Donald Davidson used the word "folk-chain" in "Hermitage," a poem collected in The Long Street (1961). In a 1966 lecture, "The Center That Holds: Southern Literature & The Oldtime Religion," he spoke of the "folk-chain of memory." The lecture waited eighteen years for print, until Southern Partisan ran it in 1984.
The Poem
“Hermitage” treats memory as older than the man who remembers. Davidson got his secondhand, from his grandmother. She was in her late teens and living in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, when Federal troopers took some boys she knew, Confederate soldiers in uniform, stood them by the road, and shot them. One broke and ran. They shot him too. She helped lay out the bodies, and years later she told the story to a grandson small enough to sit and listen. He put it in “The Sod of Battlefields.” Nobody would call that “lived experience,” the phrase moderns use when they mean memory is private property. The same handing-down goes on at family reunions in state parks, on porch swings after supper, wherever a grandfather shows a boy how to read tomorrow’s rain in today’s clouds, and in recipes nobody ever bothered to write down.
You won’t find much of it in the consensus histories. Davidson called it the folk-chain. In the South he knew, each generation took hold of the links its forebears had forged, hammered out another, and passed the chain to whoever would carry it.
“Hermitage” works the same way. There’s a bronze tablet on the hill, and it gives Davidson a name. That’s about all. It “cannot tell what fire” drove the man “Who notched the first oak on this western hill.” For that he needs the hearthside tale, and the poem expects to be kept the way the tale was, by being told again. Memory older than the rememberer.
On Chestnut Ridge, Davidson walks ground where his people’s story is waiting on him. Vines have grown up over the rails men split and stacked. He notes where the fence quits and the woods start. He seeks out the gravemarkers, “Stones where no filial tribute can be lost / Above the bones not laid in stranger’s lands,” and reads them the way a surveyor reads a corner stone. They tell him where he belongs.
The lines “To say for what beholden, to fulfill / The unuttered vows” carry Burke’s sense of history as a compact among the dead, the living, and those not yet born. Russell Kirk liked to quote Burke on what follows when the compact breaks: “No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.”
Davidson leaves the “sapless nations” behind. Husk lands. No transfusion will take there; the veins collapsed long ago. He brings us instead to the hearth, to what M. E. Bradford called “the homely and routine operation of tradition”: the fire tended, the wood split, the bread baked, the everyday done every day.
The chain holds where “one person teaching another extends the folk-chain.” Davidson put it plainly: “What passes from memory to memory, without benefit of the historian’s record, is as old in time as the memories that it expresses, and if it is accepted it endures as long as the land and people that accept it.”
The title names the homestead of Andrew Davidson. Say “Hermitage” to anybody in Middle Tennessee and they’ll think of Andrew Jackson’s place out past Donelson, which Davidson surely knew. But a hermitage is also where a hermit lives, and the man in this poem behaves like one. He sits on his ancestor’s hill and listens for what the tablet left off.
Davidson never bought the idea that time runs one direction and gets better as it goes. Anthony Harrigan, in a 1987 Chronicles piece, had a name for what Davidson offered instead: “transcendent memory.” In the poem it works plainly enough. The living read the dates cut in the stones and then go past them, to the men underneath.
The second section calls up “the man of flints and pelts.” Decades have blurred him, yet he comes back in the “hearthside tale,” where “voice to voice into the folk-chain melts.” Davidson trusted “communion and pietas” to outlast the years. The settlers in his poem arrived as old enemies: “Gael and Gaul, Palatine, Huguenot.” Over here the pipes went quiet. Swords tarnished. Whatever they’d fought about in Europe, they mostly left there.
An old man gets the last word: “Peace be to all who keep the wilderness. / Cursed be the child who lets the freehold pass.” A freehold is land you own outright. Selling it brings the curse. After everything else in the poem, forgetting where it came from looks like the same sin.
Bradford, writing about Davidson in Chronicles in 1994, said our job was to “cultivate the arts of memory, and thus hope to preserve to our posterity the bond” between generations. “Hermitage” was Davidson paying his part.
The Center That Holds
I’ve written enough, here’s Davidson’s exposition on the folk-chain in “The Center That Holds”:
A section of The Tall Men—which I first published in 1927—is by this measure about a hundred years old, for it embodies what my grandmother told me—my grandmother who was a girl in her late teens, in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, during the Federal occupation of the eighteen-sixties. She saw her young friends, Confederate soldiers in uniform, captured and shot down in cold blood by Federal troopers. She saw them lined up by the roadside, and the rifles levelled. She heard the shots and saw them fall—all but one who broke away and ran—and then was shot, too. She helped “lay out” the bodies for burial. And she told me about it one day when I was a child at her home. Later, when I was endeavoring to define, in a series of long poems, the relationship of a modern Southerner to his past, I remembered what my grandmother had told me and made it part of a poem (“The Sod of Battlefields,” in The Tall Men).
All of us in the South do a great deal of this kind of remembering, within the circle of family and close friends. With a little help from written records—family papers, books, all that we somehow accumulate—we project our memories far back. In another poem of mine (“Hermitage”), in which I try to visualize a colonial ancestor, I deal with this process of memory:
I cannot see him plain, that far-off sire Who notched the first oak on this western hill. And the bronze tablet cannot tell what fire -Urging the deep bone back to the viking wave- Kindled his immigrant eye and drove his will. But in the hearthside tale his rumor grows As voice to voice into the folk-chain melts And clamor of danger brings the lost kin close.
To see how the folk-chain of memory binds us together and comes into dramatic being in story or novel at some unexpected moment, I would offer Andrew Lytle’s novel The Long Night as a distinguished example.
If in this new Reconstruction that we are now enduring, a hundred years after the first, we should accept and apply the advice being given by the new apostles of discontinuity and destruction, we shall have no more writers like Faulkner, Tate, Cabell, Glasgow, Warren, Ransom, Katherine Anne Porter (to name but a few); but our novelists will be the fiction-writing parallels of Ralph McGill and Harry Ashmore, and our poets of some new Beatnik school will be practicing their Southern versions of Howl.
Instead of such degeneration, we have come—as I said back in 1950—“to the moment of self-consciousness . . . the moment when a writer awakes to realize what he and his people truly are, in comparison with what they are being urged to become.” And what does this mean? It means that the Southerner (or any other member of a traditional society, even a fragment of one) does not have to labor to learn some things. We already know, from the start, who we are, where we are, where we belong, what we live by, what we live for. That priceless inheritance is something given to us. But in the thoroughly modernized, anti-traditional society, it is not given; it can be achieved, if at all, only after long struggle. It is exactly what the apostles of the new Reconstruction, in the pseudoscientific language of the modern power-state, are saying we must not have, must give up if we do have it.
But we have not given it up. And so our moments of self-consciousness may become moments of deepest remembrance that lead to the life of the imagination—the poem, the story, the play, the novel. Yet the writer’s imagination only brings into significant form the life of our people who have cherished, through long tradition and rich custom, what makes such imagination possible. In 1903 the great Irish writer, William Butler Yeats, wrote this of the people of the Galway plains:
There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a community bound together by imaginative possessions, by poems and stories which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action. One could still, if one had the genius, and had been born Irish, write for these people plays and poems like those of Greece... England or any other country which takes its tunes from the great cities and gets its taste from schools and not from old custom, may have a mob, but it cannot have a people... A people alone are a great river, and where a people has died, a nation is about to die. (The Galway Plains)
So said Yeats, and what he said came true for Ireland and for William Butler Yeats. Between the Ireland of Yeats and the South of the past three or four decades, there is, I would say, a stirring likeness. We, too, have been and still are a community bound together by imaginative possessions—a people that has not yet died, a community that, though shaken, battered, and maimed, still lives as a community. What binds us together is, in some considerable measure, what bound the Irish people through the centuries. I remember the very words of the Irish poet George William Russell (Æ), a friend of Yeats, when he stood before a Nashville audience many years ago—the ladies of the Centennial Club and their guests who had come together to surprise Russell with a birthday celebration in his honor. “I will tell you,” said he (in a fine impromptu speech after the presentation of the birthday cake), “why Ireland has a great literature. Because we were poor; because we were backward; because we were downtrodden and oppressed; because we loved our country; because we were religious.” And, hearing that beloved poet as he towered before us with his great brown beard and mighty shoulders, I felt then as I feel now, that he might be speaking for Tennessee, for Virginia, for all the besieged, invaded South, no less than for County Sligo, the River Shannon, Dublin, Tara’s halls.
Notes
I’m not saying anything new, just wanted to share Davidson’s poem and essay.
My sources:
Bradford, M.E. “Donald Davidson and the Calculus of Memory.” Chronicles, 1994-05.
Davidson, Donald. “The Center That Holds.” Southern Partisan 4 (Fall 1984): 17-22. Also published in So Good a Cause: A Decade of the Southern Partisan.
Davidson, Donald. The Long Street: Poems. Vanderbilt University Press, 1961.
Harrigan, Anthony. “Transcendent Memory.” Chronicles, 1987-07.
Kirk, Russell. The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays. Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2014.
Pratt, William. “Donald Davidson: The Poet as Storyteller.” The Sewanee Review 110, no. 3 (2002): 406–25.
Winchell, Mark Royden. Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance. University of Missouri Press, 2000.
"Peace be to all who keep the wilderness / Cursed be the child who lets the freehold pass."
That hits hard.