The Attack On Leviathan

Part 2: The Diversity of America

Chapter I. The Diversity of America

Parts of this chapter (along with several others) are from “Sectionalism in the United States,” Hound and Horn, VI (July-September, 1933). The link to Davidson’s “Sectionalism” essay provides some context of its genesis—some of which is a smidge uncomfortable. In The Idea of the American South (1979), Michael O’Brien portrays Davidson as a misfit compared to his peers—a Tennessee-shaped peg with no complementary hole—a romantic, reactionary, and an anachronistic knight, according to Thomas Daniel Young and M. Thomas Inge. Davidson even spoke of himself as “a lone guerilla and Banquo’s Ghost.” 

I relay this history and context due solely to its relevance to this chapter. “In early 1932, the editor of the Hound and Horn suggested that Davidson might be commissioned to write a piece on sectionalism,” (O’Brien) which led to Tate’s criticism of Davidson detailed in the link above. Davidson, although wounded, wrote “Sectionalism in the United States,” directly leading to this pertinent book.

It seems much of the criticism was in private correspondence, although the Fugitives did have a robust culture of critiquing each other’s work. Even with Tate’s hard words to an editor at Hound & Horn, Tate’s review of Leviathan, “Critical Regionalism” in The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC) 13 Mar 1938—accompanied by a block print of Davidson done by his wife—lauded the work: “In this decade at least three great books have been written about the South and the sectional problem: Vance’s Human Geography of the South; Odum’s Southern Regions; and last fall,  Webb’s Divided We Stand. To this list must now be added a fourth, Mr. Donald Davidson’s The Attack on Leviathan.”

Tate continues, “In order to praise Mr. Davidson’s work as it deserves it is not necessary to say that it is the best of these books; but I think it is just to say that it completes them.” Tate doesn’t end there, he actually says Davidson is more knowledgeable and superior to Odum, Vance, and Webb in several disciplines—according to Tate, Davidson “knows more than they know—not more facts and statistics, but more history, more literature, and in general he commands a richer and more experienced culture than” the three mentioned above.

O’Brien writes The Attack on Leviathan is Davidson intellectually setting out on his own, untethered from Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, partially due to his bond with Tate and Ransom weakening. I mentioned the weak sales and the book’s fate in Part I—turns out, Davidson had a few thoughts about the UNC Press and its editor Lambert Davis. 

In the Attack on Leviathan file among the UNC Press Papers, the “Memorandum on Conversation with Donald Davidson,” by Lambert Davis reads, “The core of Mr. Davidson’s dissatisfaction, I am sure, is the feeling that the Press exercised some kind of censorship on his work. He is almost the only surviving member of the Nashville group of the ’20s whose southernism has been intensified rather than modified by the passage of time. He has parted company, one by one, with nearly all the members of that group, and he very definitely has the feeling that the world is against him, and that there are sinister machinations against his expression of his opinions.”

I don’t know about you—but my ”Southernism” was intensified reading Davis’s memorandum—like time is obliged to suck the oxygen from our Southern souls and extinguish the fire we were entrusted to carry. Sounds like some of these “elite” gatekeepers we have running around today, with all their talk of “respectability” and “winsomeness”. For me and mine, I pray “may our southernism never be modified.”

O’Brien lists a handful of reasons why Leviathan was unheeded, noting its “neglect has not been remedied since then” and “only Russell Kirk and Francis B. Simkins subsequently gave it any attention: see Simkins, ‘The South,’ in Regionalism in America and Russell Kirk, ‘The Poet as Guardian: Donald Davidson,’ in Confessions of a Bohemian Tory: Episodes and Reflections of a Vagrant Career.” Several others of note paid attention to Leviathan—M.E. Bradford and Richard M. Weaver, the first two to come to mind. Also, I hate to admit that I don’t remember how I learned of Davidson—only in the last few years—the work at Abbeville Institute, Chronicles Magazine, Imaginative Conservative, and many others, are all doing their part as links in the “folk-chain of memory.” 

Part I describes Kirk’s high regard for this work. O’Brien writes the Leviathan “was one of the most impressive analyses of sectionalism and the South to be offered in the 1930s, a decade peculiarly concerned with that problem. Indeed, with the exception of Odum’s work, it was the only sustained examination of the problem, which proved both its strength and its weakness.” Young and Inge noted, “as a prose stylist, Davidson has few peers in contemporary American literature. Neither Ransom, Tate, nor Warren has written essays with a precision, a grace, a force, or a conviction to match Davidson’s. Because, however, modern society has not been entirely amenable to what Davidson had to say, it has little heeded or sought to appreciate how he said it. There is every reason to believe, when all is said and done, that Davidson will endure as a prose stylist of the first order in this century.”

Back to the work at hand. This isn’t a classic book review or summary—my original aim was to list every source (author, book, essay, artist, etc) Davidson mentions or refers to in the book but that doesn’t make for the best read (see Notes below). As usual with Davidson, I want to quote or tweet nearly every sentence but there are a few paragraphs that are the best I’ve ever read which I’ll quote as though entering evidence to prove true what Kirk, O’Brien, Young, and Inge wrote above.

As an aside, I haven’t found many essays from Hound & Horn online. A little history of The Hound and Horn: A Harvard Miscellany, you may find helpful.

Davidson uses the term “diversity” not to praise the street corn, curry, and shawarma options food-deliverers spit in after sitting through “DecolonizeDoorDash” powerpoint—but to describe the evident and organic differences of people in various sections/regions, yet go purposefully unrecognized by the “experts.”

The sectionalism and regionalism of the twentieth century are an American expression of dissatisfaction with the culture, or pseudo-culture that has accompanied the diffusion of industrialism. Americans once debated the question of how much of civil liberty they must yield to the state in the common interest; they now raise the equally important question of how much of their preferred way of life they are obliged to sacrifice in order to secure economic provision and technological efficiency.

In its most self-conscious aspect this new form of sectionalism appears as a movement of artists, uncovering what politicians and economists have ignored. It is a revolt against the excessive centralism of the machine age, a tendency running counter to the cosmopolitanism that for many years up-rooted and abstracted art. The artists have been among the first to realize that some of the dilemmas of an industrial civilization may be downed or avoided by reaffirming the ties, local and native, which were once only shackles to be cast off. In its undeniable nostalgia this sectionalism contains a realistic answer to the question: Whom shall my soul believe? Worn out with abstraction and novelty, plagued with divided counsels, some Americans have said: I will believe the old folks at home, who have kept alive through many treacherous outmodings some good secret of life.

The habitat and manners of the Yankee, the Southerner, and of all the varieties of Westerner have been known and named at all periods in our history. We have a big medicine for the nation, by which, gravely passing the calumet from hand to hand, we assure ourselves that there is no North, no South, no East, no West, except as compass or winds may indicate; and we have a little medicine for the states, performed with assurances that require nowadays a more anxious and forcible puffing than of old. But no sooner is the mystical rite performed than we resume our usual characters, and are again Americans, certainly, but with equal certainty also Americans of this or that geographic division.

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Notes

Davidson quotes Lord Byron commenting on the historian Edward Gibbon. See footnote [9] from “Evelyn Waugh on Saint Edmund Campion’s Life and Death” for more context.

Throughout the book, Davidson is juxtaposing the work of Charles and Mary Beard, mainly The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols (The Macmillan Company, 1927), and the works of Frederick Jackson Turner, especially The Significance of the Sections in United States History. Although, in this chapter, Davidson notes that William E. Dodd in Expansion and Conflict (Houghton Mifflin Co. 1915) “gave a somewhat definitive statement of the problem” with sectionalism and some of Dodd’s early work on the subject precedes Turner’s.