthrie schools and espoused an historic viewpoint “different from what you usually hear about the Alamo,” by which I understood that she felt the book transcended the usual bellicose John Wayne-style triumphalism.
Anne drew my especial attention to a display along the center wall, murmuring “I want you to read this; it’s my favorite poem by Robert Penn Warren.” She gestured to a glass-encased dais upon which lay an open book, two faded black-and-white snapshots – one of a lovely teenage girl and another of a gleaming Model A on a gravel road before a storefront – and a crumbling newspaper clipping announcing the wedding of a local debutante named Ruth Northington. Ann insisted that I read the poem then and there:
“True Love”
In silence the heart raves. It utters words
Meaningless, that never had
A meaning. I was ten, skinny, red-headed,
Freckled. In a big black Buick,
Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat
In front of the drugstore, sipping something
Through a straw. There is nothing like
Beauty. It stops your heart. It
Thickens your blood. It stops your breath. It
Makes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath.
I leaned against a telephone pole, and watched.
I thought I would die if she saw me.
How could I exist in the same world with that brightness?
Two years later she smiled at me. She
Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead.
Her grown brothers walked with the bent-knee
Swagger of horsemen. They were slick-faced.
Told jokes in the barbershop. Did no work.
Their father was what is called a drunkard.
Whatever he was he stayed on the third floor
Of the big white farmhouse under the maples for twenty-five years.
He never came down. They brought everything up to him.
I did not know what a mortgage was.
His wife was a good, Christian woman, and prayed.
When the daughter got married, the old man came down wearing
An old tailcoat, the pleated shirt yellowing.
The sons propped him. I saw the wedding. There were
Engraved invitations, it was so fashionable. I thought
I would cry. I lay in bed that night
And wondered if she would cry when something was done to her.
The mortgage was foreclosed. That last word was whispered.
She never came back. The family
Sort of drifted off. Nobody wears shiny boots like that now.
But I know she is beautiful forever, and lives
In a beautiful house, far away.
She called my name once. I didn’t even know she knew it.
Warren’s profound empathy for Dante had inspired this subjective paean to La Vita Nuova with Ruth Northington as his youthful Beatrice, a glimpse of beauty forever inaccessible but placed through art in the desperate firmament of a boy’s ingenuous desire. It seemed evident that Ann had assembled this portion of the memorial herself, and I was somewhat surprised at her reaction to this aching portrayal of lost innocence and love’s denial.
But I could see that she felt it deeply. By reading the poem any number of times over long still afternoons in this rarely visited place, Ann seems to have been transported across the decades to her own moment of mortal reckoning, some biting elemental instant now remembered as bitter or sweet which she would experience but once and, like most of us lacking the means to personally capture an eternal essence, must now reach back to savor through a beloved intermediary. Glancing over I saw that Ann’s eyes had grown clouded as she gazed out into the rain. I moved quietly to the other side of the room.
On the opposite wall clusters of dried tobacco leaves wreathed several pictures of Guthrie in the early 1900s. Groups of men on horseback paraded through crowded dirt streets, wearing white sashes and felt hats. Some wore menacing black hoods. “Those are the Night Riders,” Ann said behind me in a low voice. “Sometimes Guthrie folks who come through the Birthplace say ‘I think some of my relatives may have been involved in that,’ but nobody wants to talk much about it.” The Night Riders were a loosely connected group of vigilantes who initiated the Black Patch War of the early 1900s; their violent activities were the subject of Warren’s first novel, Night Rider (1939).
Operating throughout south-central Kentucky and adjoining counties in Tennessee, the Night Riders captured police stations, set up roadblocks and cut off towns from outside contact. They intimidated, beat and sometimes killed city officials and those warehouse owners who bought less expensive tobacco from farmers not members of the Dark Leaf Tobacco Planters’ Protective Association, a coalition formed to counter the monopolistic buying practices of the Duke consortium. In doing so the Night Riders created one of the last (thus far) major instances of armed civil unrest in U.S. history. Warren’s appropriation of this local episode, still fresh history when he was young, was greeted by critics as the strong first step of a major new talent.
The Birthplace offered for sale a selection of books by and about Warren, and having become fond of Ann and Jeane, who now rejoined us, I was eager to contribute what I could by picking up the few Warren volumes I didn’t already have. Unfortunately the site’s meager budget disallowed the use of credit card transactions so I was forced to limit myself to a single cash purchase: the University of Kentucky edition of Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back, Warren’s 1979 recounting of the ex-Confederate States President’s agonizing postwar years. Davis had also been born in Todd County – a forlorn concrete obelisk rises high above the cornfields near here.
As I stood talking quietly with these two gracious ladies I was conscious of the rainwater flowing freely down the windows and of the long drive ahead to meet other commitments. Jeane asked me to send a letter to the Postmaster General urging the creation of a Robert Penn Warren postage stamp (since approved). I assured her I would, that I wished I could do more, and to hang in there, keep scraping by until the wheel of time revolves sufficiently so that Warren’s rightful claim to posterity is acknowledged by the powers that be. “One day you’ll both be famous,” I said smiling, “like those people who saved Keats’s apartment in Rome, or the Levy family that preserved Monticello against all odds.” My friends smiled too, declining to assume such mantles, and urged me to come back and visit them again.
I walked off the porch and back into the deluge, got in the truck and drove away into the tempestuous dusk, thinking of the power of identification inherent in great literature that offers a transcendence of time and place, allowing us to momentarily leap into the writer’s mind and heart and thereby awaken memories and dreams of our own past selves. The lasting strength of Warren’s artistic legacy could be epitomized in the lost look of almost youthful wistfulness on Ann’s face when she reread for the umpteenth time his poem of love and denial.
The sky was a turbulent wind-whipped froth when I pulled back onto 79, squalls of driven rain shoving my vehicle from the center line to the shoulder and back again. As I turned north onto the highway a red-tailed hawk stared down at me from the top of a great oak, then leapt into the wet billowing air and rowed powerfully through a glorious beam of sunlight that broke brightly through the storm clouds like old love suddenly remembered.
