Fred Hobson

Lewis P. Simpson (1916-2005)

The death of Lewis P. Simpson in April 2005 brought to an end the career of the scholar called by Eugene Genovese “our greatest cultural historian of the South.” That career spanned the second half of the twentieth century and extended into the twenty-fi rst, for Lewis Simpson, well into his mid-eighties, was still producing the magisterial essays that had defi ned his work from the beginning. A native Texan, he spent his career as professor of English at Louisiana State University and — after 1965 — as co-editor of the Southern Review, that literary quarterly founded in the 1930s by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, then restored by Simpson after a quarter-century hibernation. When I fi rst met Lewis Simpson, about 1980, I was taken by his Texas accent and his self-eff acing, easy-going demeanor; he might well have been the small town Texas lawyer and county judge his father had been. But, early on, I found in his essays a total commitment to intellectual life; his was, as Andrew Delbanco has put it, “one of the great instances of the life of the mind lived to the utmost.” I always saw in Lewis Simpson’s essays a mixture of elegance and subtlety — an intriguing critical habit of introducing a subject, then retreating from it, holding it in abeyance while he introduced still another subject, then in the end tying everything together in a manner that was immensely satisfying. Lewis Simpson did not begin to produce his greatest work until he was in his late fi fties: The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature appeared in that decade, The Brazen Face of History appeared when he was in his sixties, and two of his fi nest works, Mind and the American Civil War: A Meditation on Lost Causes and The Fable of the Southern Writer, were published when he was in his seventies. He is well known for his contributions to southern letters — he appeared in these pages on several occasions — but his interests far transcended the U.S. South. His fi rst notable book, in fact, was The Man of Letters in New England and the South (an earlier edited work had been The Federalist Literary Mind ), and he was always fascinated by the extent to which the southern and New England “minds” — so at odds in many particulars — also shared much in common. In fact, as his work developed, it was neither South nor New England, nor even American literature as a

Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (review)

The photograph on the front of Lost Revolutions captures what Pete Daniel’s book is about as well as any single image can. In Ellis Auditorium in Memphis in 1955, twenty-year-old Elvis Presley, one year removed from obscurity, stands with his arm around bluesman B. B. King. Race and class and the changing idea of culture all intersect in that one photograph. Sociologically speaking, Presley is undeniably poor white—that class of southerners in whom the most virulent brand of racial prejudice was said to reside. Yet, in embracing a black man he is doing something few “respectable” white southerners would have done at the height of post-Brown v. Board of Education “race-mixing” hysteria, particularly in a public place. In a deeper sense, in his music Presley always embraced elements of black culture that most genteel southerners—black as well as white—would not touch. Of course, Elvis was hardly representative of anything, and a great deal of racism did indeed reside in the poorest of white southerners, as it also did in betteroff, better-educated whites. That did not change in the 1950s, despite a number of opportunities for substantial change. What did begin to change—although the change wouldn’t be altogether apparent for a couple more decades—was the definition of southern culture itself. When Mencken, W.J. Cash, and other Southwatchers wrote of “culture” in the 1920s and 1930s and found Dixie culturally deficient, they had in mind high culture—the sort of thing measured by museums, libraries, and symphonies; or, they might have included, as a sort of footnote, “folk culture.” But they did not mean that mix of rural culture with working-class culture with mass culture that led to the creation of what Daniel calls (not disparagingly) “low-down” culture. That’s where Elvis belonged. That’s where rock ’n’ roll belonged, along with country music and stock car racing and other elements of the “wild” life that southerners brought into cities as they fled the farm during and just after World War II. It is in describing this rise of low-down culture that Daniel’s book is particularly effective.