Robert Drake: An Interview

Robert Young Drake Jr. was born in Ripley, Tennessee, in 1930, the late-born son of a cotton merchant and a woman he called the most sensible person he had known. His grandfather, a Virginian who fought in the Army of Northern Virginia and stood at Appomattox. Drake grew up among old people, listening.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vanderbilt in 1952, took his M.A. there in 1953 under Donald Davidson, and earned a Ph.D. at Yale in 1955. He taught for forty years at Michigan, Northwestern, and Texas before settling at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He published several collections of fiction and a steady run of essays, memoirs, and reviews in Modern Age, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Georgia Review, and The Mississippi Quarterly. He never planned to write fiction. A department chairman at Michigan asked why he did not write down those stories he told about people back home. Drake went away that summer and set down his memories of childhood. He died on June 30, 2001.

The critic Michael Kreyling compared Drake to Chekhov, a Southern Chekhov who kept eye and ear peeled for the moment human nature shows itself in its constant struggle against loss. Austin Warren, Drake’s first great encourager at Michigan, called the stories “a strange kind of essay, which he did not disallow as fiction.” Drake set them all in Woodville, his name for Ripley, and the people of Woodville sound as though they come from the West Grand Division of Tennessee because they do.

I have selectively edited a fifty-page interview with Drake conducted by Alan Jackson and originally published as “A Conversation with Robert Drake” in The Chattahoochee Review 16.1 (1995). The full interview is linked at the end.

Professor Drake talks about the South: geography, history, community. He talks about the craft of writing: the particular over the general, the teller who reveals more than he knows. The Agrarians come up, and I’ll Take My Stand, which Drake read faithfully and understood as metaphor rather than prescription. Davidson stands at the center, the best prose of any Fugitive. Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Lytle, Ransom, and Warren all get their due.

So does Joe Christmas, standing outside a lit porch in the dark, wanting nothing more than to belong. So does O’Connor, whose verdict after a dull literary party, “They ain’t frum anywhere,” Drake heard firsthand. He argues for Gone with the Wind as better than its reputation and remembers the great-aunts whose slippery satin laps Mitchell sat on as a girl, old women toughened by Reconstruction. Welty’s The Ponder Heart struck him like a Damascus Road conversion, because she used the language he had heard and spoken all his life for the highest artistic purposes, and it worked.

Drake once said his Uncle Lewis, a Methodist preacher who took photographs for sixty years, explained his compulsion in five words: “I just want to get this down for the record.” Drake took the phrase as his own. This interview is part of the record.

The Interview

Jackson: You’ve said that Southern writers have three things going for them: geography, history, and community. I was wondering how you think these things influence your fiction?

Drake: First, they are all three very particular. Fiction by its very nature must be rooted in the particular; otherwise you get a sermon or something. That is one of the first things you have to tell young people who are trying to write. “You are just writing generalities, which don’t convince anybody. You’ve got to show the . . . well, I guess like Othello says when he wants to know if his wife is betraying him: “Give me the ocular proof.”

Southerners, of course, will look at history; that is the most obvious one. Southerners are, as a people, still the main people in this country to whom history has really happened. Now, Toynbee, you know, said that for most people in the modern world, history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. It really happened to us. You have heard me talk about my grandfather, who was a Confederate veteran. I remember him quite well; he was a Virginian in the Army of Northern Virginia, and he was at Appomattox.

In my apartment right now I have framed on the wall his discharge papers signed at Appomattox Court House. He was living history; he was there in the house, he was palpable, you could touch him, he was alive, in many ways unlike people who go ape in the modern world when they sort of discover history or find out that maybe there really may be something to it after all, even though it has been kept secret from them. They’ve always elicited from me, I think, scorn. I grew up knowing about history; it was in the house, and furthermore my grandfather (I don’t know if this was a holdover from the Army of Northern Virginia, but he ate peas with his knife and he didn’t like to bathe any more often than he could help.) And so history was not something deodorized and conjured up by Hollywood or indeed Williamsburg.

Williamsburg doesn’t do much for me because most of it is a movie set. But I get real excited about The Hermitage because Andrew Jackson really sat in that chair right there and it is real. My grandfather was real. I read some of his memoranda that he wrote down in his later years. Unfortunately, I wasn’t old enough to ask him intelligent questions about the war, but I know it happened to someone that I knew. That does a lot for you; it is not something in a book. It is something that most Americans don’t understand.

That’s what I am always inclined to say to people who, as many Southerners do, want to take credit for their ancestors’ great deeds. I always want to say, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. The question is not whether some of their virtues rub off on you: the real question is, could you today be worthy of the examples they set back then. But I don’t think many of them would take that line, so I’m not much on the picturesque view of history. I always think of that scene in Gone With the Wind, which I’ve always said is a much better book than most people think, where at the barbecue at Twelve Oaks the news of Fort Sumter comes and breaks up everything, and the hot-bloods are standing around talking about war and just dying to get into it and kill a million Yankees, because of course one Southerner blindfolded can always kill two dozen Yankees.

And remember that Rhett Butler is the only dissenting vote when he says, you Southerners, all you have is slaves, cotton, and arrogance. He is about to be lynched at that time, when an old man, who is a veteran of the Indian wars or the Mexican wars, stomps out of the corner and says you young bucks don’t know a thing about war, you think it is all honor and glory, but it is dysentery and pneumonia and do you know what dysentery does to a man’s bowels?

That is what Southerners saw during the horrors of Reconstruction, and I know Margaret Mitchell said in an interview that she remembered all the old great aunts, whose slippery satin laps she sat on when they would go to visit on Sundays, and she said those old women were tough. They had to be because they had survived Reconstruction and they knew the world backwards and forwards. They had the benefit of the discipline of history.

I think history, more than any other subject, takes the starch out of people. Southerners have had history, they have had place, because again for Southerners people are always unique and they belong somewhere. Now everyone knows that wonderful story about Flannery O’Connor going to a literary party and being bored out of her mind and later she observed to several people, of whom I was fortunately one: “You know what’s the matter with all those kinds of folks? They ain’t frum anywhere.” For Southerners, I think people usually are from somewhere, and if they aren’t from somewhere, then something is wrong because Southerners historically have dealt with a stable culture or stable world.

I think very few people in Southern literature, at least modern Southern literature, have ever had to go in search of themselves. You know one of the most idiotic phrases in modern times is “I found myself” in a certain experience. That is why people like Joe Christmas in Faulkner is even more of a standout than he is, because he quite literally does not know who he is. In New York, I guess you probably have a Joe Christmas standing on every street corner, so there is no big deal about that. But in Jefferson, Mississippi, he is a sore thumb and then some.

So they have geography; people belong somewhere. That is one of the first things a lot of Southerners ask: Where is he from? Is he kin to the people by that name over in the next county? or is he kin to some other folks? They always try to place people. I know when I began teaching I would always, still do, and I have been teaching forty years, ask a new student, Mister So-and-So, where are you from? One of my colleagues pointed out to me that was really rather rude, that I was rather snobbish, as though I was trying to rank him in some sort of order. I said that was perfectly ridiculous. Where he is from is part of his self, and it is quite literal placement and it gives certain meaning to his life. The trouble is, the world we live in now has got some great rage against context. Race, color, creed, gender, and God knows what else, as though you could just strip all these fripperies, which is what they imply that they are, off of people and leave you with something called naked human nature and that is the real “them.” I think that is perfectly absurd. We are the sum of all these things; they make us what we are.

My hometown, for instance, is just a small town in west Tennessee, Ripley, where I grew up. I still call it home—that may tell you something right there. Memphis, which is our big city just fifty miles south, is just full of people that migrated there from Ripley, somewhere along the line, and they think it is just the most wonderful thing they ever did in their lives: they got out of Ripley. They put all those irrelevancies behind them and now they live in Memphis, and they can be mugged along with everybody else.

But, here we are at this very moment in Atlanta, and if you do a little field work in Atlanta, I think you would find that Atlanta is just full of people tickled to death that they got out of Memphis. Sooner or later if you go on to the wider vision, you end up in New York City, and you might find that although Atlanta is wonderful and has the biggest airport I reckon in kingdom-come and other improving modern things, that New York has got a lot of ex-Atlantans. So where does it all end? You have to come to a stop somewhere, otherwise you wind up being in charge of men in little white coats.

I know I put that question to a Yankee friend one time and he clearly had no idea what I was talking about. So, place is part of the totality of human experience and again to some extent this was forced on Southerners by being the venue where the war was fought. It was not fought in Ohio and Massachusetts; unfortunately, it was fought down here. Of course New England characteristically was kind of saying, “let’s you and him fight, they can pay the bill.”

One of the most moving scenes I think that Faulkner ever wrote, in Light in August, is when Joe Christmas walks at night through a residential area of Jefferson, Mississippi, and sees a group of people playing cards on the side porch (and I hope it was a screened in porch, I used to think that was the greatest luxury possible, and it saves you from getting mosquito-bitten), but he sees a group of people playing cards on the side porch, lit up of course at night, and he says, “that’s all I ever wanted. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.” I think that most people can relate to that, and Southerners were born knowing that. Not to belong is one of the worst things that can happen to anybody in the world. I have spent my life not belonging, in some ways, to various things but more often than not by choice, and that does things to people. I’m not asking for sympathy but it does things to people.

Jackson: You are a Southerner, a Tennessean, a student of Donald Davidson, and a Vanderbilt alumnus. What do you think of the Agrarians and the Agrarian movement?

Drake: I was terribly impressed by them. After all, their names have been in print. That was all it took to impress me and most other people. I read I’ll Take my Stand faithfully; I got out in the world and began to appear in some of the more conservative journals myself, and that’s not always the wisest thing I could have done, because back then that wasn’t the politically correct thing to do. But Mr. Davidson, of course, was an enormous influence on me, but I must say he never brought his far-right politics into the class. They did not affect, or indeed infect, his literary judgments. He sometimes would make funny asides about them, but no, that never infected his judgment.

I was so in awe of him, it was difficult for me to make any real judgment except that I knew a lot of people thought he was crazy—well, not crazy, but just tiresome and foolish. I thought, too, he was spoiled rotten. Everybody at Vanderbilt stood in such awe. I think he was sort of a bully, too. He was just always against everything. I had sense enough to know that there was a lot in this world I didn’t like, but I am just like that Peter Arno cartoon of the two men in quicksand: I had half a mind to struggle. Then I got tired of all the hangers-on. His graduate students said, “You know he’s always just so unhappy in the modern world,” and I thought, god-dammit, look at my Grandpa...he had every reason to be as unhappy as all get out, lost his money, lost his property, lost everything, and if it hadn’t been for my grandmother, God knows, he probably would have starved to death, but he wasn’t going around acting that way.

I just got tired of that. Of course, I never argued with him about anything like that, but then when I began to work closely with him, not only in writing class but also in his course in the ballad and the folktale, which I have more or less copied at the University of Tennessee, and then he supervised my M.A. thesis on the short stories of Saki, who, of course, a lot of people never heard of, we became, by definition, closely associated, and I began to see that behind all that there was a lot more. That’s what I tried to put in that article I wrote about him for the Vanderbilt Alumnus (Jan.-Feb., 1964). Because I saw there’s more to it than that, and basically he was not so much an Old Testament prophet as he was King Lear or something. I call him “The Ancient Mariner.”

Alexander Heard said before he came [to Vanderbilt] from Chapel Hill where he had been a dean and political scientist, he had heard more about Mr. Davidson than anybody connected with the university except Harold Vanderbilt himself. In a strange way I began to feel sorry for Mr. Davidson. But you see, what would put your back up was he always acted like he was the only one who felt this way and that the world had somehow gone back on him. You felt like saying there are other folks around, too. He had long since left the Methodist Church where he’d been reared, because it had become sociological and all, and that was more or less the reason I left it too.

I thought about how much my daddy and other people like him admired and indeed loved Franklin Roosevelt, whom of course Mr. Davidson, I understand, regarded as an anathema, and the TVA, oh that was terrible, socialism, and all that kind of carrying on.

It became an embarrassment; because if you mentioned that you had worked with Donald Davidson, people would say, “Oh that’s that crazy man,” or something like that. I thought, I don’t wonder that you are saying that, but you see you don’t know what I know about him. He did himself a disservice and finally he did us a disservice.

Now some people would wildly object to that I’m sure, but that’s what I think. To this day there is nobody in this world I would rather have commend something I had written than Mr. Davidson. He wrote the best prose of any of them, and I don’t believe anybody else’s comments on that; his prose is the most lucid, the most precise, and indeed, he had the best ear. Of course, that’s his poet’s ear, probably. The best ear of any of them, and I will never change my mind about that.

Then something else you should know, and other people should know and they don’t know it; nearly every summer he taught at the Bread Loaf School of English up in Vermont, and I visited him there several times just went and had lunch with him. I had friends up there I would visit and say, “Would you mind riding over to have lunch with Mr. Davidson?” Of course, they had heard so much about him they were ready to go.

The thing I learned was that he had as loyal a following up there as he ever had at Vanderbilt. It was not a sectional thing in that sense. He and Robert Frost were very good friends, and of course a lot of that is old country New England, and you see that at Yale. Some of my closest friends were that: they weren’t east coast people; they were country New England folks. There’s lots of similarity there. It has an edge to it. He always said about Robert Frost, “You better be careful when you read Robert Frost; now, you are liable to run over a booby trap.” That was something I learned from visiting at Bread Loaf School, and of course they had very distinguished teachers. He was on the permanent staff, but I know Cleanth was guest professor one summer and a lot of people from those New England schools, like Dartmouth.

It is not without interest if you want to start making comparisons; you know Robert Penn Warren is buried in New England. He got very fond of Vermont and he and his wife began to spend more and more time there and he is buried up there. There is not happenstance there.

"For Southerners, people are usually from somewhere, and if they aren't from somewhere, then something is wrong."

Jackson: But not all the Agrarians were so kind to the north. Do you think the Agrarians were right?

Drake: Mr. Davidson didn’t agree with this, but I think maybe the best comment is what Louis Rubin said: that you should not read I’ll Take My Stand as a literal prescription for behavior, but it’s kind of a metaphor. It’s a poem, in a way. It speaks metaphorically. In that way I think some things were right. I know some scholars have found in the last few years, to their surprise and maybe consternation, young people have discovered this book and the Sierra Club and other people like that have discovered this book and they don’t think it is lunatic work. So much in what they wrote does speak to the condition of many modern people who now do feel dislocated and displaced. They didn’t really want people to give up indoor plumbing and pull out the TVA socket, I guess.

I think in many ways they were right in principle. I don’t see how you in some ways think otherwise. I think about my students. These things are harmless, but nonetheless I think they are important. My students don’t know any geography. Why? They go everywhere on the interstate, which doesn’t go through anything, and they don’t know where they are. Or else, they fly and they don’t know where they are, and I can tell you the people on that airplane...I mean the flight attendants as they are called, they don’t know.

One time I was going to Canada to speak at Windsor University right across the river from Detroit; naturally I had to go through Atlanta, and then the flight from Atlanta to Detroit and then Windsor, and the pilot says, “Ladies and Gentleman we are now passing over Cincinnati over on the left side.” It was a beautiful Fall day...so I looked and there was a little silver trickle of water and I just said to the flight attendant, “That must be the Ohio River.” She says “I wouldn’t know.” And I thought, well, honey, I hope the pilot knows. But it is almost a contempt for scenery. I think about my students; they don’t have any idea. For instance in Huck Finn, it is very important that you know that the Ohio River comes into the Mississippi River near Cairo. So then you say, now who knows where the Ohio River comes from? You never find anyone now that will know. Well, I had to learn that in the fifth grade. So you say, where is Three Rivers Stadium and that begins to percolate.

It is just the loss of the particular. I know Mr. Davidson, in one of his later poems, said something about in poetry the tame abstract must wed the wild particular. I think that is marvelous, and in a way that’s what the arts all try to do. No real art is about thought. I have not a shred of sympathy for it; the idea of thought just makes me want to go to bed. The idea of the wild particular is something to take notice about. I think in a certain way, a certain limited way, they were right. I think it is not accidental that some young people have been discovering this.

I’ve asked some of my friends why naturalists often write well in certain forms. One of them, who is a botanist, told me, in our business we are trained to observe and record the particular instance, and we are used to writing concretely. You see, the social sciences can’t be concrete about, God knows, anything. I thought that was a good explanation. I’ve always sensed that in Mr. Davidson’s conception. Then, of course, he was always concerned with Hardy; he used to teach a course on Hardy and Conrad, and I wish that he’d been doing it while I was there. But the conflict in Hardy was always, he said, essentially the conflict between tradition and anti-tradition, which I think is perfectly true and I think is also perfectly true of Southern literature.

Jackson: Vanderbilt, for all of its esteem, and I’m not going to dismiss that, did not seem like a terribly happy place to people like John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks.

Drake: Now wait a minute. You are talking about something, but you don’t quite have all the facts. I know that those gentlemen have said some things to that effect, but let me remind you that Cleanth Brooks always said he was born into genteel poverty; that was his phrase. His father was a Methodist preacher. He went to a prep school, a private school, a very good one too, in McKenzie, Tennessee, called the McTyeire School. That was named for Bishop McTyeire of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, who was one of the folks that helped persuade old Commodore Vanderbilt to give the first million dollars with which to found the school.

Furthermore, when Brooks went to Vanderbilt, he belonged to ATO Fraternity, which is a very reputable fraternity and always very strong in the South. Then, of course, later on he became a Rhodes Scholar. Only the United States Senate is a more prestigious club than the Rhodes Scholarships. You look around you on the national scene, and indeed on the local scene, and I think you will see what I mean. I don’t say this to be unkind or malicious, but the Fugitives and their literary coterie belonged to what there was to belong to; they were not left out.

I think in those days too, it was easier to be both a poet and a football player, than it became later on when you had Big Jim Dickey and people like that. I don’t think the world was quite so divided back then. Now Mr. Ransom later left Vanderbilt because Chancellor Kirkland would not give him the magazine he wanted to edit and Kenyon College made a more attractive offer.

They did not go around acting like poets. They were, I’m not going to say “good old boys,” but they were simply young men, most of them from quite good families, even if they were born into genteel poverty, who began to experiment with writing poems and got inspired by teachers like Mr. Ransom and Donald Davidson, who was my great teacher.

Mr. Davidson, of course, all of his life was mortally afraid of poverty because he grew up pretty hard, and I was told at one time that he did not even participate in the Vanderbilt retirement plan. He was depending on the sale of his textbooks to provide for his old age. I notice, by the way, you have here the one I used as a freshman at Vanderbilt and is still matchless in some ways [points to a copy of American Composition and Rhetoric]. Ransom and Tate were not left out and I don’t think they were regarded as such curiosities. This is very important because I hear this now. I have heard this over the years, how could we get such a body on our campus? The answer to that question is to beg that question because you don’t import such bodies; they happen. I think Mr. Davidson, who was the one most at the center of the group, said once that he saw no reason why a similar group could not have existed in any other university down South given the common commitment that they all had to the discipline and practice of poetry at that time. I think that is true. But you don’t order off for these and you don’t create it by establishing, God help us, a writing program.

Jackson: I want to ask you a little about Peter Taylor. He is from Trenton, Tennessee, your part of the state. I am curious about your themes and background, which are very different from his; even your approach is different.

Drake: Well, he puts my teeth on edge. Though he is enormously admired by many people who are good friends of mine and many people who are not good friends of mine. One of my students summed it all up better than I could, just a few years ago when we were studying his work in my Southern literature class. It was a summer school course. I’ve often had very bright students in summer school because they are highly motivated, and they want to get through. This fellow said, “Mr. Drake, you know what, I just don’t think his characters are as important as he wants me to think they are.” And I said, “You’ve got a point.” Now of course this comment would completely destroy whatever reputation that I may have in some circles because Taylor has a devoted and indeed fanatical following amongst the writers. And when I say that, I mean The New Yorker people and the Sewanee Review people and all that.

I told Cleanth Brooks one time that I thought Peter Taylor really did believe that people who belonged to country clubs were better than other people. He very predictably denied that. He said, “Oh, some of his most unsavory characters are country club people, but you know the country club people don’t recognize themselves.” Well now, that’s stupid. The story that got my back up some years ago was published first in The New Yorker, where I read it, and then later appeared in book form, called The Old Forest. It all hinges on this crucial distinction between Memphis debutantes and Memphis working girls, the young girls who come into Memphis from places like my hometown and other towns to work as secretaries and the way the world is changing.

Occasionally I have found some of his stories extremely moving, like “A Long Fourth,” which is laid in Nashville and takes place over a long Fourth of July weekend, right at the beginning of World War II, when the son has come home to join the army. What his mother learns about her three children in the process of the weekend, and it has racial overtones, which of course ought to please many people because they think Southerners have not written about race or taken the right attitude about race. And, she learns, finally, that it is not in any one of her three children to really love anybody.

Now, I can’t think of a worse thing for a parent to learn about his or her progeny, and I find that is very moving and quite credible. And I didn’t go to Vanderbilt for nothing; I know Nashville pretty well and I believe every word of this story. Maybe down on Franklin Road his sociology is always impeccable. In Memphis, of course, they all live in what’s called the Gardens District, which is midtown, bounded on the west by Cleveland, on the south by Central, on the east by Cooper, and on the north by Peabody. It’s where Mr. Taylor’s own family lived when they lived in Memphis for a while.

As I understand it, his father was a big executive in various companies around the South, and he was always losing out in the power struggles, so they would always come back to Trenton and recoup their fortunes and then venture forth again. So there is that novelty that I think won the Pulitzer Prize, A Summons to Memphis, which I thought was really exasperating. It is based on a historical event, the collapse of Caldwell and Company in Nashville in the early 1930s and Luke Lea, one of the executives, being put in jail. Luke Lea was, by the way, the officer in World War I who tried to lead a group of men—after the Kaiser had abdicated and moved to Holland who tried to go and kidnap him, but the plan was foiled. Lea, spelled L-E-A by the way, Nashvillians are very particular about those things, and so he carries on about the family being forced to move from Nashville to Memphis as though they were Russian aristocrats being forced to move to Moscow from St. Petersburg. I just feel like saying, “Ho-hum.”

Mr. Taylor, of course, has an interesting family history on both sides. His maternal grandfather was Governor of the state of Tennessee; his name was Robert L. Taylor. He was called “Our Bob,” and he ran against his own brother for the governorship and beat his brother, Alf Taylor. Alf Taylor was later elected governor. Then on his father’s side, his father’s name was Hillsman Taylor and his paternal grandfather was named Robert Zachary Taylor, which sounds absolutely like, you know, just dripping with history. And he almost got lynched when he and his colleagues in a business organization called the West Tennessee Land Company tried to buy up a lot of the land around Reelfoot Lake that was kind of held by squatters’ rights. Anyway, they tried to buy up a lot of the land and turn it into a very big money-making development. This was about 1910 or 1912, or somewhere in there, and with disastrous results because they were subjected to terrorist tactics from the local owners, the people who owned just small plots of land and so on.

One time I was visiting some friends in England who lived in a wonderful old country house, and they decided to go out to some gymnastic event one afternoon which I did not want to go to, so I stayed home. I love to read back issues of magazines; I can’t think of a better way to spend a rainy Saturday than go through a whole lot of back issues of Life, and what should they have in their library but back issues of Illustrated London News, which would be the English equivalent, you know. And there were some issues from the early decades of the century, and lo and behold, there was a big write-up, with photographs, on the terrorist night-riders of West Tennessee. They finally called out the National Guard and got it pacified and The West Tennessee Land Company finally had to back down. . .

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, the editors of The Southern Review, were enormously influential at that time and for a few years, and of course Louisiana State University didn’t want to fool with it and declared it dead, then of course years later it was resurrected, you know, with Louis Simpson and others and continues as a very distinguished magazine, and this is not impugning the good faith of Brooks and Warren and their right to make editorial choices, but I mean they were in a position to do people an enormous amount of good.

One of the people that they fostered was Katherine Anne Porter. The fact that she was married to Albert Erskine, who was one of the assistant editors, didn’t hurt, I guess, and then Albert Erskine claimed to have discovered Eudora Welty. Of course, a number of people have claimed to discover her. Which is always very fine...now you see I’m getting to be ugly, but this is true. So those magazines were extremely powerful in promoting the interests of their friends.

I got to know Allen Tate really quite well some years later after they moved into Nashville, because his emphysema kept getting worse and he decided he must be closer to his doctors. I got to be very fond of him and he was so kind to me. He wrote blurbs for my books, and he said such kind things about some of my work. I had no claim on him, I mean he had not been my teacher; there was no connection, but he was very kind to young people. It was not just me, it was a lot of other people too. He was also mean. He would talk about people. Of course, sinner that I am, I relish that.

Any Southerner, any Southerner who is a real Southerner, I’m not saying wave the Confederate flag, but I mean any Southerner who thinks like one is a born rememberer. He’s been surrounded all his life by memories, often sad ones. Now that’s passing, I suppose, with people like me, and remember I don’t count in a way because I’m older than my years, in some ways. But these were all born rememberers. They were people for whom the past was, not that it was better, not that they necessarily thought that it was better than the present, but they thought it was part of the whole show and you must get it correct. So when they argued about the design of houses, that still seems funny to me. It was part of getting all the facts correct. For them the world was all one: past, present and future. Now that’s always true of Southerners, by and large. I mean it; it’s not that modern idea that the past is dead. Henry Ford said history is bunk and all that kind of stuff; ironically, through his own efforts he reconstructed a nineteenth-century village. What is it?

Jackson: Deerfield.

Drake: Yes, Deerfield. I haven’t been there, but what could be more ironic than that? It was almost like it was blood money or something. Because more than any other person in this country, he destroyed the nineteenth century, in some ways, with the invention of the automobile and the enormous proliferation of automobiles, and so they thought it was all connected and that the world was connected. That is the theme I see so much in Robert Penn Warren, but it didn’t surprise them a bit if they went somewhere else and met somebody who knew somebody they knew. They didn’t travel much—it was no news to them that people were all, in some ways, brothers and sisters. They wouldn’t have gotten up and taken a high stand on some social problems, I’m sure you know, but there was no news to them that basically most people were all alike. No news at all. I don’t think I could add any more to that.

Robert Drake Interview (Chattahoochee Review 16.1, 1995)

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Sources

James A. Perkins, “Remembering Robert Drake (1930–2001),” Modern Age 44, no. 3 (Summer 2002).

Jeffrey Folks, “Robert Drake, As I Knew Him,” Modern Age, June 10, 2015.

Thomas Hubert, “Robert Drake and the Presence of the Past,” Abbeville Institute.