The Attack On Leviathan

Part 1

In 1938 appeared the clearest and most courageous of the Agrarian documents, Donald Davidson’s Attack on Leviathan.” – Richard M. Weaver

Russell Kirk tells the story of discovering Davidson’s book in 1938 as a sophomore at Michigan State in the introduction for its reprint in 1991. Kirk writes, “The book was so good that I assumed all intelligent Americans, or almost all, were reading it. Actually, as I learned years later, the University of North Carolina Press pulped the book’s sheets after only a few hundred copies had been sold: clearly an act of discrimination against conservative views.”

Perhaps you might grasp my gratefulness to possess one of the “few hundred copies” that escaped the book bath for the depublished and presumably turned into unnatural ingredients Intellectuals relish in their SoyFast shakes and superfood bug bowls.

Some months back, I called my Grandpa and told him I'd be over shortly to collect him. We sauntered over to the Goodlettsville Antique Mall. Not three steps in, we come to what I call a China Cabinet (don’t have the strongest furniture nomenclature game). Tucked inside that old curio holder were a few books. Like C.S. Lewis meditating in a toolshed, amid moted sunbeams, behold, a site prettier than a June bug on a tin dipper, Donald Davidson’s The Attack on Leviathan.

As a veteran in this here book-buying, I’m Epictetus until I get eyes on that initial page's faintly penciled price. Naw! Is this real life? $6. SIX. DOLLARS. Surely, the book had some defect. Nope. Solid copy. A First Edition, inscribed with an unfamiliar name and a newspaper clipping inside.

I roundoff’d (for the South would deem cartwheels or skips inappropriate for its sons, much less the act of sliding) into Alan Cornett’s DM’s, for he’s an expert on such Cultural Debris and a fellow Southern bookman, my exact message: “I’m so confused. I paid $6 for Attack on Leviathan. I’m seeing it on AbeBooks for $100+.”

His response: “there’s no way this dude got a 1st edition for $6.” No. No. That’s what he was thinking. His actual reply: “Is it the Transaction pb?” Not the keenest knife in Dixie, I had not a clue what he was asking. With a little interwebs search I cracked the code. The 1991 reprint was originally published by Transaction, which “was sold to Taylor & Francis in 2016 and merged with its Routledge imprint.” Good luck even finding the 1991 paperback for $6.

Mr. Cornett goes full Lord Peter Wimsey and sends me the obituary for the book’s inscriber and first owner, Dr. Robert Hunter West—whose inscription reads “Robert H. West June 23, 1938” with the clear penmanship of a man of letters, not the illegible Grakliani script of a Dr. who writes SSRI prescriptions to the folks deciding to pulp such valuable works.

Many of you are acquainted with Marion Montgomery (big fan) who studied and taught at the University of Georgia. Deal W. Hudson makes the connections for us—he writes:

Those who are familiar with the history of American letters will remember that Georgia had enjoyed close ties to Vanderbilt’s Fugitives and Agrarians since the 1930s. The legacy of Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Andrew Lytle was strongly represented on the Georgia faculty by William Wallace Davidson (Donald’s brother), John Donald Wade (founder of the Georgia Review), and Robert Hunter West, who became Montgomery’s early mentor and lifelong friend.

It’s an honor to own Dr. West’s copy of Leviathan. Montgomery even dedicated his book The Reflective Journey Toward Order: Essays on Dante, Wordsworth, Eliot, and Others to Robert Hunter West. Dr. Montgomery wrote in an essay that “West, a Professor of English, an authority on Shakespeare and Milton, but locally known as an authority on the occult (hmmm). He was already famous (locally) for fierceness in resisting corruptions of our language. He was deadly on papers using passive voice in a cowardly way, or on the sloppiness of phrases like different than.” I am 100% certain I would have failed Dr. West’s course.

Montgomery wasn’t hyperbole-maxxing concerning West’s expertise on the occult. Vanderbilt University houses the Robert H. West Demonology and Witchcraft Collection which features in “All Hallows: Witches, Magic and Things That Go Bump.” Teresa Gray, curator of special collections, said “Professor West, who taught at Vanderbilt while earning his doctorate in English during the 1930s, had a very strong interest in the 17th-century witch trials in England and the United States.” I couldn’t find any proof West was one of Davidson’s students at Vanderbilt but it is highly likely. Dr. West died in 1988, so I can’t say how my copy ended up at the Goodlettsville Antique Mall. I carry the hope that many a tome from his collection now nestle in new quarters or await in the hushed corners of bookshops and cobwebbed confines of Southern antique stores.

Now to the neatly folded newspaper clipping placed betwixt the cover and first page, now stained a tinge darker oxidized-yellow-brown than the actual clipping. It probably hasn’t been unfolded since put there on June 30, 1963. The Nashville Tennessean ran a great Book Page “Under the Green Lamp with Floy W. Beatty”, originally edited by Richmond Croom Beatty. The clipping was the “Green Lamp” review of Leviathan, “Regionalism Reaffirmed”, an abridged reprint of Richmond C. Croom’s 1938 review in the Nashville Banner, “Searching Probe of Social Ills” on another great Book Page, “About New Books” edited by Mary Stahlman Douglas.

On a random note, as much as I appreciate Routledge/Taylor & Francis reprints, dropping $60 on a paperback isn’t my idea of a good time, then there's the matter of the cover design — which brings to mind a booth at Bayside’s favorite hangout, The Max. I will help in whatever way I can to get quality hardcover reprints of our Southern canon into the hands of fellow Southerners and booklovers.

Preface

Davidson described this work as “a series of essays and informal studies grouped around a general theme. It does not pretend to be a systematic and definitive consideration of sectionalism and regionalism in the United States. To deal adequately with that subject would require a lifetime of travel and investigation and would call for a combination of special skills, particularly in history and other branches of social science, such as I cannot claim to possess, great though my interest and assiduous my reading in those fields may have been. I can claim only the layman’s right to judge warring interpretations of American life and history, to set them beside the reality of experience, immediate or remembered, and then to choose for himself whom his soul will believe.”

I’ll highlight several of the names Davidson mentions in his acknowledgment for you to add to your reading list: John Donald Wade, Stark Young, Frank L. Owsley, Allen Tate, Seward Collins of The American Review, and James Southall Wilson. He also thanks The Southern Review, Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, and The Hound and Horn for permission to reprint his essays in this book.

On James Southall Wilson, William S. Knickerbocker (editor of The Sewanee Review back in the day), wrote in 1929:

Foremost among those who are cultivating reading and book-buying habits among Southerners may be mentioned John Southall Wilson, editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, Howard Mumford Jones, editor of The Literary Lantern, the editors of The South Atlantic Quarterly, and John H. McGinness, editor of The Southwest Review and literary editor of The Dallas News. Perhaps the most distinctive newspaper book page in the South is that of The Nashville Tennessean, edited by Donald Davidson whose weekly bulletins of literary comment have a special viewpoint and who has been unusually successful in securing the assistance of some of the best minds of the upper-middle South in reviewing books for his page.

In 1934 Mr. Knickerbocker throws a little shade at Davidson, the Agrarians, and The American Review in his editorial “Asides and Soliloquies.”

Donald Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1938) (you might want to click here)

Just Because

A sample from the Taylor and Francis reprint of Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States, by Donald Davidson, with a new introduction by Russell Kirk. 1991. It can still be purchased here.

Russell Kirk, “Donald Davidson and the South’s Conservatism”

The Attack on Leviathan at 75: A Commemoration and a Critique Modern Age (Fall 2013)

Virginia Rock’s groundbreaking Dissertation “The Making and Meaning of I’ll Take My Stand –  A Study in Utopian – Conservatism, 1925-1939”

M.E. Bradford, “The Prophetic Voice of Donald Davidson” Chronicles Magazine, 1992

M.E. Bradford, “No to Leviathan” National Review, September 17, 1982.

M.E. Bradford, “Donald Davidson, 1893-1968” Southern Review, 1968

M.E. Bradford, “A Durable Fire: Donald Davidson and the Profession of Letters” Southern Review, 1967

M.E. Bradford, Leviathan’s Predictable Servants

Mark Royden Winchell, “Reattacking Leviathan” Chronicles Magazine, 2005

Donald Davidson Papers, MSS.0002. Vanderbilt University Special Collections.

Donald Davidson on Abbeville Institute

Donald Davidson, Tennessee Encyclopedia

Murray N. Rothbard and Ronald Radosh, A New History of Leviathan

Michael Sisk, “The Courage and Endurance to Remain in His Own Country and Fight the Battle Out: Donald Davidson and the South, 1893-1968” (2008). All Theses. 496.

Marion Montgomery, “Books, Books, Books: Difficult Choices in Time of Intellectual Stress” The Christendom Review, 1999

Thomas Daniel Young, Donald Davidson (1971)

Special Southern Issue of Modern Age, Vol 2 Iss 4 (Fall 1958)

Brainard Cheney, “Donald Davidson” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Autumn, 1968)

Louise Davis, “He Clings to Enduring Values” Multipage feature on Davidson in The Nashville Tennessean Magazine (Sep 4, 1949)

Robert H. West, “King Hamlet’s Ambiguous Ghost” PMLA, Vol. 70, No. 5 (Dec, 1955)

Robert H. West. “Science Fiction and Its Ideas”, Georgia Review Vol 15, No 3 (Fall 1961)

Robert H. West, “Literature and Knowledge” Georgia Review, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer 1971)

Robert H. West, “The High Art of Quality Frivolity”, South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol 37, No 1 (Jan, 1972)

Book Reviews:

Allen Tate, “Critical Regionalism” The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC) 13 Mar 1938, Sun, Page 29. This review is accompanied by a block print of Davidson done by his wife.

“Donald Davidson Argues Case of Regionalism” The Nashville Tennessean, 3 Apr 1938, Sun, Page 46

Helen Hill, “The Parts and the Whole” The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 14, No. 4 (AUTUMN 1938)

Charles S. Ascher’s review in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol 206, 1939

Review in “Books to Own” The Daily News Leader (Staunton, Virginia) – 3 Jul 1938, Sun, Page 5

Harry Estill Moore, Review of The Attack on Leviathan, Social Forces, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1938

William C. Frierson’s review, “Mr. Davidson Asks if South Intends to Do Nothing”, mentions that he is a professor at the University of Alabama and was a member of the Agrarian Group in Nashville. The Birmingham News  1 May 1938, Sun, Page 85

Caro Green Russell, Review from “The Literary Lantern” in The State (Columbia, South Carolina), 26 Jun 1938, Sun, Page 17

I thought I knew about all the Southern literary publications but I learned about the North Georgia Review from “Little With a Big Punch” The Times Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia), 4 Jun 1938, Sat,  Page 8

Hudson Strode, “A Southern View of the South” NYT, 1938