The revival of the literature of the 30’s through which we have recently been living—the republication of novels long out of print, the redemption of reputations long lapsed, the compilation of anthologies long overdue—has been oddly one-sided, a revival of one half only of the literary record of that dark decade: the urban, Marxist, predominantly Jewish half, whose leading, journal was the New Masses and whose monster-in-chief was Joseph Stalin. And this skewed emphasis, though somewhat misleading, is comprehensible enough; for we live at a moment when a large reading public, educated by a second generation of urban Jewish writers (ex-Marxists, this time around), begins by identifying with certain contemporary literary heroes, like Moses Herzog, whose minds were made by this 30’s tradition, and ends by wanting to read the books they read: the fiction of Nathanael West and Daniel Fuchs and Henry Roth, even Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money.

Some writers, however, who move us just now at least as strongly as Saul Bellow, writers ranging all the way from neo-Gothic journalists like Truman Capote to latter-day prophets like Marshall McLuhan, were nurtured on another, rival tradition which also flourished in the 30’s: a provincial, Agrarian, primarily WASP tradition, whose chief journal was the Southern Review and whose monster-in-chief was Huey Long. We are less likely to know the basic manifesto of that tradition, a compilation of paeans to the old South called I’ll Take My Stand by “Twelve Southerners,” than such Marxist equivalents as Malcom Cowley’s Exile’s Return or Edmund Wilson’s American Jitters.

Yet the former is no more dated, no more alien in its aspirations than the two latter, which, indeed, have been drastically rewritten in later editions, as their authors have changed with the times. All three books are exemplary, useful both for illuminating their own age and tempering our enthusiasm for the unguarded goals and hopes of our own. Just as we find it therapeutic to recall that Cowley and Wilson once looked to the Soviet Union for salvation, we may find it equally so to remember that Robert Penn Warren could once write of the Southern Negro that he “is likely to find in agricultural and domestic pursuits the happiness that his good nature and easy ways incline him to as an ordinary function of his being.”

And it is well, too, to come to terms with the hopes for literature which the Southern Conservatives, like the Eastern Radicals, attached to their social and political programs—in order to savor the full irony of the fact that both movements did, indeed, produce literary revivals; though in each case, the most moving books arose out of tension and delusion rather than allegiance and simple faith. The great writer of the South was already on the scene when the 30’s began, but he remained as invisible to the doctrinaire advocates of Southern Agrarianism as Nathanael West or Henry Roth were to be to the doctrinaire Marxist critics. Not until 1939 did George Marion O’Donnell give full recognition to Faulkner in the Kenyon Review, successor to the Southern Review. In 1939, when I’ll Take My Stand appeared, Donald Davidson, who was entrusted with commenting on the arts, did not even mention him—concentrating instead on Ellen Glasgow and James Branch Cabell, the latter his leading contender for the laureateship of the South. Yet some of Faulkner’s very best work had already been published; though, indeed, so embattled and bleak a novel as The Sound and the Fury provides little of that “repose” and “continuity” which Davidson hoped for from the Old Dominion; part of his problem being, of course, that it was Virginia and not Mississippi which he had in mind when he spoke generally about the South. Madness, stylistic improvisation, and a radical dislocation of the tradition are what Faulkner was then prepared to offer; and that, Davidson thought, was already being supplied in sufficient quantities by certain despised writers from New York and Chicago.

From our present vantage-point, it is easy to see that Glasgow and Cabell, addressing the past as they did in hushed and genteel voices (for all Cabell’s vaunted pornography), could evoke from it no promise of a renaissance of letters; and that Faulkner alone was capable of providing models for the literature to come which was to celebrate the terrible and elegant death of the South. Not, let us recall, the Faulkner of post-Nobel Prize banalities about dignity and endurance, but the shrill and despairing Faulkner, who mocked the world of the mid-30’s with Sanctuary, and was able still to write as late as 1944 (in the course of asserting that his real subject matter had never been the South at all): “. . . life is a phenomenon but not a novelty, the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere, and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time.”

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Before any other Southern writer of distinction, John Peale Bishop seems to have sensed the value and significance of what this Faulkner was doing—not merely going on record in praise of his double vision, his capacity to appreciate simultaneously the myth of the Sartorises and the fact of the Snopeses; but imitating his techniques as well in, for instance, a story called “Toadstools Are Poison,” which he published in 1932 in emulation of Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun.” We are more likely to be aware of such later heirs of the dark Faulkner as Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Truman Capote, even so belated a continuer of the line as Flannery O’Connor. Yet Bishop was there first in picking up the cues for a fiction Gothic, as the fiction of the South has always been since the days of Edgar Poe, but fully aware at last of what before had only been hinted: that the blackness of darkness which haunts it is not merely embodied in the Negro, but quite simply is the Negro—that nightmare creature born of the contempt for manual labor and the fear of the sexuality of their own women which had so paradoxically made the white masters of the South heroes hut not quite men.

Such a fiction is by definition even further from the possibility of “repose” than that of the industrial North and East; for if the latter is torn between the terrible fact of the present and the dream of a barely possible pure future, the latter is pulled apart between an equally dismal actuality and the dream of a manifestly unreal pure past. Nonetheless, the manifestos of the Agrarians tell the kind of lie which illuminates the truth of the fiction of Faulkner and Warren and Bishop, even as the Marxist manifestos tell the kind of lie which illuminates the truth of the novels of Nathanael West and Henry Roth. If we would recapture the past of three decades ago, we need to relive both the elation of the beautiful lies which nurtured it, and the discomfiture of the grim truths spoken from the heart of those lies. It would, therefore, be a special shame if Bishop’s single completed novel, Act of Darkness, remained unavailable a moment longer, since in it one committed by birth and temperament to the myth of the South both rehearses it and—passionately as well as tenderly—gives it the lie.

We must, then, if we are to understand Bishop and his age, learn to think of him as perhaps the most important Southern novelist of the 30’s² despite the slimness of his production. Yet if we bring him to mind at all these days, we are likely to associate him with a different genre, a different decade, even a different region. Certainly we tend to remember him first as a poet, second as a critic—and only last, if at all, as a writer of fiction. And though this emphasis is, on the one hand, a function of the way in which his influential friends (Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, among others) have chosen to mythicize and preserve him; on the other, it is a result of how his writing career actually developed.

True enough, Bishop may have first captured the imagination of a large audience as the semi-fictional highbrow poet, Tom D’Invilliers, who moves through the pages of Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise; but his verse had already appeared in print under his own name even before the publication of that novel in 1920—in fact, three years before the start of World War I, which is to say, a year before the initiation of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry and the official beginnings of modernism in American verse. And he continued to write poems until his death in 1944, publishing four volumes in his lifetime and leaving enough uncollected poetry to justify Tate’s putting together a Collected Poems in 1948, as well as a special selection for English readers in 1960.

In his preface to the latter volume, Tate celebrated Bishop’s achievement as a poet, paid a passing compliment to his fiction, then went on to give the highest praise to his criticism—recording a belief that his dead friend had been “one of the best literary critics of the 20’s and 30’s.” And in this opinion, Edmund Wilson (perhaps even better qualified to judge) had seemed to concur, when he had earlier gathered Bishop’s scattered criticism into book form for the first time. But Bishop’s critical writing, collected in a single volume, disconcertingly adds up to less than one would have expected from the impressions created by individual pieces; just as his verse, however elegant and accomplished, now seems too much a fading echo of styles already obsolescent before he had perfected his skills.

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No, it is only in Bishop’s fiction that I, at any rate, hear an authentic and original voice, only in his one successful novel and a handful of short stories that I come on rhythms and phrases, images and myths that live on in my head. But he does not seem at first glance a 30’s writer even in this area of his greatest achievement; for he began to write fiction, too, long before the collapse of post-World War I prosperity had made the 30’s possible—publishing his very first stories when the 20’s had barely started: one of them, characteristically elegant and unconnected with things to come, in The Undertaker’s Garland, a volume on which he had collaborated with Edmund Wilson.

Wilson and Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald and Wilson; how inextricably Bishop’s life as a writer is involved with theirs, and how inevitably we are tempted to see him through what we know more securely about them. But the clues they seem to offer are likely to lead us astray, suggesting that Bishop’s spiritual home was Princeton (where he had met his two friends); that not The Sound and the Fury but The Great Gatsby provided him with a model for his fiction; and, finally, that he is a 20’s writer in his deepest heart. Wilson, to be sure, who began as a true child of that earlier decade, was reborn as a leading spokesman for the radical 30’s and survived to become a kind of elder statesman to the generation of the 40’s and 50’s; but Fitzgerald we think of as having belonged so utterly to the era which learned in large part its very life-style from him that he could not survive its disappearance. And Bishop seems, after all, much more like the latter than the former.

Why not, then, regard him simply as a 20’s writer, who, living too long without accommodating to a new era, found himself quite out of fashion? Certain of his allegiances, surely, like a great deal of his rhetoric, he shared with those older winters, who—having barely found their voices before World War I—were bereft by that war of subjects appropriate to those voices; and insisted forever after on regarding its horrors as a personal affront rather than a universal catastrophe. Like many of his contemporaries, too, Bishop subscribed with equal fervor to the cult of self-pity and the religion of art, which seemed for a while—until the coming of more fashionable political faiths—to fill quite satisfactorily the vacuum left by the vanishing of older pieties. And like most of them, he espoused a righteous contempt for the vulgarities of American culture and a yearning for Old World charm which, combined with a favorable exchange rate, led to expatriation in the Holy City of Paris.

It was the war which took him to France for the first time; and returning briefly to America, he did not cease to remember it, writing at the close of an essay on his alma mater, which he published in 1921: “If I had a son who was an ordinarily healthy, not too intelligent youth I should certainly send him to Princeton. But if ever I find myself the father of an extraordinary youth I shall not send him to college at all. I shall lock him up in a library until he is old enough to go to Paris.” Shortly thereafter, he made his first postwar removal to Europe, then a second much longer one, which lasted until 1933, and during which three sons were born to him on the continent to which he dreamed of sending them if they proved themselves “extraordinary” enough.

And what does all this shuttling between Princeton and New York and Paris have to do with the 30’s, which turned from New York and Princeton, as well as Detroit or Sauk City or Newark, New Jersey toward the Holy City of Moscow (to which only a few were foolish enough to venture in fact)—or alternatively, to the Holy Anti-City of Jefferson’s Monticello (to which none, however foolish, could manage to return)? Little enough in fact; indeed, so little that we are not surprised when Bishop, in quest of a setting for his one finished novel, moves backward in time, out of the mid-30’s which saw the publication of the book to the pre-World War I years of his own childhood. And in that relatively remote era, he rehearses—or rather lets his boy hero with whom he shares the almost anonymous name of John rehearse—a familiar tale, not less indebted to certain prevailing modes of the 20’s for being so palpably autobiographical. The commonplace which reminds us that life often imitates art does not make sufficiently clear that it is inevitably yesterday’s art, outmoded art, i.e., a cliché which today’s life is likely to repeat.

In Act of Darkness, at any rate, we find Bishop, though apparently convinced he is recreating his own early experience, recreating instead fictional patterns already well established by his predecessors and contemporaries at home and abroad. On the one hand, we encounter such standard American plots as the belated flight from mama; or the boy vicariously inducted into maturity by witnessing the fall to woman of an older man on whom he has a homosexual crush. On the other, we are confronted by such fashionable European imports as the direct initiation into manhood at the hands of a whore (fumbled the first time, achieved the second); and especially the fable of conversion popularized by Joyce’s Portrait of the Arist as a Young Man, in which a baffled youngster—realizing after many wrong turnings that only Art gives meaning to Life—goes forth to write his first novel.

All this familiar stuff is transformed in Act of Darkness, however, not only by the subtlety of language and delicacy of cadence which Bishop somehow redeemed from mere elegance by transferring it from verse to prose; but also by the typical 30’s tone and voice in which he renders it. It is not finally a social message which gives to the fiction of the Depression years its special character, though the critics of that age once liked to think so. Horace Gregory, who was willing to hail Bishop’s book when it first appeared as “one of the few memorable novels of the decade . . .,” hastened to add, almost apologetically, that it had “no pretensions of being a ‘social document.’” No matter, since the hallmark of the 30’s is rather a certain panic shrillness, a sense of apocalypse, yearning to become religious but held by the mode to secular metaphors.

This we find everywhere in the period: in those atypical novels produced then by writers out of another decade—in Faulkner’s Sanctuary, for instance, or Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, or James Gould Cozzens’s Castaway; as well as in the most characteristic work of writers who belong entirely to that dark decade—in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonely-hearts, say, or Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. They are mad books, all of them, even more disturbingly than they are crypto-religious ones: sometimes actual projections of madness, sometimes accounts of long flirtations with insanity, ending in not quite credible escapes back into reason and peace—as if the political debates which occupied the age were finally mere analogues, leftover 19th-century metaphors called on to express a crisis of consciousness for which the times had not yet found a new language.

And of all the books of the period, Act of Darkness (along with Call It Sleep) comes closest to revealing that not-quite secret. How different its panic mood is from the more theatrical despair typical of the 20’s (think of Fitzgerald’s All the Sad Young Men), which, after all, was never incompatible with euphoria. A comparison of the two types of book reveals how—though the Great War may have been felt chiefly as a personal affront—the Great Depression seemed Armageddon itself, a kind of end of the world. It is odd and maybe even a little degrading to realize how we Americans (not only our writers, finally, but all of us) were driven to ultimate despair not by contemplating the destruction of fabled cities abroad or even the prospect of our own deaths in foreign lands, but by a confrontation at home with the Crash, the end of prosperity and fun and games. The colloquial phrase says it exactly: the Depression struck home to us as the war had not; and the image of the desolated American city seemed an image also of our own devastated souls, whereas that of the ravaged European capital had signified only the death of that culture with which we had never been quite at ease.

Most Depression novels, therefore, played out their fables against the background of the ruined American city, making the native urban landscape for the first time the chief symbolic setting for our kind of Gothic. Not so in Bishop’s case, however, despite his commitment after his college years to the Princeton-New York-Paris circuit, despite his father’s Northern city origins, despite his own final retreat to New England to die. Faulkner himself may have been driven in the Depression years from Jefferson to Memphis, out of whose back-alleys Popeye emerges to stalk the pages of Sanctuary, that other inverted parable of rape and the Southern Lady. But Bishop turns back, in the midst of the general panic that was possessing the land, to where his own personal panic had begun, to precisely the sort of small Southern community in a farm setting which the Agrarians celebrated; but which for him (despite the kind things he had to say of the South in his more abstract commentary) is the place of horror from which, at the end of his book, he is escaping, even as he escapes the “soft torture” of his mother’s love and the temptation to madness.

His poems, on the other hand, do have a kind of urban setting; since in them he imagined himself and his friends (Edmund Wilson, for example, turned not so improbably into an antique senator) moving through an imaginary city clearly intended to remind us of Rome. But his is not the Rome—however much Allen Tate would like us to believe it—created in the fantasy of Southern neo-Classicists like George Washington Custis, delivering his annual Fourth of July oration dressed in a toga, or Thomas Jefferson dreaming the University of Virginia. Bishop’s is rather a doomed and decadent city—much like the “unreal City” of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, or even more like Cavafy’s Alexandria: an imperial capitol whose great Caesars are all dead, and which is assailed from without by barbarians and Christians, from within, by doubt; a city whose inhabitants are waiting—as so many so variously but so nearly unanimously waited in the 30’s—for the End:

We did not know the end was
    coming: nor why
It came; only that long before
    the end
Were many wanted to die. . . .

So, too, his first and unfinished novel, The Huntsmen are Up in America, is set in legendary dying cities—this time called Venice and New York. But that novel stutters away before its intended close in the most legendary part of New York (doubly strange and wonderful for the Southerner), which is to say, in Harlem, where Bishop tries to bring to the surface the underground theme that obsessed him: the idyll which turns nightmare of a sacred union of white and Negro, the pale virgin and the black stud. The idyllic names for the partners in that union are Venetian, of course, Desdemona and Othello; but to do justice to its nightmare aspects, Bishop had to take it back to where, in his troubled mind, it really belongs: back to his own birthplace of Charles Town, West Virginia, called in his fiction “Mordington”; though its actual name is distributed between the two leading characters of his completed novel, to the Charlie and Virginia, who were for him the prototypes of Othello and Desdemona.

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“Mordington” is, at any rate, the background not only for Act of Darkness, which he published in 1935, but also for the collection of stories called Many Thousands Gone, which had appeared four years earlier. It was apparently Bishop’s aim in the five stories which make up the book, as well as in the novel, to create a mythical equivalent of the small town he knew best: his own Yoknapatawpha County, which is to say, a microcosm of the South, true both to its sociological facts and its legendary meanings. Sociologically, Bishop is not nearly so successful as Faulkner; for despite his patent determination to write the sort of “realistic” book his age had convinced itself it admired, his data keep incandescing (at best) into poetry, or dissolving (at worst) into self-conscious symbolism. Yet in the course of his failed attempt at recording history, he does succeed in releasing from himself and from whatever of the past lives on in his memory, their essential myth.

In an extraordinary little story called “If Only,” a pair of genteel Southern spinsters known as “the Sabine Sisters,” who have survived the Civil War only to confront indigence, find themselves one day possessed of a Negro servant called “Bones.” The allegorical import of the names is not less important for being self-evident: the evocation of Rome and rape in the first, of death and the Minstrel Show in the second. Bones, at any rate, almost miraculously restores the decayed household of the sisters to an elegance which they perhaps only dreamed of having had before; but simultaneously begins to appear before them in darkly sinister, though inconclusively sexual manifestations—winking out at them in naked insolence from their bathtub, asleep on one of their beds, “terrible and tall . . . and very black.” Dismayed and horrified, the two women find themselves incapable of telling whether their ambiguous servant is a madman, or a figment of their own madness; and they cannot, in any event, disengage themselves from their “nigger,” since “with him they lived in terror, but in the tradition.”

Act of Darkness, which is concerned with the escape from both the terror and the tradition, is less perfectly achieved; but by the same token, it seems richer, less a bare parable. And we are finally more deeply moved and illuminated by it, for all its obtrusive faults: its two halves which fall apart in tone and tempo, its point of view which shifts without clear motivation or redeeming grace, etc. etc. Any teacher of composition could tick off its flaws; yet the tale it tells survives its technical ineptitude: the story of a boy early bereft of his father, almost swallowed up by his mother’s love and dogged through his lonely house by a Negro homosexual of his own age, who at last finds a kind of salvation by attaching himself, purely and passionately, to his young Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie, however, first seduces a young farm girl whom the boy is prepared to love though not possess; then takes him to a whorehouse in an unsuccessful attempt at inducting him into guilt and manhood; finally rapes a not-so-young Southern lady, a friend of and surrogate for the boy’s mother, called by the twice symbolic name of Virginia.

The climax of the book’s action and the heart of its meaning is contained in a long courtroom scene, during which Charlie is, at the lady’s instigation, tried for having assaulted her; and ends by claiming that not he—dandy and bully and restless seducer—but the woman herself—intellectual and freethinker and virgin—had been the effective rapist: that “he shamelessly allowed her to complete his animal rapture,” maintaining the while “only a passive prowess.” And young John is undone by the confession, pushed over the brink of a breakdown by what seems to him the ultimate affront to his own dubious masculinity: “What I could not forgive was his denying his domination over what had been done in the darkness of the woods. . . .” But John is not alone in his dismay at this comic-tragic denouement; for the reader finds himself shaken as he is shaken only when some inadequate but long-lived archetypal version of the way things are is inverted and extended, an ulterior, and uncomfortable, significance made clear.

I should suppose that the Southern reader especially would be discomfited; for though rape is the subject par excellence of Southern literature in the 19th and 20th centuries—a concern as obsessive as that with seduction in 18th-century England—it is typically the rape of a white woman by a black man, real or fancied, which lies at the center of the plot. Bishop’s novel, however, tells no nightmare tale of a black man grossly offending or falsely accused; though there is an attenuated and dislocated echo of the standard fable in the sub-plot of the black fairy with whom the white boy narrator flirts in horrified attraction, and who is finally killed off-scene by being pushed out of a window by somebody else. In the main action, a white man, a gentleman—in fact, just such a gentleman farmer as the Agrarians were then making the focus of their hopes for social reform—is responsible, at least passively, for the act of darkness which the color of his skin seems to belie.

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But why, the book insists that we ask, why such a total inversion of the archetype? Surely not just because it happens to have happened so in some series of actual events from which Bishop may have made his fiction. So easy an answer the novel itself will not let us accept, evoking as a clue toward its close the pair of ill-fated Shakespearean lovers who had already begun to haunt Bishop, as we have seen. Desdemona and Othello appear again and again during the 30’s in all of Bishop’s work, whether in verse or prose, the first explicit reference, as we might expect, in the book whose protagonist is called “Brakespeare,” The Huntsmen are Up in America. Describing the city of Venice, Bishop writes, as if by the way, “it was only there, I am sure, that the ceremony could have been found that would have wed Desdemona to her black Moor.” And a gloss on the metaphor is to be found in one of his best poems, a kind of epigraph to the body of his work, which he called “Speaking of Poetry”:

The ceremony must be found
that will wed Desdemona to the
huge Moor.
            It is not enough—
to win the approval of the Sena-
tor. . .
                   For then,
though she may pant again in his
black arms
(his weight resilient as a Barbary
stallion’s)
She will be found
when the ambassadors of the Ve-
netian state arrive
again smothered . . .
       (Tupping is still tupping
though that particular word is
obsolete . . .)

The allegorical meanings are clear enough: elegance must be married to force, art to magic, the mind to the body—married, not merely yielded up to the kind of unceremonious possession which turns inevitably into destruction. It is ritual, “ceremony,” which makes of passionate attachment a true marriage, as it makes of passionate perception a true poem: which is to say, the marriage of Desdemona and Othello becomes a metaphor for the poetic act. Equally clear is the nature of the appeal of that metaphor to the race-obsessed, sexually queasy Southern mind: the image of black “tupping” white, a miscegenation, which—lacking appropriate ceremonials—is no more than a rape.

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Fair enough, then, that after Charlie’s trial and conviction, his unnerved nephew—who had earlier found satisfaction in simpler boys’ books, idyllic like Audubon or sinister like Oliver Twist—should have turned to Bishop’s favorite play to team for himself how the poet can confer order and beauty and significance on what otherwise must remain heartbreakingly chaotic and sordid and meaningless. “Had the actual murderer of Desdemona . . .” Bishop reports him as thinking, “been brought into a Venetian court, his trial would have made no more sense than Charlie’s had done in the Mordington courthouse.”

But there is no “huge Moor” in the Mordington affair, we want to cry out at this point, no black man at all, only Uncle Charlie. To which Bishop responds through his narrator, evoking for the first time relevant Shakespearean criticism as well as the text: neither was Othello a “huge Moor” really—only a Venetian nobleman, neither blacker nor whiter than the farmer from West Virginia. “The Venetian gentleman,” Bishop’s John explains to us, “who wore mulberries on his shield, since his name was II Moro, had, in the repetition of the story of the murder of his wife, been mistaken for a Moor. In time, passing to the North, he had become a black-skinned barbarian, Othello.”

The blackness of Othello is, then, Act of Darkness insists, a misconception, a mistake; or more precisely, the rapist of white women is black only as the dream of revenge against their emasculating Ladies is black inside the darkness of the white heads of Southern males. The prosecuting attorney, pressing for Charlie’s conviction, underlines this when he so oddly repeats in his own language the burden of the scholarship on Othello: “. .. once more the cry of rape is heard in the land and . . . this heinous and horrible crime, has been committed, not by a man of the colored race . . . but is imputed to one whose former education, training, and fair tradition should have predisposed him to a career of honor and worthy actions.”

There is another turn of the screw beyond this, however, as we already know; a second and even more terrifying inversion implicit in Charlie’s plea that it was he who had been raped, that the true Othello is Desdemona: the pale virgin dreaming her own dark violation, and projecting that dream outward upon the white male who resents her—at the cost of his manhood and honor, and at the risk of his life. But the end of the illusion which concealed this truth from a defeated nation, which survived only by imagining itself the last home of chivalry, means the beginning of the end of that nation’s myth and its very existence. Intuiting this, Act of Darkness becomes a work of prophecy, a parable of that death of the South which all of us are living through in agony right now.

Its protagonist, at any rate, having been deprived of that illusion by his uncle and Shakespeare, is preparing at the book’s end to leave not only the small lies of his mother, but the larger lies of the sweet land which seemed for a while to sustain them, to go North. First, however, he has to return to the whorehouse to which his uncle had earlier taken him in vain, where, this time, he musters up enough “passive power” to accomplish his own deflowering. “It was when her hands were on me,” he tells us, “that I knew what was again being accomplished was the act in the woods, that all its gestures must be repeated and forever repeated, the rape of the mind by the body.”

But at this point, we are no longer sure (and how did we ever deceive ourselves that we were, even in deepest Dixie?) about which is mind, which body, which White, which Black, who Desdemona, who Othello, who the virgin and who the whore. The mythical marriage which Bishop imagined in his verse has, in fact, been accomplished, the archetypal opposites united in a confusion that begins in madness and ends in poetry.

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¹ Copyright © Leslie Fiedler 1967.

² Carson McCullers is his chief rival; but though her first and best book, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, which appeared in 1936, is a true 30's book, adapting the terror of the Depression to a world of freaks reflected in a child's eye, her reputation belongs to the 40's through which she lived, and to which she provided a bridge.