The Republic of Letters in America

The Correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate

Thomas Daniel Young, John J. Hindle, Thomas Daniel Young, John J. Hindle

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813195131
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate, extending from 1929 to the time of Bishop's death in 1944, embraces the period of the Great Depression and the coming of World War II. In that richly eventful period in the development of American literature, these two men of letters were continually exchanging news and comment about the activities, opinions, successes, and misadventures of poets, novelists, critics, publishers, and editors; about expatriate Americans in Europe and the quickening intellectual life of New York; and about the Agrarian movement and what was later to be called the Southern Renascence. Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Katherine Anne Porter, Maxwell Perkins, Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley, Scott Fitzgerald—all are subjects of comment, both personal and artistic. The respect and affection of both writers for Edmund Wilson survived their vehement political differences with him, and their exchange of literary criticism, advice, and encouragement with Wilson continued unabated.

The letters record a warm and steady friendship, as well as a literary relationship in which Tate—though the younger man—is clearly the mentor. The freedom with which Tate and Bishop discuss their work in progress, and the care and candor with which they comment on one another's poems and stories, offer the reader of this carefully edited correspondence revealing glimpses of the creative process and the reality of the American "republic of letters" in their time.

1929-1934

After their introduction on September 23, 1925, an event overshadowed in Tate’s memory of that day by the birth of his daughter, Bishop and Tate did not meet again until 1928, in Paris, where their friendship truly began. Tate was working in France that year on a Guggenheim fellowship and was accompanied by his wife, Caroline Gordon. Bishop and his family had taken up permanent residence in a chateau near Paris in 1926, where they lived until 1933, six months after the Tates returned from a second sojourn in France. The correspondence begins in 1929, while Tate was still in Paris, and continues following Tate’s return to the States at the end of 1929. It is in these first letters that we see the creative activity of both men increase with the stimulus of each other’s careful and detailed criticism. Bishop produced a quality and quantity of verse and prose under Tate’s prodding that he was not to achieve again until the last years of his life. Tate, on the other hand, was writing some of his best poetry and making his first attempts at fiction. We can also see the reaction of concerned, intelligent men like Tate and Bishop to the economic and social devastation of those years, which they saw as the inevitable result of capitalism. Yet we can also see their distrust of Utopian political remedies, a distrust born of a skepticism and sense of evil central to their southern heritage. This section of the correspondence ends in the fall of 1934 following Bishop’s return to America and the completion of his novel, Act of Darkness. For Tate, too, the fall of 1934 was especially significant, for it marked the end of his efforts to support himself solely by his pen and the beginning of a long and distinguished academic career.

July 17, 1929

Tressancourt, par Orgeval S[eine] et O[ise]

Dear Allen:Isn’t it about time that you were delivered of Jefferson Davis?¹ As I remember the fifteenth was the date set for the cutting of the umbilical cord. If the event has taken place, let me know. I await anxiously the time when you’ll again be available for discourse and drinking—My regards to your wife, JPB

AL

1. Tate completed Jefferson Davis, His Rise and Fall: A biographical Narrative (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1929) while in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship.

[July 1929]

Dear Allen:I’m so sorry to hear about your mother’s death.¹ It was two years earlier, almost to the day, that I learned in similar fashion of my own mother’s death, and I know how grievous it is to be so far away. There is, as you say, no reason for returning once you know that she is dead, but it is impossible not to regret not having been there. I suffered for months afterward, and even now cannot quite forgive myself not having gone back, though at the time it was next to impossible, Margaret being with child and having a very bad time of it. To you, then, I can truly say that I sympathize with you.

I am, on the other hand, delighted that you have finished your book.² I hope now that you will devote yourself for a time at least to poetry.Yours, John

AL

1. Tate’s mother had died on July 17, 1929, at Monteagle, Tennessee.

2. Jefferson Davis, His Rise and Fall.

November 17, 1929

6 Place de l’Odeon / Paris, VIe,

Dear John:I read your story¹ the very night I brought it with me, and I have reread it since; but this is the first chance I have had to write to you about it; even now I am so rushed that I really ought to wait for the next conversation. It is a fine story beautifully written, and I hope you have enough of them like it to publish a book very soon.

If there is any criticism of it at all, it is, it seems to me, on two points only, which are really one point. The story tends to fall into two parts, and the style is two styles perhaps for that reason. It appears to me that what the professors call the “exposition” may be elaborated a little too much—the late war as the taking off place; and because this requires some manipulation to get you to the main character, the action is somewhat retarded; this same difficulty seems to place too much emphasis upon the hero’s mother, who is obviously required as a further transition from the opening scene to the fine climax. All these difficulties are beautifully handled, but I believe that it would be a better story if they were eliminated altogether.

I have a suspicion: you are a very good short-story writer; and an extremely good novelist. It seems to me that, as a short-story, the piece should plunge right into the last incident with the minimum of preparation. As it is, it requires only the right amount of extension to make it a novel. There are two things that make me believe that you have primarily the instinct of a novelist. First, your tendency to elaborate a scene with reflections of, in this case, the “Marlow” of your method; and, secondly, your weakness (from the point of view of the short-story) for letting a character run away with you—which tends to clog the action. Old Mrs. Ambler is beautifully done, but her story blurs her son’s because you get too much interested in her for her own sake. Shouldn’t the treatment of minor characters in a short-story as a rule be more externalized? The old lady was obviously very rich material, and a great temptation. As the story stands, it would make a novel, or at least a fine long story, if it were twice as long: the various elements, for lack of even further elaboration, are suspended at present because the treatment is too intensive for a story, not intensive enough for a novel.

One difference between the story writer and the novelist is a difference between you and Hemingway. Hemingway has never surpassed the last episode of your story for pure narrative; but Hemingway, being only a story writer, would have got the character into that piece of action with a preparation of about two pages. On the other hand, he could never have given us Mrs. Ambler. He implies character through action; you arrive at action through character, and you are a novelist.

This is all very hasty and involved; I want very much to talk to you about it. In spite of all I say, if I were to find a book of stories like this one, I should say that here is a very good writer indeed, even if I should look forward to a novel by him.

Most of this I got from Caroline, who knows more about these things than I do.

We have been hoping you’d drop in some day, and if you all aren’t doing anything in particular tomorrow afternoon, why not go to the bicycle races with us? The Walkers are going, and perhaps the Hemingways. If you can make it, meet us at Lipp’s for lunch at 12:30, or at the Velodrome d’Hiver at 2, at the entrance on the street where the elevated tracks are. . . . Best regards to you both.Yrs. Allen T.

TLS

1. “The Cellar.”

March 24, 1930

4 Rue Mignard XVII/Passy 34–99

Dear Allen:The child turned out—to our amazement and Buffie’s surprise—to be two children—in other words, twin boys, born Saturday night, easily and expeditiously.¹ They are a good size for twins, sturdy and disposed to feed, and as a consequence of her short labor, Margaret is sitting up looking as if nothing at all had happened.

I shall come over nonetheless, as soon as things are running with fair smoothness. Scribner’s has taken Many Thousands Gone with enthusiasm and offered a—to me—more generous price.² I miss you both. John

AL

1. Bishop was married in 1922 to Margaret Grosvenor Hutchins. They had three sons—Jonathan, the eldest, and Robert and Christopher, twins—all born during their parents’ prolonged European residence.

2. Many Thousands Gone was published by Scribner’s in 1931.

August 9th, 1930

Dear Allen:I’ve been a devil of a time answering your letter. The water crisis undermined my morale so that I wrote no one; I wanted to say I was sailing, and not until I could say that, would I write. Well, we bathe now, all of us and the household is calmer than I can remember it. So I’m sailing on the Berengaria next Saturday, arriving in New York the twenty-second. I plan to be around there a few days only before going to Charles Town. My address is 311, S. George Street.

In New York, the only address I can think of at the moment is the Coffee House, 54 West 45th Street.

Your estate on the Cumberland River sounds on the grand scale.¹ I hope I can see it; it all depends on the money. The new well about broke us and just now I don’t see how I am going to stay the two months I want in the land of tariff and Hoover. However, I’m coming and will stay as long as subterfuges and Scribner’s check hold out.

I was delighted with Caroline’s story.² Please congratulate her for me.

I haven’t done a hell of a lot of work this summer, but think with a little revising at my sister’s I can hand over the mss to Scribners before I return.³ I’ve got everything in rough shape. Of course, give me time and I’ll revise till the crack of doom.

I thought MacLeish’s new book very good.⁴ Well, even better than that. He has at last shaken off the sand of the Waste Land from his feet and written at least three poems that are about as good as one gets.

I had a good trip to London a month ago, to sojourn in the political atmosphere of the Stracheys. I heard nothing but the American Revolution—not that of ’76 needless to say—so that at last I had to tell ’em just what the Revolution would come to in America. It would so obviously turn into a continental race riot that not a page of Marx would be left intact. Michael Gold and Dos Passos’s provisional govt would last, on a liberal estimate, three days. Then the north Italians would begin killing south Italians, the Irish the Jews, everybody the niggers and at the end we’d all find ourselves safe and not so snug under a good hardboiled dictatorship, not of the proletariat. They were on the other hand amusing and maybe sound on the subject of the Social Rev. in England. Strachey gave us a good picture of Moscow receiving its first communication from His Majesty’s Soviet Government.

I’ve heard nothing from Ernest except through the public prints. Scott F[itzgerald] has been in Switzerland with Zelda. She started with a nervous breakdown last winter and since has had to be confined, I can’t say how strictly. He lies so I could only make out that her state is serious, or at least has been. But how near actual insanity she has been or is I’ve no idea.

But don’t let me spread the impression that she is insane. I simply don’t know. The rumor has gone about Paris, but is ultimately based only on Scott’s drunken gossip and that depends upon whether he’s trying to bolster himself up or make himself out a lowly Mid-Western worm. As you know.

My infants thrive. The new ones have been no trouble at all for all that they mean a lot of work. They eat, sleep and grow enormously. I don’t think they had names when I wrote you. The elder was, inevitably, named for Margaret’s father and is being called to his displeasure Robert—I’ll have to say Grosvenor in his presence. The little one is Christopher, after Marlowe or Columbus, or anybody except A A Milne.

My best to Caroline and many apologies for not having written sooner. John

TLS

1. With a loan from Tate’s brother Benjamin, the Tates had purchased “Benfolly,” an estate near Clarksville, Tennessee.

2. “The Long Day,” Scribner’s Magazine 88 (August, 1930), 162–66. This was her first published short story.

3. Bishop is completing Many Thousands Gone.

4. New Found Land (1930).

December 12, 1930

Route 6 Clarksville, Tenn.

Dear John:Perhaps you are in town, but I’m sending this to the country, where, I hope, you are basking in the mild French winter, as we are shivering in the famous December of the sunny South. I can’t tell you how sorry I was to get your farewell note back in October; I was sorry we had not gone to Virginia to live, for I am sure you would have visited us there. But perhaps we shall meet again within a twelvemonth; Caroline has applied for a gift from the Guggenheims, and there’s no reason to suppose she will be refused, since I got one. We should sail in September, and I should hope shortly after that to see you climbing those five flights of stairs at the Place de l’Odeon. I’ll never have enough imagination to stay anywhere else.

I saw a very good poem of yours in a recent New Republic,¹ and I was pleased to see in the Contributor’s Notes the news that you were the author of a volume.² Where is it and where may I get a copy? Much as I admire Many Thousands Gone I insist on putting your poetry far above your prose. I was saying that to some one here the other day, and was promptly accused of self-defense: I feel a mild nausea every time I see the biographies mentioned. I will probably come in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1929–1934
• 1934–1939
• 1939–1944
• Chronologies
• Index