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Asked by the editors of a regional publication to submit a list of important books that should be read by the rising generation (general books in the Western tradition and books especially pertinent to Southern readers), Montgomery submitted the two lists that follow this introductory essay…. Montgomery’s concern is to provide orientation to young readers living in a confusing, chaotic intellectual climate dominated by intellectual provincials in the academy and elsewhere. As always in his writing, Montgomery emphasizes the reader’s responsibility both to his inherited tradition and to his community. The serious reader is a steward, and as Montgomery puts it toward the close of the essay, he is “obligated to pursue a rescue of tradition in the light of the truth of things.” —Michael Jordan

Books, Books, Books: Difficult Choices in Time of Intellectual Stress¹
November 1999

Marion Montgomery

Recently I was requested by the editor of a regional journal to contribute to a special issue, its theme a recommendation by various contributors of those works a young scholar setting off for the academy ought to read. What was solicited was a listing of twenty titles in each of two categories: general works and works oriented to the American South. Not a promising invitation to me, since to give a list to any young waking intellect, without any accompanying orientation that might allow that young person some purchase on the “sage” providing him an intellectual roadmap, is problematic at best. How uncomfortable to him, to be confronted by a list of oughts at the outset of his journey. For that reason, I was myself somewhat uncomfortable when my list, along with those of others, appeared in cold print, and I was made the more concerned by an extrapolation from those lists of those works considered by survey as the “greatest of all time.”

My own concern had been quite other: I intended rather to enable the serious young student a beginning, whereby he might discover first of all just where he now stands at the ending of our millennium. My list is concerned to alert him to recent travelers within his own most immediate country of the mind, considering that he (within the terms of the invitation) is most likely a young Southern intellectual. My list suggests messages from significant travelers just ahead of him, located at disparate points of the current intellectual compass. My concern was that he might from these discover with more assurance just where he now stands as he is about to set out. By reasoned triangulation, he might with more confidence begin his own journey into what is in our moment a confusing intellectual desert.

Given, then, this difficult charge, and suspicious of lists as such, I accompanied my record of those messages with a brief introduction. But since that preface did not accompany my lists, I venture some rescue of it here. Concerning the question of “Southern” books, I recall Stark Young’s contribution to I’ll Take My Stand (1930), that yet famous symposium by “Twelve Southerners”: “[W]e defend certain qualities not because they belong to the South, but because the South belongs to them. The intelligent course sees first our Southern Culture in relation to other cultures, and then in the light of its own sun.” In the light of its own sun, as the intellectual sojourner may rescue that light from distorting and conflicted shadows which, by their local proximity to his seemingly lonesome trail, tend to distort those “qualities” properly sought as the permanent things. By those shadows he may be threatened to an arrested provincialism, a suspension of the journeying, or to an endless circling in shadows. Either way, that is to consent to a distortion of the viable, especially of the local in which one always begins to learn to read signposts. It is to betray one’s inheritance of the immediate present and thus to betray the tradition inherited to this moment by grasping at shadows of the permanent things as if shadow rather than substance were desirable.

These signs—my listed works—are given as cautionary in the light of present intellectual crisis, the effect of which is a rapid degeneration of the academy itself, to which the young journeyman is presumed bound. And these initiating words may serve him in judging both me and my list. Such is the beginning of his responsibility to tradition. It is a responsibility which properly requires that he neither reject his inherited present tradition nor embrace it unexamined. He must instead sort it, since it is not a tradition but an amalgam of traditions impinging upon his waking reason. Thus, in the light of Young’s rubric, I am at once suspicious of the awkward disjunction of general works from Southern ones. I caution as well that my list is heavily exclusive, assuming for instance a commitment already made to that rich inheritance of literature and philosophy reaching back to the Greeks.

And so, because of the responsibilities of intellectual judgment in such undertakings as this, I should prefer (given happier circumstances) a personal tutorial conversation “about” these concerns, though circumstance dictates this elliptic approach by introduction and listing. Not easy, this attempt to encourage any young waking mind setting out to recover the rich intellectual history he has inherited. Certainly not easy, a colloquy denied, to sufficiently emphasize the paradox: his is an inheritance left him at no initial cost to him, though it is dear in an old sense of that word, its very richness progressively waking in him, one prays, that sense of responsibility to the inheritance—first to his own benefit and collaterally to the benefit of intellectual and social and political community itself.

And so I must especially remind him that he is responsible to and for that inheritance, which is already bequeathed to his sons and daughters before he has even come into his own inheritance. Through his responsibility as waking steward to that inheritance, he may increasingly gather from it a continuing viability to himself and thereby to his present family and community in this moment. For he will discover himself sustained by a mystery of recovery: he will discover himself member in a community beyond moments, becoming citizen among the living and the dead. He will discover a community transcending history itself, transcending even his locally inherited tradition confounded so often by history – tradition constricted by intellectual error to the confines of a merely immanent world by our century’s dominant Modernist tradition.

In such a sorting of his own inherited moment, he will also discover that my numbered list proves to be works individually relative in their virtues to his particular pursuit of the permanent things: his pursuit of those “qualities” to which he both personally and communally most properly belongs. But may he discover as well that his first responsibility to his inheritance is the perfection of his own intellectual gifts. That is the first and always his central responsibility as steward: a perfection of his nature as this person. His integrity as person, his integral perfection as intellectual soul incarnate, is the end toward which he journeys beyond where he stands at any moment. (For this high journey he must first secure his own oxygen mask before attempting to help others in distress—as intellectual soul, that is.) As for my list, I repeat that I assume as implied but not set down many important works within the Western tradition, works he must engage in relation to what Young speaks of as “other cultures,” cautioning the journeyman that in our present climate of intellectual corruption, advanced under the shibboleth of “multiculturalism,” that false sign as usually explicated is a clear and present danger to intellect itself.

One must read such works as the Bible, then, and those “monuments of unaging intellect” as William Butler Yeats calls them—that literature through which any journeyman may begin to justify his entitlement: literature from the Greeks down to recent “Southern” writers. There is rich sustenance as well as danger in old philosophy winnowed, and in poetry and drama: from Homer and Virgil and Dante, from Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton: from many other feeding stations of the word along his way, in which word he will find stored sustenance. Perhaps more immediate to him (assuming him Southern), those actual Southern writers who prove larger than merely “Southern”: William Faulkner, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy. As always more and more join him in his passage into high country. And so one is obligated to read a great range of present witnesses, as well as some long dead to the world but present nevertheless to his journeying. Not directly listed here, once recognized as belonging to the “Western canon” in the American academy up until World War II. There began at that time an intellectual provincialism, not only in our social and political institutions but, more destructively, in the academy. The effect is now evident in academic curricula, but evidenced increasingly in the general collapse of present community itself. Indeed, it was the editor’s own sense of our loss of a community of the living with the dead that prompted him to solicit listings.

My choices are works of varying complexity, so that it would be reckless to attempt them too ravenously. As caution then, I list them alphabetically by author, a sign of the responsibility to a sorting. To start with the first and attempt them as a list would be like attempting to read the Bible through from “the front.” One founders in the “begats” if not careful. Common sense must discriminate, then, but over a period of time. The task is now gradual: an awakening of common sense in response to evident truths. And perhaps with some help in the ordering and winnowing aided by a proximate mentor. For, as chaotic as is the present academy, persons yet survive there—a few heroic witnesses who are devoted to a pursuit of the truth of things. These persons will know as well how formidable those proximate antagonists to a concern for the truth of things, antagonists whose name is legion always, but seldom so concentrated one suspects as in this moment in the academy.

Such a mentor will know that, as Richard Weaver reminded us, ideas have consequences. He will know especially that bad ideas have bad consequences. Not only in present manifestations of untenable ideas, but in many ideas inherited as tradition, ideas always corroding present community. For ideas—both good and bad—as ideas have a property of vaporousness, to speak metaphorically. They affect particular intellects, and through them the present community, by a sort of osmosis. Or perhaps, by a trickle-down effect from established, inherited authority, whether legitimate authority or not.

But then bad ideas are, like the poor, always with us, making the journey dangerous but certainly not boring. Bad ideas—as ancient as the garden of Eden, made endless in variation by the oldest of all bad ideas: that by intellectual autonomy “I” am not simply equal to but the superior of all ideas and thus superior to the Cause of ideas as well. How endless those variations, and how seductive. Always as if new—as if resolving and simplifying the journey by an intentionality supreme. But it is out of this complex of ancient and recent ideas that we discover ourselves obligated to purifying them as it were, in an attempt to recover and sustain viable tradition, as tribute to the present community through our peculiar gifts as person. That is why the sound traditionalist knows himself obligated to the sorting of his inheritance, becoming thereby a responsible steward to complex tradition. For tradition proves always a complex of good and bad ideas. Ambiguous tradition is ours both in the brain and in the blood. That is, it affects our intellectual gift, which (more formally) is that gift of both intuitive and rational knowing, a mystery we must engage along our way as intellectual creatures.

With an obligation to pursue and recover Stark Young’s “qualities” to which we properly belong, a suggestion of one foray into our list: consider St. Augustine’s Confessions, and in its light a Northern and a Southern work: Henry Adams’s Education and William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee. Adams quite deliberately writes his intellectual history in imitation of St. Augustine, whom I have sometimes suggested our first “Modem” novelist in his Confessions. That is, St. Augustine is concerned to witness by his art the progress of a soul (his own) from being lost in the always present desert of the world, only at last in turning from the Modernist presumption of autonomy to discover the desert as lying in himself. Increasingly, especially under the influence of Dante’s Divine Comedy, this journey has become the poet’s theme in Western literature, the poet himself becoming the protagonist, whether presented as hero or antihero. And increasingly, the necessities to art’s transforming autobiography—what Aristotle would call history—into poetry have led to aesthetic sophistications effecting a severing of the poet from his art, lest he be too personally—too historically involved. Out of that severance, an action not reserved to the poet, we discover ourselves the “Age of Alienation,” haunted by Y2K as Modernism’s reminder of original sin.

Now St. Augustine is a soul most exceptionally gifted intellectually, a recognition which at first delights him in a self-love willfully pursued, the parabola of that action ordering his personal “novel.” (It is a parabola of fictional action faintly echoed by James Joyce in his own Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.) St. Augustine was at first possessed by self-love, until that turning in which he rejects his Manichaean autonomy. Henry Adams, like Augustine, is as well a gifted intellectual soul, and in that same tradition of the soul on pilgrimage, though by the eve of World War I he would not speak with a term like the “soul.” He is also, at first intuitively and then quite self-consciously and rationally, aware of himself as at the lag-end of the Puritan “tradition.” That is a tradition which, in its “Northern” as opposed to “Southern” manifestation, had become transformed out of an intellectual “Transcendentalism,” more properly called angelism, through Pragmatism and Positivism, leaving Adams with his intuitive desire for an integrity beyond any conscious confessional recognition available to him. He continues alienated in the world. Forlorn, he deports himself as Stoic, a deportment which at last cannot redeem the time. Hence there is a climate of pathos to that marvelous attempt at self- rescue, The Education of Henry Adams, which is significantly cast in a third-person reflective detachment from himself.

And so Adams’s attempt of self-rescue, of survival as intellectual creature through Stoicism, is made evident in a tonal unity of his episodic “confession.” But that tonal quality yields a sense of pathos quite other than the triumphant confidence – out of faith and hope and love—which we find in St. Augustine, who in his own person (“I”) is thankful for rescue through grace. Such the points and counterpoints of witness in these signs to our young journeyman as he reads this ancient and this modern message in relation to his own obligation to the journey. And should he be a Southern journeyman, there is the interestingly parallel work of “Uncle Will” Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee, a “confession” of a Southern Stoic to be read along with the “Yankee” Stoic, Adams, as both may be enlightened by St. Augustine’s Confessions. William Alexander Percy (“Uncle Will”) is recognized as such a Stoic by his nephew Walker Percy, the novelist. (“Uncle Will” was a poet, as was St. Augustine at his outset.) Walker reflects on this species of tradition as he discovers himself a “Southern” version of homo viator, discovering as well an inadequacy in Stoicism—Yankee or Southern—to any safe passage for him. Thus it is that he will recognize closer kinship with St. Augustine. He comes to a rational appreciation of that lineage by discovering his intuitive affinity to St. Augustine as running deeper than that to his “natural” Uncle Will, to speak perhaps cryptically as we must.

Only after The Moviegoer is published does Walker recognize that his novel lands “squarely in the oldest tradition of Western letters: the pilgrim’s search outside himself, rather than the guru’s search within. All this happened to the novelist and his character without the slightest consciousness of a debt to St. Augustine or Dante.” (Here, a playful detachment through third-person perspective, like that taken by Adams as a literary device, quite different from St Augustine’s passionate first person monologue to God by that wayward pilgrim come home at last.) Walker Percy, in his essays and in interviews, comments on the inadequacy of Southern Stoicism to a recovery of his own Southerness as valid against the Modernist “angelized” world. He had been uncomfortable all along with a Stoic “Southerness,” inherited from Uncle Will most proximately, though through that inheritance sorted he will nevertheless begin to recognize certain “qualities” belonging not to the South, but through which qualities the South belongs to something extra-temporal and extra-geographical.

In another juxtaposition of works from our list: consider Gilson’s rather fierce rejection of Cartesian Idealism on philosophical grounds in Methodical Idealism, along with Maritain’s Moral Philosophy, in which Kantian “universalism” is rejected on rational grounds as well. For both Gilson and Maritain are concerned through philosophical analysis with causes whose effects will concern Walker Percy in what he rejects as the “Los Angelism” of community, a pseudo- culture he engages as satiric “poet”—as novelist. Both these French philosophers, both Thomists, are concerned to reveal the intellectually destructive (and so culturally destructive) effects of untenable ideas descended into the popular spirit through an osmosis—bad ideas inherited from the late Middle Ages. Through increasingly unsophisticated misunderstandings of tolerance, those bad ideas (Gilson and Maritain would contend) erode community and family. And to these add Gabriel Marcel, whose Homo Viator engages that erosion as it bears directly upon the family, more fundamentally destructive of community than the spectacle of World War II all about him as he writes.

Such works help us recover a position necessary if we are to take a stand in our present Modernist desert, for they recover to us those questions which must be asked in this crisis of dissolving intellectual responsibilities. One may well in this perspective also consider Fischer’s Albion’s Seed as recovering at a social level of our recent history something of the complex cultural grounds feeding the nematodes of bad ideas that by now infect the soil of viable tradition. Fischer gives account of the imported cultural and religious tradition of the Puritan New Englander, of the Southern Cavalier, of the Appalachian and Deep South Scotch-Irish- English borderers: invasions settling into our landscape and establishing tensional provinces on this continent, out of which an emerging confluence of cultures. Cultures further complicated by that Quaker Province in the Delaware River Basin, on the border of the “North” and the “South.” Fischer’s work not only helps reveal origins of some present consequences settled into our culture, but may reveal as well continuing dispositions out of those cultures, making us the more vulnerable to Cartesian and Kantian dissociation of intellect from reality itself, counter to our pursuit of a unity beyond provincialism, through the angelism of autonomous intellect.

The work throws historical light as well on residual Northern-Southern antipathies still with us, such misunderstandings as those which Donald Davidson engages in his Attack on Leviathan. For in such works, the tensional relation of regional and provincial forces in their historical aspects emerge, complicating (for instance) our understanding of the old and continuing relation between Tidewater Cavalier and Mountain clansman, or either of these in opposition to a Puritan residual inheritance. One discovers that more than geography is involved in the relation of Cavalier Planter and Mountain Yeoman, theirs a complex relation made emblematic in Southern history in the figures of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. That in itself is a complex juxtaposition of symbolic figures further unfolded by Frank Owsley in his two works, King Cotton Diplomacy and Plain Folks of the Old South. It may even lead one to such a recognition as expressed by a friend of mine who remarked, after reading into Fischer—my friend a North Carolinian: “Now I know why the _________ boys [from a local Scotch-Irish clan] threw rocks at me when we were children.” Fischer’s book, then, reveals something of the tensional relation between the Cavalier’s social and religious mentality and that dogmatically inclined independent mentality still evident in our Southern uplands and in parts of the Deep South, reaching even unto Southern California, where it may become metamorphosed into Percy’s “Los Angelism.” There were differences affecting the uneasy alliance of Cavalier and Yeoman in defending the “Southern Cause” against Yankee Puritan-Quaker intentionalities, those provincials themselves already metamorphosing to political and cultural Pragmatism and moving toward the triumph of Positivism at our own century’s end.

And so such reflection gains a richer dimension to much of this century’s literature, especially that associated with the “Southern Literary Renaissance.” It is a richness caught in Faulkner’s postage stamp world in Mississippi and in Flannery O’Connor’s recognitions of man as homo viator revealed in seemingly backwoods Georgians, her “Christ-haunted” protagonists. Light shed as well on that enigmatic iconography to things “Southern” in the figure of the Cavalier Stoic Lee, with his “right arm” Presbyterian fatalist Stonewall Jackson. That is a recognition Walker Percy comes to, expressed in his “Why Are You a Catholic”: “If one wished to depict the beau ideal of the South, it would not be the crucified Christ but rather the stoic knight—at parade rest, both hands folded on the hilt of his broadsword, his face as grave as the Emperor’s [Marcus Aurelius’]. In the South, of course, he came to be, not the Emperor or [King Richard of Ivanhoe],but R. E. Lee, the two in one.”

In the light of our rubric from Stark Young, it becomes difficult to separate “general” from “Southern” works, then. I have for many years written on this difficulty. My Lamar Lectures, Possum and Other Receipts for the Recovery of “Southern” Being, quite deliberately puts “Southern” in quotes for reasons implicit in our rubric. I have written on Solzhenitsyn as “Southerner,” and on many others in this vein, including Homer, Dante, Eliot, Hawthorne, Doestoevsky. For to be a “Southerner” in my sense—to belong to abiding principles as opposed to declaring that those principles belong to me as Southerner—is determined neither by geography nor by history, as important as history and geography are. Instead, I believe myself a person, an intellectual soul incarnate, who by the gift of my being am required to address history and nature, and the accidents of my time and place, as steward to the inherent goodness of creation itself. Included most proximately is my responsible stewardship to myself as person, in which proper office (when properly pursued) I may benefit my local community.

What we discover in journeying creation is that willy nilly we are traditionalists. But once more we inherit a mixed tradition, to which we are responsible as stewards through our specific gifts as this person—each witnessing according to his gifts. That is a recognition which T. S. Eliot comes to, relatively late in his life, in recovering his own “Southerness.” In his Virginia lectures, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, he begins with a tribute to those Twelve Southerners who had recently published I’ll Take My Stand. Eliot goes on to explore the idea of tradition, suggesting it “a byproduct of right living, not to be aimed at directly.” It is of the blood, so to speak, rather than of the brain. For that reason there rises in the person blessed by that inheritance the necessity to his “brain,” to his intellect, to sort his blood inheritance: to separate and purify bad and good ideas in the blood. Thus T. S. Eliot will at last declare that, as poet, his responsibility is to “purify the dialect of the tribe.”

This is a recognition of responsibility he comes to after considerable struggle with his own inheritance which is largely Puritan. How poignant, his remarks to Sir Herbert Read at the time of “Ash-Wednesday,” a letter dated St. George’s Day in 1928:

I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn’t an American, because he was born in the South [St. Louis] and went to school in New England as a small boy with a n— drawl, but who wasn’t a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians [for which read our yeoman and cavalier], and who so was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more a Frenchman than an American and more an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the U.S.A. up to a hundred years ago was a family extension [read Fischer’s Albion’s Seed]. It is almost too difficult even for H.J. [Henry James] who for that matter wasn’t an American at all, in that sense.

The essay, one might venture out of all this reading of our selected list, is to be Eliot’s Four Quartets.

It is both a necessity and an obligation attendant upon our inescapable journeying of this world, this sorting of tradition. That is the consequent office of stewardship, benefiting community according to perfected gifts, whether by “purifying the dialect of the tribe” as poet or by serving in other offices made kindred and complementary by the obligation to community through our sojourning as person in that community. In Eliot’s terms, from his After Strange Gods, homo viator discovers the important complementary relation of orthodoxy to tradition: orthodoxy oriented to the truth of things independent of what man may make of known truth. For through orthodoxy, one regains a devotion to community, maintaining as steward “a consensus of the living and the dead,” that consensus discovered as his already by inheritance in this present moment to the journeyman, especially made evident through his sorting of the tradition in his blood.

It is through knowing himself thus obligated to pursue a rescue of tradition in the light of the truth of things, his labor of intellectual journeying, that the person may stand witness to community of the abiding “qualities” to which he properly belongs. But even if community refuse that witness, he must continue resolute, knowing (in Eliot’s words) that old truth to our proper sojourning: “orthodoxy may be upheld by one man against the world,” as was true in the ancient world in the resolute stand taken by St. Athenasius—as Eliot suggests. On another occasion Eliot remarks that in our sojourning as intellectual soul incarnate, we must not be tempted to despair, for there is no such thing as a Lost Cause in this world. All causes prove subject to worldly decay, and so there is no gained cause that is absolute in this world.

In this recognition lies the spiritual burden to homo viator, in relation to intellectual causes that are always more or less lost, leaving the sojourner his spiritual burden as fundamental. What is constant to the community of the living and the dead is the obligation of the person as journeyman to a restoration, under the constancy of grace. The person’s responsibility to himself and to community is that of steward to tradition, whereby he may contribute the vital necessities to any present community—according to his own gifts as spent in this continuous task. Thus with piety and humility, he must sort his inheritance toward recovering the goodness possible to any person (for community exists to this end). Always in a strangely shifting desert of this moment in this place. A simple truth to be recovered—but to be recovered by responsible labor among the monuments to our intellectual and spiritual responsibilities as persons, such as witnessed most variously in my recommended works. And may you as journeyman have safe arrival in that country which lies beyond the necessity of any lists.

Works Southern:

Bradford, M. E., Against the Barbarians, and Other Reflections on Familiar Themes

_____, Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative

Davidson, Donald, The Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States

_____, Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays

Foote, Shelby, The Civil War: A Narrative

Letters:

Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate: Collected Letters, 1933-1976

The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate

 The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

 The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor

Lytle, Andrew, A Wake for the Living

O’Connor, Flannery, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Papers

Owsley, Frank L., King Cotton Diplomacy

_____, Plain Folk of the Old South

Percy, Walker, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

Percy, William Alexander, Lanterns on the Levee

Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand

Weaver, Richard, Ideas Have Consequences

_____, The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought

Winchell, Mark Royden, Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism

And on and on and on . . . .

Works General:

Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams

Augustine, The Confessions

Chesterton, G. K., The Everlasting Man

de Jouvenel, Bertrand, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

Eliot, T. S., After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy

Federalist Papers

Fischer, David, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America

Gilson, Etienne, Methodical Realism

Johnson, Paul, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties

Lewis, C. S., The Abolition of Man

_____, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

 Marcel, Gabriel, Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysics of Hope

_____, Man Against Mass Society

Maritain, Jacques, An Introduction to the Basic Problems of Moral Philosophy

_____, The Person and the Common Good

Niemeyer, Gerhard, Between Nothingness and Paradise

Pieper, Josef, In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity

_____, Leisure: The Basis of Culture

Rommen, Heinrich A., The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy

Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History

de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America

Voegelin, Eric, From Enlightenment to Revolution

_____, Science, Politics & Gnosticism

And on and on and on . . . .