back into the men who contemplate it,nbecause they have the capacity fornidealism. But in Buckley’s fiction,nwomen are the abyss. Betrayal is asnnatural as a sigh, and as predictable asntomorrow’s guilt. In the face of suchnsadness, dreams of peace deserve nothingnmore than a funeral shroud.nBrad Linaweaver is a novelist and anbook reviewer for the Atlanta Journalnand Constitution.nRed Talknby Gregory McNameenTalking with Robert Penn WarrennEdited by Floyd C. Watkins, John T.nHiers, and Mary Louise WeaksnAthens: University of Georgia Press;n419 pp., $45.00nRobert Penn Warren (1905-1989)nwas, in the old expression, a mannof parts, a complex intellectual whonspent much of his adult life in northernnuniversities, a Kentucky farm boy withnthe heart and soul of a Confederatengentleman. A founding member of thenAgrarian movement of the 1930’s, leadernof the so-called Fugitive circle ofnpoets, and guiding light of the NewnCriticism, he was both culturally conservativenand artistically avant-garde.nAnd he was a first-rate thinker and angood talker, as the pages of the delightfulncollection Talking with Robert PennnWarren reveal in abundance.nComprising 24 conversations, interviews,nand transcribed television appearances,nthe collection reveals Warrennat his plainspoken best. He isngenerous, bookish, matter-of-fact, occasionallynimpatient. “I think peoplencan freeze themselves by their hastynintellectualizing of what they are upnto,” he remarks, somewhat impatiently,nto a too-pompous interiocutor, andngoes on to spin out front-porch anecdotesnof the writer’s life that shunnacademic pretense and are all the morenattractive for it.nYet Warren’s homespun talk is perfectlynserious, the more so as the yearsnroll by. (The collection is arrangednchronologically, and the reader has thenchance to see Warren revising himself,nhis opinions, even the facts of his lifenfrom page to page.) He reiterates thenconcerns of his Agrarian days, drawingnon Jeffersonian ideals of the propernrelationship of humans to nature andnantebellum notions of states’ rights tonoppose the rise of the great Americanntechnological monoculture (wherebynAtlanta, absent its peach trees, looksnlike any northern or Midwestern burg).nHe announces his great love for Americanin idea and fact while steadfastlyncriticizing its weaker moments, especiallynthe historical oppression of blacksnand the conduct of the aimless war innVietnam.nRadical views, to some, but Warrennhas more often been unfairly pegged tonBRIEF MENTIONSnthe reactionary right. Having dared tongive politicians a human face and thennormal frailties in All the King’s Men,nWarren Was exposed to criticism fromnall manner of leftist orthodoxies. Hisngood-natured, but perfectly serious response:n”I’ve been accused of being anfascist off and on all my life. That’snwhat happens to a Jeffersonian Democratnin this crazy world we live in.” Hisnopposition to the war in Vietnam,nvoiced most compellingly in an interviewnwith the ever-pious Bill Moyersn(who, as Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary,nperfected the art of doublespeak),ngrows from the political idealsnof the early Republic. America’s in-nIN JOY AND IN SORROW: WOMEN, FAMILY AND MARRIAGE INnTHE VICTORIAN SOUTHnEdited by Carol Bleser, with an introduction by C. Vann WoodwardnNew York and Oxford: Oxford University Press; 330 pp., $24.95nIn one way or another 18 historians have contributed to this volume on then19th-century South, and editor Carol Bleser of Clemson University is to bencommended for giving the reader a collection that displays the full range of what isngoing on in social history. If the essays here run the gamut from brilliant to disgraceful,nthey are all the more representative for their unevenness. Some of the topics arenserious (female individualism), some trivial (Walker Percy’s great-aunts), somenfashionably off-color (incest and miscegenation), and some just.silly (cookbooks).nBertram Wyatt-Brown’s true subject is Will and Walker Percy, and he seemsninterested in the work of the Ware sisters and of their niece primarily for thenopportunity their poetry and Gothic novels give him to psychoanalyze the family.nVirginia Burr provides a readable portrait of her great-grandmother, Ella GertrudenClanton Thomas of Georgia, but cannot put the woman in any kind of a context, asnElizabeth Fox-Genovese is able to do in her more illuminating treatment of SouthnCarolinian Sarah Gayle. Fox-Genovese discusses the sense of self envisioned bynSouthern women like Gayle, who saw themselves within a network of family relationsnand did not, as in a more bourgeois culture (read the north), define themselves asn”individuals.”nLess successful is Catherine Clinton’s “‘Southern Dishonor’; Flesh, Blood, Racenand Privilege.” Clinton takes the position that only racial prejudice can explain thenwidespread disapproval of interracial fornication and adultery, as though fidelity andnchastity were of no concern to the Christian Southerner. She also cites the W.P.A.noral testimony of ex-slaves as though this evidence were unquestionably accurate; asnvaluable as those interviews are, they must be taken with a critical grain of salt, as evennso sympathetic a historian as Eugene Genovese has made clear. Her final sentence,n”And I propose that we make sure the worst is yet to come: that Southern honor bendethroned and that antebellum Southern dishonor take its rightful place at centernstage,” is not scholarship but politics.nThe outstanding piece in the volume is Eugene Genovese’s humorous “Toward anKinder and Gentler America: The Southern Lady and the Greening of the Politics ofnthe Old South,” in which he reveals the deep political involvement of Southernnwomen. In the fine tradition of Andrew Jackson’s mother, such women as Anna MarianCalhoun Clemson and Mary Henrietta Pinckney (and many less well-known) spurredntheir men on to duels, secession, and war. His more academic article on the ties thatnbound slaves and masters together, “‘Our Family, White and Black’: Family andnHousehold in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worid View,” is also very good, and proofnfor the war-weary that there are some in Southern studies motivated by a love of theirnsubject, rather than by its opposite.n—Katherine DaltonnnnJUNE 1991/35n