The Thirty-Year War

COLLECTED ESSAYS (578 pp.)--Allen Tate--Swallow ($6).

In presenting his credentials as an essayist, Poet-Critic Allen Tate, 60, makes a mock show of inadequacy. He laments his failure to do research, bewails his faulty memory, confesses that, although he has been writing it for 30 years, he can neither define literary criticism nor guess its aims. Yet Tate confidently jabs his critical stiletto into a wide range of men and institutions, from Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson ("the light-bearer who could see nothing but light, and was fearfully blind") to criticism itself (it "is in at least one respect like a mule: it cannot reproduce itself, though, like a mule, it is capable of trying").

Thought v. Being. Many of the 42 essays are intelligent, imaginative analyses of such literary greats as Emily Dickinson, Poe, T. S. Eliot, Dostoevsky and John Donne. But Tate's concern is with life as well as literature, and his theme is the "deep illness of the modern mind." The villain, says Tate, was French Philosopher Rene Descartes, whose triumphant discovery of at least one ultimate certainty ("I think, therefore I am") is responsible for dividing man against himself by isolating thought from total being. Today's battle is waged "between the dehumanized society of secularism, which imitates Descartes' mechanical nature, and the eternal society of the communion of the human spirit."

In Tate's world, a politician who uses immoral methods unconsciously acts on the assumption that society is a machine. So do bankers, butchers and bartenders--everyone who exhibits the "secularism of the swarm" and pursues purely materialist goals. This drift away from a moral center can be clearly seen in the totalitarian states, and is spreading through the free world, where "so much of democratic social theory reaches us in the language of 'drive,' 'stimulus' and 'response.' " For these words Tate would substitute, respectively, "end," "choice" and "discrimination," for "it is by means of discrimination, through choice, towards an end, that the general intelligence acts."

Communication v. Communion. In Tate's view, the man of letters is as much alienated from the moral center as the man of action. There is no lack of communication between men: voices sound and re-sound over wire and air. But "communication that is not also communion is incomplete." To communicate fully, man must add "the rule of love to the rule of law." And, a man "loves his neighbor, as well as the man he has never seen, only through the love of God." A society which once has been religious, says Tate with evangelical fervor, cannot, "without risk of spiritual death, preceded by the usual agonies, secularize itself." Kentucky-born Author Tate, a convert to Roman Catholicism, has long been associated with a group of Southern "agrarians"--Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Andrew Lytle--who have persistently preached a flight from the machine age to the rural virtue of the soil. Tate's own 30-year war against the corrosion of civilization by the machine has been fought in the pages of literary quarterlies which, he observes wryly, serve the purpose "of acquainting unpopular writers with one another's writing." They are, specifically, the trade journals of literature, just as Iron Age and Steel are the trade journals of the metalworking industries. Where Steel ponders the notch sensitivity of beryllium or discusses the control of stress corrosion cracking by shot peening, the literary mandarins in the Kenyan Review proclaim the "procedure of positivism" that "reduces the aesthetic sign to a denotatum." The vocabularies in all trade journals sound abstruse and incomprehensible to laymen. Essayist Tate thinks it unfortunate that most intelligent laymen today seem to believe that "the high places of literature" are beyond their mental reach.

For readers who would like to begin scaling the literary heights, Tate's own Collected Essays makes an attractive and not too formidable base camp.

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