Between Aquinas and the Agrarians: An Interview with Southern Scholar Marion Montgomery
This interview between Professor Marion Montgomery (1925-2011) and Dr. Alan Harrelson took place on April 17, 2009, in Crawford, Georgia. The recording preserves their exchange as it occurred, edited only to remove repetitions and verbal stumbles. This conversation, previously unknown and never before published, appears here for the first time. I am grateful to Patrick Seay for introducing me to Dr. Harrelson, and to Dr. Harrelson for his permission to transcribe and share this important conversation. The transcript and audio file is available to download below.
The Transcript
Harrelson: All right, Professor Marion Montgomery here, April 17, 2009. Professor Montgomery, could you start with a brief story of your career describing some of the high points that you’ve experienced?
Montgomery: Well, I celebrated my 84th birthday yesterday, and so you’re asking me for several volumes. I don’t know whether to get into it too much. I was born in the small town of Thomaston down in middle Georgia, and lived there until World War II when I went into the Army. When I came out, I came up to the University of Georgia to do my undergraduate work, and have lived in this part of the state ever since. That was in 1947, so we’ve been here a good long while, this part of the state.
Harrelson: And you taught at the University of Georgia for how many years?
Montgomery: I taught there for 35 or 40 years. Looking back, I can’t count and be sure how long, but for a considerable time. And I’ve been retired since, oh, let’s see. December of 1987, so.
Harrelson: My goodness. That’s a good spell of time since teaching.
Montgomery: Yes sir. Though I lecture around and travel here and there.
Harrelson: Professor Montgomery, do you sympathize with 20th century Southern Conservatism, Agrarianism, things of this nature?
Montgomery: Well, of course, for many years while I was teaching, my office mate was William Davidson, who was Donald Davidson’s brother. So I was tuned in to the Fugitive Agrarians very early. He was an undergraduate teacher for me and so I’m pretty well tuned in to that dimension of Southern history.
Harrelson: Did you ever have any relations particularly with Donald Davidson?
Montgomery: Indeed. I met him several times and was rather closely familiar with him through his brother, of course, since his brother was my office mate. He was of importance to me in his work, of course. And we corresponded some. I remember, for instance, I did a little book on T.S. Eliot, and he taught Eliot for years at Vanderbilt. And so I got him to read it for me, and he liked pretty well what I was doing with it.
Harrelson: Were there any other of the original Twelve Southerners who composed I’ll Take My Stand that you were familiar with personally, or at least acquainted with?
Montgomery: Oh, yeah. Andrew Lytle was a good friend. He’s been here to Crawford two or three times, I think. And there’s the next generation that included Cleanth Brooks, who participated in Allen Tate’s Who Owns America. He and I were good friends as well. I knew Tate and we corresponded some. There were several of those people that I was on the periphery with, you know.
Harrelson: Well, I think that’s extraordinarily important.
Montgomery: Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate’s first wife, was a good friend as well.
Harrelson: My goodness, so you were familiar with a goodly portion of the original Agrarians. As far as Andrew Lytle is concerned, he wrote The Long Night, I think is what it was.
Montgomery: Amongst other good novels.
Harrelson: Yes, sir, and a biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest. I had an opportunity to write a research paper on Andrew Lytle and Mel Bradford’s understanding of the Southern past. So, I did research on Andrew Lytle rather significantly.
Montgomery: Well, good. You did properly.
Harrelson: Yes, sir. I think I did. As far as Andrew Lytle’s character was concerned, was he more in tune, did he sympathize with Southern yeomanry more so than the plantation aristocracy?
Montgomery: Well, you know he farmed some in North Alabama for a while. He also began his intellectual career, I suppose you would say, as an actor. Did you know that?
Harrelson: Yes, sir. I do remember reading that. What was the name of that place where he farmed? Cornsilk or something like that.
Montgomery: Yeah, that sounds close to it. I don’t remember precisely.
Harrelson: And he lived until 1995, I do believe.
Montgomery: I think so. I spoke to him. He was on his deathbed and we had a brief chat at that time.
Harrelson: I’ve always heard a lot about his character and I’ve read a lot about his personality. He seems to have been a rather amiable person.
Montgomery: Amiable, good humored, direct, and very firm in his position. He was a delight. He loved to sing. That was one of the things that often happened. He came out here one time, a good while before he died, and there were a bunch of us here and we were singing old songs and so on. We asked him if he knew that one called “I Am an Old Confederate.” And he said no, he didn’t think he’d heard it. So we sang it for him. He was much taken with it and he said, I never heard that one before. And at that time we had one of our grandsons here with us and he was, how old was Josh? He was seven or eight years old and he was distressed that Mr. Andrew didn’t know that song and he disappeared, the child did. In a few minutes he came back and he had laboriously copied out the words and Mr. Lytle folded it up and took it with him, you know. And Josh is now a lieutenant in the Army in Alabama, you know, but that was something I remember very fondly.
Harrelson: Well, it sounds like your relationship with Mr. Lytle was beneficial for the both of you.
Montgomery: Oh, it was and I was a trust for him.
Harrelson: Oh, yes sir. That’s most interesting. I regard the works of Andrew Lytle very highly as well as yours and I think it is an outstanding story.
Montgomery: Do you know his A Wake for the Living?
Harrelson: A Wake for the Living? Yes. He wrote that in the ‘70s for his daughters, I think.
Montgomery: It’s a fine book.
Harrelson: And in that book he talks about the Southern family, the family as being the fundamental foundation of Southern society.
Montgomery: Well it’s the fundamental foundation of civilization, not just of Southern society. That was one of the reasons that somebody like Russell Kirk, was tuned into it. He was a good friend of Davidson’s and it was exactly that common understanding that drew them together. So Kirk was not Southern, but “Southern” as put in quotation marks, which I often do. I have an essay called “Solzhenitsyn as Southerner,” for instance. So I think one of the dangers of not understanding tradition as larger than regional, is that you get separated from kindred in distant places like Solzhenitsyn, like Russell Kirk up in Michigan, you see.
Harrelson: I remember you writing an essay on that in your book entitled On Matters Southern.
Montgomery: I imagine I did.
Harrelson: I’m here to tell you right now, I think you’re right on par with that interpretation. I’m looking here through my notes just now trying to find a quote, yes here it is, Russell Kirk in his Conservative Mind, he wrote this, “The modern South cannot be said to obey any consciously conservative ideas—only conservative instincts, exposed to all the corruption that instinct, unlit by principle, encounters in a literate age. The affection of state sovereignty, the duties of a gentleman, and the traditions of society, which Randolph and Calhoun,” John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, for any listener who doesn’t know who those people were, “extolled found their finest embodiment in General Lee,” these Southern characteristics that Russell Kirk recognizes. He recognizes General Lee as embodying all of them. And Russell Kirk states that with Lee these ideas yielded to superior force at Appomattox. To what extent do you think that’s the case, Professor Montgomery?
Montgomery: Well, I think it’s in general a true summary of which I would qualify in one way. Russell uses the term instinct, and I prefer another term given that in the past two or three hundred years we’ve tended to lose sight of what is something more deeply fundamental in human nature than instinct, in that instinct tends to be associated inevitably with evolution, you see. And what I prefer is the term intuition, and that’s why I said in my lectures Possum and Other Receipts for the Recovery of “Southern" Being I have a secret title, Thomas Aquinas as “Southerner”, in quotation marks. Because Aquinas argues, and I think rightly so, that we are by the nature of our creation intellectual souls, and our intellect by its very nature is gifted with two modes of action toward immediate creation.
And one of them is an intuitive response of openness and love to things perceived as good because they are. And that’s why place—the local—is important to civilized community, you see. And he says that that’s a mode, that’s not a separate intellect, it’s a mode of action of intellect. It has to do with an openness of love toward a thing because it is, and he says an extension of that mode of the intuitive is the rational intellect. And he says the rational intellect has to come up to the level of the intuitive finally, but it’s a labor that you have to make through discursiveness.
We are unlike the angel, discursive. The angel is purely intuitive, knowing immediately, you see. We have to labor for it with a vow of very nature as complicated by original sin, you see. So that you see where somebody talks about instinct, I’ve shied from that a little bit. It’s not that whoever is saying it, as Kirk is saying it, doesn’t recognize the thing for what it is, but I think there’s a better term for it than instinct.
By the middle of the 18th century, instinct was taking over and in reducing man to his animal nature, you see. And an inclination for a long time underway but exacerbated by Darwinian evolution, you see. And what happens is you begin to get instinct on one side and reason on the other and get them embattled. And the point is that they’re complementary and not to be embattled. That’s why 18th century enlightenment was so destructive of civilized community, you see.
Harrelson: That’s entirely correct. I agree wholeheartedly.
Montgomery: And you see, I think it’s this sort of thing that we tend to lose sight of if we don’t understand the nature of tradition. Tradition is an inheritance that is, as T.S. Eliot says, partly of the blood, which he says has to be complemented by orthodoxy, which is of the reason. And it’s not that you’re either orthodox or traditional, it’s that by orthodoxy you sought tradition and rescued the viable in it out of tradition because we inherit things that need to be discarded. And if we discard all of tradition, we discard inheritance that needs to be preserved. And the responsibility is to sort that with reason and rescue the viable that is life-giving. And if you fail to do that, it erodes community. Your community is reduced to mere society and society needs regulating by form imposed upon it—rationalistically. And who urges that to us? Enlightenment rationalism, you see. And so we lose the validity of the intuitive, which the rationalist says is merely a sentimental, animal-like reaction in our nature. And that has to be expunged. It has to be exorcised, you see. So you end up with sentimentality on the one hand and rationalism on the other, butting heads, and it runs all the way now through Western civilization down to the local level, yea, even unto the South.
Harrelson: Well, Professor Montgomery, that is some valuable insight from a Southern intellectual such as yourself. Professor Michael O’Brien, who is considered along with Eugene Genovese to be one of the preeminent scholars of Southern intellectual history, maintains that in the South during the 20th century, particularly during the interwar period, there was basically no intellectual vigor. There was no vigorous intellectual life in the South. I disagree wholeheartedly with that assertion.
Montgomery: There was, but it was, what I contend is that there is a diaspora of people that you do not necessarily locate geographically, though there is, I guess, almost by hesitation, a preserving of it somewhat longer in the South, and Russell Kirk, I think, tuned into that. It doesn’t mean that you don’t end up with it in islands here and there, and meanwhile the larger spectacle of the New South overwhelms it, and that, of course, was one of the points that led the Fugitive Agrarians to what they did, you see. They recognized this and responded to it.
Harrelson: I believe, speaking of the Fugitives, their 1930 agrarian manifesto, I believe it was John Crowe Ransom who wrote “The Introduction to Principles.” Could you elaborate somewhat about your understanding of what the purpose of I’ll Take My Stand was?
Montgomery: Well, undoubtedly it was an attempt to recover some of the things they recognized as being rapidly lost in the South, and I think it probably came as a shock to them. The Monkey Trial in Dayton was one of the shocking things that woke them up. They had, up to that point, been largely interested in poetry, publishing The Fugitive and so on, and they began to wake up, and it took some of them a long while, I think, to tune into what was going on and to understand its origins as more than simply in recent Southern history going back to the 1860s. It was longer in the works than that. Alan Tate tuned into it gradually.
Alan Tate in I’ll Take My Stand writes the essay on Southern religion, and in it with the perspective that you have to value Tate as having made possible to me, but looking at it, what I notice is that he was very skeptical of St. Thomas and scholasticism and was more partial to orthodoxy than to Catholicism, but by 1950, through Jacques Maritain, he becomes a Catholic, you see. And I appreciated that in him, and I think he appreciated my recognizing it in him, you know.
And meanwhile, he and Ransom were often in contention with each other. Why? Because Ransom was fundamentally a skeptic—an intellectual skeptic. He was given to aesthetics of a Kantian dimension, and that is a skepticism that is not only a kind of criticism, but implies and sometimes deliberately denigrates the religious. And I don’t know whether you remember it or not, but he and Tate almost came to a fistfight that was sort of heeled over by Donald Davidson in arguments over Eliot’s The Waste Land, because, you see, Eliot of New England is going through the same developments as he did in the late out of his New England inheritance. Notice, if you haven’t read it, or if you need to reread Davidson’s essay “Still Rebels, Still Yankees.”
Harrelson: Was that in Attack on Leviathan?
Montgomery: No, it’s in a collection of essays that LSU published with that title of essay. But at any rate, Tate almost intuitively, not instinctively, recognized that there’s this danger. And Ransom was highly skeptical of Eliot as poet, in the nature of his prosody. Whereas Tate was responding to Eliot, I think, I’m being speculative here, at a time when he was intuitively recognizing what was going on with Eliot at a level deeper than the aesthetic. And as a matter of fact, the same sort of thing was happening to Eliot that Donald Davidson recognized in The Waste Land, and it led Davidson almost in opposition to answer The Waste Land with his long poem called The Tall Men. Do you know The Tall Men?
Harrelson: Yes, sir.
Montgomery: Well, in that little Eliot book that I mentioned to you that Davidson read for me when it was in the manuscript, he especially appreciated my noticing that The Tall Men is an answer to The Waste Land. What I say is that by the time Davidson wrote The Tall Men, Eliot had reached Davidson’s position. And with The Waste Land, Eliot is experiencing what his friends called a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t, it was a spiritual crisis. As he realized that there was a spiritual collapse. He recovered from it and wrote “Ash Wednesday” and the full quartet, so that “Ash Wednesday” is almost contemporary to The Tall Men, and they fall right in together.
Harrelson: Well, I do declare I enjoy this. I have enjoyed this conversation immensely thus far. Uh let’s speak about Mel Bradford for a few minutes.
Montgomery: Oh, gosh, I remember. Where is my picture of Mel? It’s usually up here. It must have fallen down, but I have a great picture that he sent me of him here somewhere. Mel and I were good friends. I met him over at Alabama. We were at the university over there. We were on some sort of joint to do, and the first time I met him, we walked up and down on the campus there talking about Faulkner, and it was a great encounter, and we were good friends from that point on. I have a long piece in On Matters Southern on Mel, as you know, remembering my last meeting with him.
Harrelson: My goodness. Mel Bradford taught at the University of Dallas, I think, what it was, a professor of English.
Montgomery: Yeah, for a long time, yeah. Now, he taught with Tom Landess, whom I mentioned to you, who’s over in South Carolina now there in Columbia. I think he’s in the governor’s office. They taught there together. Our oldest daughter, who’s just here with her children last week, finished high school early and got a scholarship to the University of Dallas, and Tom [Landess] and Mary Beth were on their way there with all of their children. They came through from South Carolina, picked up our daughter Priscilla, went up to pay their respects to Andrew [Lytle] up at Monteagle. They were old friends, too, and went out there, and eventually Priscilla ended up as assistant to Caroline Gordon when she went out there.
Harrelson: I was having a conversation a few weeks ago with historian Orville Vernon Burton.
Montgomery: I don’t know him.
Harrelson: Well, he’s from Ninety Six, South Carolina, and he’s now the chair of the history department at Coastal Carolina University in Horry County. He informed me at the South Carolina Historical Association’s annual conference that he and Mel Bradford conducted a debate several years ago. Vernon Burton has just written a book entitled The Age of Lincoln.
Montgomery: I imagine that Mel did engage in that.
Harrelson: Oh, yes. In The Age of Lincoln, Professor Burton’s thesis is that Lincoln was a Southerner. He and Jeff Davis were born fairly close together.
Montgomery: Yeah, up in Kentucky.
Harrelson: And for some inexplicable reason that I probably will never understand, he is of the opinion that Lincoln was, in fact, a Southerner. But anyhow, I was delivering a presentation that day on Mel Bradford and Andrew Lytle, and Professor Burton informed me of this debate. He said that I ought to become acquainted with that debate and get a copy of it somehow or another.
Montgomery: I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it, but I’ve heard Mel on the subject.
Harrelson: That’s what I’m getting to—Mel Bradford and Lincoln. Have you ever conducted conversations with Bradford about his views regarding Lincoln?
Montgomery: Oh, I’ve read him on Lincoln and heard him debating with other people. There’s a Straussian out in California whose name—you see, when you get this age, you begin to lose names—whose name I don’t remember now, but they were old antagonists on the question of Lincoln. So I remember Mel on Lincoln. I’ll point you to a book. We were talking a while ago about how you have to sort tradition and seek the viable. There’s a book that’s well worth your knowing about. It’s from the 1960s, it’s by a man named Fredrickson and it’s called The Inner Civil War and its subtitle is Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. And he has an interesting account of Lincoln in there that I think is exactly right in which he argues that Lincoln as politician—as he was rising to public recognition—saw the advantage of adapting evangelical Christianity to politics without the primary emphasis on God himself, you see. And he does a pretty good job of looking at the rhetoric in some of Lincoln in relation to this and how persuasive it was to the yeomanry level of America at that time. And it’s right persuasive and worth looking into. I think Mel was tuned into some of this too.
Harrelson: I think he must have been. Of course you know that this year is the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth and I declare everywhere you turn nowadays you hear of Lincoln. But that’s just the way it is I suppose.
Montgomery: Some time you need to read The Inner Civil War. I used to always give my students a long reading list and it would include things like this in a modern poetry course and how in the hell does that get into a modern poetry course? But that and the work of Eric Voegelin, have you run into him? Science, politics, narcissism and that sort of thing. Gerhart Niemeyer and that sort of…
Harrelson: Yes sir. Well that’s good you found a way to incorporate that into a poetry course.
Montgomery: Well it fits right in, for instance, notice as you read Eric Voegelin’s work how in his later work as he moves along in that long history thing, more and more he begins to cite and quote T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. They’re seeing the same sorts of things that Davidson saw and that Eliot saw.
Harrelson: Yes sir. Professor Montgomery, if you don’t mind let’s talk about some terminology here for a few minutes. Every once in a while I encounter a Southern intellectual historian, somebody who studies the history of intellectuals in the South, and they have a hard time describing what Southern Conservatism was or is. Now Mel Bradford once wrote, if I can recollect precisely, “that you can be a Southerner and a conservative. You can be in the South and call yourself a conservative, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a Southern Conservative.” How would you define that term, Southern Conservatism, as it existed during the 20th century more particularly?
Montgomery: Montgomery: Well the reason it’s so difficult to define it I suspect is that it was made very quickly a pejorative term and particularly in the interval between the two World Wars and very particularly in opposition to I’ll Take My Stand. So that conservative began to have a pejorative sense and the Southerner was a particular species of that sort of ideological reaction, you see. So it’s difficult to define for that reason, particularly, to define to some people who by instinct and not intuition resisted. They are modernists by having breathed modernism all their intellectual life long and it makes it difficult for them to quit smoking modernism as it were and get the lungs clear for a time. So that’s why it’s difficult for that term.
That’s why I keep coming back to join—I avoid it because it’s so easy to misunderstand conservatism—so I tend to talk about tradition and orthodoxy in relation to each other at the metaphysical level of the nature of man as, notice the terms, intellectual soul incarnate. And it’s from the incarnate that the intellect moves. St. Thomas for instance says, and he’s answering Descartes before Descartes was even born, you see, St. Thomas says that born into the world the first action of the person is an immediate open response to a thing that exists, and it is an action of love accepting the thing because it is and it is only from that, that you suddenly realize that you exist.
And you see how that is an answer to Descartes and his doubt, you know. I think therefore I am St. Thomas or the neo-Thomist would say he’s got it all upside down. He starts with his conclusion and therefore he loses himself. He’s separated from that possibility of an intuitive openness to the thing because it is and if it is it therefore is good. Not that it’s perfect but it can’t be and if you see that it’s not perfect if there isn’t a goodness of some sort in it because it is created and whatever is created is by its nature good and there’s a falling away from that good possible but it’s nevertheless good as long as it lives. That’s why even deathbed confessions are possible.
Harrelson: Oh yes sir. Well so what that demonstrates to a certain extent then is that Southern Conservatism, if we can call it that, a tradition/orthodoxy, is really a member of a broader Western civilization tradition.
Montgomery: Well there’s no question of it and what has happened which weakens Southern Conservatism is a loss of the whole history of our becoming as intellectual creatures. A neo-Thomist named [Étienne] Gilson did lectures at Harvard in the 30s just before World War II and he has a fascinating argument about the decline of Western philosophy into modernism, which he rejects, and very valiantly so. But one of the lines in the descent starts with Abélard. Do you know Abélard, back in about the 12th century?
Harrelson: No sir.
Montgomery: Abélard and what was his name? His Beloved. That’s a very famous romance. Abélard and I don’t know, see I told you I couldn’t always call up names now. But at any rate they were lovers, had a child, he was the philosopher of the moment and a very important one. And in response to this, the woman’s uncle had him castrated. And he ended up as a philosophical theologian in a monastery and he was a philosopher and he’s famous for his emphasis upon what Gilson points out as logicism, logic, you see. And the emphasis upon logic gets picked up in, I’ll come up with his name in a minute, Occam, William of Occam and nominalism. And that logic begins to suggest the possibility of intellect’s control of what is by the act of naming. And the naming not only defines but almost causes its be. So you go from Abélard to Occam to Descartes to Kant and you end up finally with Jean Paul Sartre and existentialism. And that is the decay of western philosophy.
Harrelson: That sounds very similar to what Richard Weaver wrote about.
Montgomery: Oh yeah, he talks about Occam.
Harrelson: I was sitting here thinking as you were telling me that, you know, I said, well my goodness that sounds like what Richard Weaver was saying.
Montgomery: Yeah, Ideas Have Consequences. And what Gilson is arguing is that bad ideas have bad consequences.
Harrelson: Yes sir. It seems to be common. It should be common sense.
Montgomery: So, you see that there’s this background, that say, the Fugitive Agrarians were beginning to tune into when they were about your age. Don’t you see it took them a while to get tuned into it.
Harrelson: Professor Mark Malvasi, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. He teaches history at Virginia someplace or another I believe. I don’t know particularly right now. But he wrote a book on the Agrarians. He concentrated on Ransom, Davidson and Tate. And his book was entitled The Unregenerate South. In there he argues that Southern Conservatives divinized the secular. They replaced a piety for God for a piety for history and tradition. They had taken the position of God and placed it below the position of tradition.
Montgomery: I think that’s a whole wrong thing. It certainly is. I’m not sure but you might make that argument in relation to aesthetics and Ransom. And I have another little book that deals with Ransom and Tate in relation to this. I can’t always remember the title of my own thing let alone somebody else’s.
Harrelson: Well you’re doing pretty good in my opinion.
Montgomery: The answer to him I think probably is in there. [hands his book to Harrelson]
Harrelson: This is your book, by Marion Montgomery, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate: At Odds about the Ends of History and the Mystery of Nature.
Montgomery: Yeah and it’s exactly about that.
Harrelson: I believe this would probably provide a productive rebuttal to Mark Malvasi’s assertions.
Montgomery: I think it would.
Harrelson: I was familiar and I knew that you wrote this but I’ve never read it. I was researching it.
Montgomery: Well you can’t, gosh you can’t read it all. Oh no, nobody can. Even me. I can’t remember it.
Harrelson: Your works in particular are very conducive to my personal interest at least. Let’s see here now. The Southern Past, Professor Montgomery, that’s a very large topic.
Montgomery: That is indeed.
Harrelson: In my own personal research I’m trying to understand what the understanding of the Southern Past was regarding the Southern Conservatives in the 20th century, particularly during the interwar period. And to what extent, the questions I’m asking are such things as to what extent did an understanding of the Southern Past shape a critique of the modern order? That sort of, because what I’m finding is that they possessed a particular understanding of the Southern Past that contradicts much of what modern historians have written about the South.
Montgomery: Well some of them did. You see, the problem is to distinguish many things going on at the same time, I think. And what I was thinking of immediately is an old idea of mind that suggests just how complicated it is. For instance, the University of Georgia was founded very early, but it was founded by New England minds, you see. And there is a dimension of the New England mind out of Puritanism that is quite unlike the Middle colonies, Virginia—Cavalier, feudal. And so you get that New England mind with almost an instinctive industrial inclination that gets sort of planted surreptitiously within the Southern culture. And it explodes out of it after 1865 through people like Henry Grady of the New South, you see. And there is that tension between that address to existence and the more intuitively anchored response that is signaled in Lee and his character, for instance, in the Middle colonies. And so you see, you’ve got internal ferment and factionalism all along the way. That’s why it’s so dangerous to try to talk about Southern Conservatism, you see, because it’s not a simple thing. It’s a complicated thing. And that’s why I tend to shy away from such things. I say, first let me footnote this with a volume. And then we’ll talk about it.
Harrelson: I understand. Exactly. There are various historians, and I’m having to speak from what I know about what historians have written. Fitzhugh Brundage as well as David Blight, they’ve started this new field of history that has to do with Southern memory, how Southerners remember their past. And what they maintain is that race relations is the central theme of Southern history.
Montgomery: Yeah, of course they do, yeah.
Harrelson: But I’m here to tell you.
Montgomery: That’s the modernist infection at work, really. It’s not that race isn’t an important element of it, but the truth of the matter is that the problem of racism has to do with the level of spectacle in communal life that doesn’t go beneath the level of spectacle, you see. So you talk about it up here, and you don’t talk about that marvelous mystery that the person has created an intellectual soul incarnate by his very creation. He has limits. If he didn’t have limits, he would not even exist. Without limits, he can’t exist. And you go from that to recognizing that each created intellectual soul incarnate is unique, and human dignity lies in a perfection of the limits of gift, and that means a responsibility to recognize limits and to fulfill them. And see, that’s much deeper than the level of social commerce that overlies it, and which too many intellectuals never bothered to get beneath.
Harrelson: That seems to be a problem, well, in my mind especially. That’s all I hear from most historians in the academy nowadays, is that race relations is the central theme of Southern history. What I’ve found in reading the intellectuals who were living in the South at the end of the war period, they viewed Confederate defeat at the crux of the Southern past. That really had explained a great deal about a pervasive decline of public morality and why the South was in the position it was in during that particular period in the 20th century.
Montgomery: What you have to remember too in relation to that is that they didn’t have much time to sit around thinking about it. They were too busy trying to survive after 1865, and you don’t debate these things until long after. And when you begin to debate, what happens is the ground is surrendered to abstractionism, and race is one of the terms. So, industry, you see, agriculture, all of those things are abstractions way up here that make sense only when they’re anchored at what I have called and then called before 9-11, ground zero. In this moment of my existence in this place, in these circumstances, and you go from there, you don’t try to leap uphill, you see. And what happens is that you make it abstract even such a thing as human dignity. You lose the ground of it as the responsibility of this person to his peculiar limits whereby he is this person and no other person.
Harrelson: Well, what you’re telling me, I think, is that in order to understand the South, in order to understand...
Montgomery: Or any place where you happen to be, it doesn’t make any difference whether you live 500 years ago in another place or here or now, and we happen to live here and now in the South.
Harrelson: That’s an outstanding point. It really is. Regarding your own lifetime, now I acknowledge a particular Southern tradition, a culture that we have here...
Montgomery: Which has to be sorted.
Harrelson: Exactly. What sort of changes can you talk about that you’ve witnessed during the course of your lifetime, positive, negative, what have you, in Southern culture and the way Southerners think about themselves?
Montgomery: Well, again, the danger of generalization is there. What I would say is that it becomes more and more apparent to me as a sort of a triumph of secularism in its modernist manifestation which conflicts with the residual intuitive sense of community in the South. And those things mix and mingle and react to each other, and it’s the sort of thing that Flannery O’Connor wrote about so well. Do you know any of her works?
Harrelson: Somewhat. Now, you befriended Flannery O’Connor, did you not?
Montgomery: Well, she befriended me. We were good friends, but she is very much tuned into this, and you need to read her. And one of the places not only is our importance is not only her fiction but those letters, posthumous letters called The Habit of Being. The habit of being, that’s what we’ve been talking about much of our interview here. The sorting of tradition, of the becoming comfortable and open to existence at ground zero as this person, and she’s very much tuned into that. And she and Walker Percy are Southern Catholic writers, you see. And I’ve got a book on Percy coming out that deals with this too. It’s called With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party: in Company with Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, and Others And you see that brings the two together. What he says is that the Southern writer—Catholic or Protestant—is in quest of the Holy Grail and he discovers himself at a Tupperware party, you see.
Harrelson: Well that’s fascinating. My goodness, the more I sit here and talk with you, the more fascinating it becomes. I am here to tell you right now. Now, did you not write a book a few years ago on the nature of academia?
Montgomery: Oh, I’ve done two collections of essays on that actually, essays along the way. One of them was a series of lectures given over at Erskine in South Carolina. And the other was a gathering of essays from about the 1960s down to now here I have to go cite them again for you. See, I can’t remember my own. It’s like losing your children. The one is called Liberal Arts and Community and its subtitle is The Feeding of the Larger Body. This is coming through, isn’t it? And the other is one called The Truth of Things and its subtitle is Liberal Arts and the Recovery of Reality. And it’s all a part of what we’ve been talking about. Just how important that last one is, is signified I got my royalty statement on The Truth of Things the other day.
Harrelson: Really?
Montgomery: I thought I ought to put it up there to keep me at ground zero.
Harrelson: Yes, sir. I believe that will be the case. I’ll have to write that down in the field notes for this interview.
Montgomery: You see, it’s a very formal report.
Harrelson: Oh, yes.
Montgomery: Inside was that three by five card with the two quarters and a dime taped to it. Which has been a matter of much humor.
Harrelson: Well, good. I don’t doubt that it will. That’s just the way it is. There’s nothing we can do about works that should be appreciated and are not.
Montgomery: Well, some of them will be around for a while.
Harrelson: I hope so.
Montgomery: I’m pretty confident.
Harrelson: You lived through the Second World War.
Montgomery: Yeah.
Harrelson: Now, I have also read a few historians who maintain that the Second World War really brought the South down. That it did as much, if not more, to alter Southern society, its traditions and its norms, than the Civil War.
Montgomery: Well, it opened us to certain things. How could it not, given the kind of forced desperation that we were in at the moment, you know. And one of the things, I’ve been writing about some of this, as a matter of fact, recently, too. One of the things you notice, a very interesting thing to notice, is that from the 1940s to the 1960s, interesting things were happening all over the world, but in this country and in the South, too. And you begin to notice people responding to it. Elliot, for instance, wrote a couple of little books at that time, one of them is called The Idea of Christian Society. The other is Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. C.S. Lewis wrote The Abolition of Men, about what’s happening in education. C.S. Lewis also wrote The Screwtape Letters. Do you know that?
Harrelson: No, sir. And I hate to reveal my ignorance so much about all this.
Montgomery: You’re too young to have read all of this stuff yet, but you need to, somewhere along the line. But Screwtape is the chief devil who writes letters to his devil disciple, how to seduce his mind. And Lewis is writing this in the middle of World War II, but he’s not so much interested in that war, as he says in an introduction. He’s interested in what happens to society in those particular times. Richard Weaver is coming to Ideas Have Consequences. Gabrielle Marcelle in France under Nazi occupation is writing a book that he’s doing lectures and essays that come out as Homo Viator: A Metaphysics of Hope, in which he has a whole essay on the family that’s worth reading in relation to your interest in southerness. Jacques Maritain is writing things just all over the world. This sort of thing is cropping up, you see. Meanwhile, culturally, we are moving into the 1960s, and what happened in the 1960s, as I argue, happened in the 1860s, but in Russia at the time of Dostoevsky, at the time of Notes from Underground, which is a monologue of a modernist lost, you see, that leads Dostoevsky on then to write Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Devils, and it’s the period in Russia when the young revolutionaries, the nihilists, are revolting against their fathers, and who were their fathers? Dostoevsky says, the liberals. Now where does that crop up again? In the 1960s over here, you see. And it’s almost as if we are imitating what happened in Russia, you see, and the young revolutionaries are revolting. It’s very interesting to see what happens after the time of Dostoevsky in Russia, and maybe to watch what’s happening here after the 1960s.
Harrelson: So what we have, so to speak, is a generation of young people that were growing up in the Second World War and had gone to Europe.
Montgomery: The Baby Boomers.
Harrelson: The Baby Boomers, okay.
Montgomery: Not the ones who fought. See, their fathers and mothers, the war is over. We were triumphant. All evil is solved, you see. And there was that letdown as their children, the Baby Boomers, were coming up into the 1960s.
Harrelson: So these Baby Boomers, so to speak, were repudiating the values of their previous generations. I’ve never heard that comparison before between Russia and the 1860s. Right at the time you said 1860s, I thought, okay, he’s going to talk about the Confederacy. No, you’re talking about Russia.
Montgomery: But the 1960s were being prepared in our 1860s.
Harrelson: A valuable point, indeed. A valuable point.
Montgomery: I’ve just finished a long work that deals with that.
Harrelson: Let’s see. I’m trying to look here. Oh, yeah. Okay. I have another question that I would like you to respond to. To what extent do you believe Southerners today are motivated by historical consciousness? Do Southerners...
Montgomery: Let me answer that quickly. And with children who do not know whether the Depression came before or after the Civil War, you know, that sort of thing, how can you deal with a question like that?
Harrelson: Well, you’re right. You’re exactly right in that sort of the answer.
Montgomery: By accident you have been fortunate in learning some things that I dare say many of your contemporaries, many of your generation are unaware of.
Harrelson: That’s unfortunate, I think. Extremely unfortunate.
Montgomery: Of course it’s unfortunate. And a part of it is, I think, deliberate. I think it is a kind of educational brainwashing that goes on. As in the attempt to make positive law of the politically correct, which is in direct violation of all I’ve been saying about the human dignity as central to the existence of the person as this person and no other. And the politically correct deny that. And hence what is for me a diabolical principle of modern education, any child can be whatever he wants to be. And if I’m right about the nature of human dignity, then that is diabolical and destructive of that natural inclination by his creation to discover and come to terms with the limits of my existence. I can be Michael Jordan and shoot gold three pointers all day, you see. Even if I’m one-legged. You can be whatever you want to be. It’s diabolical, I believe.
Harrelson: Well, I think you’re right. That’s the conclusion at least that I’ve come to in reading about equality. That’s what I hear all the time is universal equality, that universal equality was what was founded in 1776 and 1787. When you read the works of Calhoun and Randolph and people like this.
Montgomery: They recognize it as more complex.
Harrelson: Yes, sir. If I talk about those things nowadays.
Montgomery: You get batted over the head.
Harrelson: Oh, an unpatriotic imbecile is the nomenclature that comes to mind.
Montgomery: Or they might as well say you’re a Southern Conservative. Don’t you think we ought to close it on that? Do you have any more central questions?
Harrelson: Well, I have one more question here. Do you think Southerners still have a sense of the past? And even if you get past the Baby Boomers.
Montgomery: Some do, and some discover it. See, you can’t say anything so general about Southerners. You’ll run into people who know. I ran into you, and you know more about Southern history than most people I’ve run into, whether they are young, middle-aged, old, you see. So what you have to be concerned for and value is what I call the diaspora, the scattered. They show up, oddly, here. You came from South Carolina, somebody comes from British Columbia, and down here at Bell’s calls when we were having 75 people at Easter, and wants to come talk to me about Eric Voeglin, you see. There is that diaspora that you have to value and keep in mind when you’re doing what you’re doing, where you are, and this sort of thing here seems to suggest nobody is paying attention. Somebody is paying attention, you see. And it’s not just Southerners, they’re persons coming to themselves in a dark wood, as Dante says as he begins the Divine Comedy, you see. And the dark wood may be even Crawford, George, don’t you see?
Harrelson: Well, Professor Montgomery, I think we’ll call our interview to a close. I have thoroughly enjoyed this.
What a tight circle of friends that generation all ran in. Thanks for transcribing this.