think you can do it, but in comparison to teaching, you’vengot to teach too. Even writing: there’s just no one solution.nHere’s what I do, and this is the ground on which younbegin: sit down at the same place every day at the same time,nand put yourself away from yourself, and enter the imaginarynworld. And then do the day’s stint. And if you’ve gotnthe strength left, then you can do whatever else you have tondo. The only trouble with that is, that always has its ownnmeasure and its own rules.nWhen I was working on The Long Night, there was a hillnbehind the house, you know, and I would go up and put anboard across a stump or something and stay there all day.nAnd when I came in my father asked me how the muse hadntreated me. “Well,” I said, “I saw a snake chase a frog to antree. And the frog got to the tree and the snake crawlednslowly behind the brush and then he turned and looked atnme.nBell: That’s in the book, isn’t it?nLytic: Yes. I was just another creature out there, andnnothing could intervene.nBell: Have you seen that book, Nashville: The OccupiednCity?nLytic: I’ve got it here, but I haven’t read it. I just don’tnlike to read about the Civil War anymore. It’s not alwaysnmiswritten, but it is so sad. There was no reason really there,nat the end . . . they were as exhausted as we were. Andnthey’d got all the people they could out of Europe. AndnGrant had thrown away 10,000 men in one attack; the mennput their addresses on their backs.nBell: Cold Harbor?nLytle: Yes, Cold Harbor. And Jefferson Davis wouldn’tnlet Lee retreat to the mountain, and if he had, then Lincolnnprobably would not have been reelected, and McClellannwould have been, and we could have brought the war to annend. That’s a possibility, but it didn’t happen, and so that’snwhat we’ve got to live with.nBell: Where would we be if that had come to pass?nLytle: Well, I think the Industrial Revolution would havenbeen slowed. But I don’t know how far. They might havenrejoined the old Union, I don’t know what that would havenbeen. Or you could have had the Confederacy by itself.nThen they probably would have taken Mexico and Cuba.nThey had an army, and the Austrians were done for there.nThe Yankees wanted to do it, too, so you just can’t tell. Inthink they would have moved in that direction.nBell: What would life have been like?nLytle: Country people would have made a living again,nthat’s what they would have done.nBell: You think there’s a way we could have avoidednhaving McDonalds and K-Marts all through here?nLytle: I don’t think that’s the farming interest, [laughs]nWe’ve got as many stupid people here as they’ve gotnanywhere else, of course. It’s true. But they weren’t thatnstupid before the war, because everybody was well-informednon politics, they loved to hear people debate.nYou know, I figured finally, after 60 years, that that wasnone reason why nobody paid any attention to the Agrariannposition: nobody could think of his own society disappearing.nThey couldn’t think of it.nBell: It did, though.nLytic: Right underneath them, yes. But you can see hownthat would be. Because this is the greatest revolution that’snhappened, certainly, in our time.nBell: Well, it’s the most destructive.nLytic: Yes. Well, they put this car plant at Smyrna, theynruined that beautiful country over there, for 3,000 jobs, notntwo million. And you’re not going to control them, and it’sngoing to go bankrupt finally, because people don’t have thenmoney to buy that many cars.nYou know, it doesn’t take but one bad idea, that’s allnyou’ve got to have, to destroy a man or a state. That’s whatnyou’ve got: materialism, that man can finally be eternal, ornimmortal. You know, Allen [Tate] used to quarrel withnEdmund Wilson, he believed in that: the perfectibility ofnman, Wilson did. But you know what the question is:nWhen? When? And in the meantime you’ve got to make allnthese sacrifices at somebody else’s pleasure, or interest,ntoward that end.nIt’s a kind of satanic thing. They deny the nature ofnthings, that there’s dark and light, pain and pleasure, day andnnight, male and female. . . . They deny all that, to say thatnthere’s just goodness, what’s wrong is some mechanicalndifficulty. That’s what we’re confronted with.nBell: What do you think about Lyle Lanier saying wenmight come back to a more agrarian type of society?nLytic: I think it’s going to blow up first. I don’t think itncan come back now—the grounds for it have been destroyed.nParticularly in the South, the smaller farmers,npeople like that. You take Murfreesboro, Rutherford County,nwhen they bought out the old Lytle house and tore itndown and put a Carnation milk plant there, then there weren30,000 milk cows in the county. Not any there now. Thenplant has been torn down, itself, don’t you see? I just thinknwe have gone mad with this technology, and just makingnthings.nBell: Even in dairy farming now the cows are milkednaround the clock, they’re never out to pasture, they just feednthem.nLytic: Just like the chickens. That’s a horrifying thing.nWhat we have done is violate nature. You make war onnnature, you use it, you see. And when you do that younyourself become a kind of monster. It’s a monstrous life, andnin a way, you see the results of that in these people.nA family farm cannot be torn down to the moneyneconomy. We were at Cornsilk here in 1925 and ’26; wenhad mules and horses to plow, and we grew our own fuel.nWe had one tractor to disc with because loose ground wasnhard on the workstock. But then, you didn’t have any rent tonpay. And you grew a great deal of your own food. But younjust cannot be dependent on the world market. Just to be onnthe money economy, no way for a farm to do that andnsurvive. In the first place you’ve got to consider seasons. Youncan have drought; you can have too much water. You payn$80- or $90,000 for one of these big tractors and have an300-acre farm, why, there is no possible way not to go undernthe hammer like they do out there in the West.nAnd when Fll Take My Stand came out, it was aboutn50-50, the chance was possible for some kind of restraint, bynslowing down the speed of change.nBell: Did the down side of it all turn out as you expectednit might in 1930?nLytic: Oh no. We couldn’t imagine it being as bad as it isnnnSEPTEMBER 1988/11n