PERSPECTIVErntf^^^^’^^Suf’Tmrn^^^SsSi^^^^mvr^’^’^^rnw^^^^rn’i%M*^M’rnkrnv l ,rn1 Ifrn#•*’rn«rnv ^rn• â„¢ & ^ ^ ^ % -Xrn^B ^c ^”v^ -^rn^H f ^’ s^^-‘^’ ‘^rn’.V?v.<^’^rn^KV^rn£^<^ ^krn^ ^ ^ ^rnSouthern Men, American Personsrnby Thomas Flemingrn^^ C weet home Alabama / Where the skies are so blue.” ItrnL_/ has been many years since anyone made money from patrioticrnsongs dedicated to Illinois or New Jersey. Chicago andrnNew York have their anthems of course, to say nothing of SanrnFrancisco, but no one is going to get into a fight over “the cityrnthat never sleeps” or “little cable cars climbing halfway to thernstars.” In the I9th century, we did celebrate the rivers of thernmidsection: the Ohio and the Wabash, but none of them wasrnso famous as the inconsequential Suwannee celebrated byrnStephen Foster and later taken up by New York songwriters asrna codeword for the sentimentalized South: “How I love ya, howrnI love ya, my dear old Swanee.”rnWe are become a cynical and heartless people, more pronernto deride than to celebrate our hometowns, and yet CharliernDaniels virtually drips with sentiment as he sings of “Carolina,”rnand Merle Haggard was proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,rnwhich he was not. If northern songwriters can occasionallyrnwrite movingly of the troubles of Allentown, Pennsylvania,rnthe tone of boosterism and defiance is almost exclusively confinedrnto the South. “If the South had won the war, we’d a hadrnit made,” Hank Williams Jr. was singing a few years ago, justrnwhen the critics were praising him for giving up his Southernrnnationalism.rnLynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” remains thernbenchmark Southern song, because it is deliberately combative,rnthrowing down the gauntlet to the Canadian leftist whornhad stuck his nose into what did not concern him. In “SouthernrnMan,” Neil Young had cried shame on Southerners for thernusual reasons. One might have thought that an Anglo-rnCanadian could have better spent his time on the Ojibwa, victimsrnof both toxic waste and toxic welfare, or the French,rnwhose identity the English did their best to eliminate. “Mr.rnYoung, does your conscience bother you?”rnOne does not need to turn to popular music to find signs ofrnSouthern chauvinism. Southern fiction has so dominated thernUnited States in this century that some people have said therernare only two kinds of American writers. Southerners and Jews.rnThis is an exaggeration, but just barely, and despite the considerablerndifferences that separate Southerners and Jews, thernsuccess of both groups depends on their atavisms: loyalty tornkinfolk, preservation of tradition, and suspicion of aliens.rnIn America Faulkner could only have been a Southerner, becausernonly a Southerner can spend his life wrestling with whatrnit means to be a Southerner. A century and a half ago, whenrnNathaniel Hawthorne was crafting his nearly perfect stories ofrnPuritan life, the Northeastern writer was already out of touchrnwith his people, and as a thin stream of civilization flowed westwardrnin the wake of the pioneers, region after region wentrnthrough a brief period of literary exaltation—Ohio, Indiana,rnIllinois, the Plains States—before the stream lost itself in therndeserts of the West. The closest approximation to a northernrnFaulkner may be Glenway Wescott, of an old Yankee family inrnWisconsin. But Wescott left Wisconsin at an eariy age, and thernnarrator of Tfte Grandmothers—an almost too beautiful novelrntracing his own family’s descent—is an expatriate, like Hemingwayrnand Fitzgerald.rnNot all Southern writers have been obsessed with the landrnand its history—Walker Percy and George Garrett are notablernexceptions—but, as the essays in this number illustrate, thernland and its people was the dominant theme of the Agrariansrnas well as of Faulkner, and it is still providing Fred Chappell andrnWendell Berry with the matter of literature. There is nothingrnunusual in this; what is unusual is what has happened to thernrest of the American Empire, where people of my generationrncan scarcely tell a single tale of their grandparents and where itrnis nothing for families to spread themselves across the continentrnlike so many toys shaken on a child’s blanket.rnNo human civilization has ever been created by nomads—rnalthough even true nomads have their sense of place—andrnwhether one looks at Athens in the fifth century or Florence inrnthe 14th or Edinburgh in the 18th, the great works that definernour culture as “the West” were created by men who knewrn12/CHRONICLESrnrnrn