The Novels of Andrew Lytle: a Study in the Artistry of Fiction
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1972 The oN vels of Andrew Lytle: a Study in the Artistry of Fiction. Charles Chester Clark Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Clark, Charles Chester, "The oN vels of Andrew Lytle: a Study in the Artistry of Fiction." (1972). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 2199. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/2199 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This dissertation was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. 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University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 A Xerox Education Company 72-28,333 CLARK, Charles Chester, 1919- THE NOVELS OF ANDREW LYTLE: A STUDY IN THE ARTISTRY OF FICTION. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Ph.D., 1972 Language and Literature, m o de m University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan © 1972 CHARLES CHESTER CLARK ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE NOVELS OF ANDREW LYTLE: A STUDY IN THE ARTISTRY OF FICTION A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Charles Chester Clark B.S., The University of Oklahoma, 1940 M.A., Northwestern State College of Louisiana, 1966 May, 1972 PLEASE NOTE: Some pages may have indistinct print. Filmed as received. University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deepest appreciation to Professor Lewis P. Simpson, who directed this dissertation, and to Professors Darwin H. Shrell, John H. Wildman, William J. Olive, and Lawrence A. Sasek for the encouragement and editorial assistance which helped me complete this dissertation. My heartfelt thanks to my wife, Eva Nell Clark, to my mother, Mrs. Chester C. Clark, to my brother, Mr. Robert Bradford Clark, to Mrs. H. J. Laborde and Mrs. M. 0. Gallup, and to Professors M. E. Bradford and Thomas H. Landess of the University of Dallas for encouragement and advice. My gratitude and admiration to Andrew Nelson Lytle, Esq., of Monteagle, Tennessee. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................... ii ABSTRACT ................................................... iv PREFACE .................................................. vii I. ANDREW LYTLE'S CONCEPT OF FICTION ............... 1 II. THE EARLY F I C T I O N ............................... 13 III. ALCHEMY IN M E N ................................... 81 IV. A NAME FOR EVIL; A SEARCH FOR ORDER ...........147 V. THE VELVET HORN: A LIFETIME'S DEATH IN LOVE . 170 VI. FROM OLD SCRATCH'S CANNIBAL WORLD TO PARADISE . 232 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................. 245 VITA .......................................................249 ABSTRACT Andrew Lytle has published a relatively small number of stories and novels. The most important of his fictional works are The Long Night, At the Moon's Inn, A Name for Evil, The Velvet Horn, and A Novel, A Novella and Four Stories. Lytle's first published work of fiction, the short story "Old Scratch in the Valley," serves as a base mark in any attempt to assess his development as a novelist. In "Old Scratch," Lytle presents a picture of the matriarchal society which he believes to have been the bul wark of the Southern family. The story illustrates his be lief that "the last active expression of this [matriarchal] society" occurred in the period 1880-1910. Lytle's first novel, The Long Night, takes place in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, from the 1850's to this post-Civil War period. A sort of Senecan-revenge tragedy, the novel is based, as some critics have failed to note, on a true story in F. L. Owsley's family history. The quest for revenge, as told by an eccen tric recluse to his younger kinsman, is justifiably shifted to the third-person point of view by the young nephew, a teacher-writer, for he presents the tale he received from his uncle with parts filled in later from other sources. In his next novel, At the Moon's Inn, of which the novella Alchemy iv V was originally a part, Lytle, a novelist who exhibits "the peculiar historical consciousness of the Southern writer,'1 presents the stories of the Spanish conquest of Peru and of De Soto's Floridian expedition. De Soto, the man of Will, and Tovar, the man of sensibility, are compared and contrasted in an allegory which admonishes moderns to remember the medi eval concept of de contemptu mundi. Lytle, in At the Moon1s Inn, as in his other novels, is careful to work out what he considers a good balance between the narrative, or panoramic summary, and the dramatic. In the climactic scene, he pre sents De Soto as a Spanish puritan, a gnostic who usurps the authority of his priest. The novel is shot through with irony, the greatest irony being that the Spaniards are oblivi ous of the great worth of the fertile land through which they force their way in search of another Peru. The theme of gnosticism reappears in A Name for Evil. Lytle depicts in this first-person narration a psychotic middle-aged writer who, with his wife, tries to restore order to a farm as he struggles to achieve order in his own life. With Christian and Jungian symbolism, Lytle shows that only madness can re sult from an attempt to re-create history. The Velvet Horn, Lytle's summa mundi, consists of five parts with a progression d'effet structure. The protagonist of this novel, which has a Cumberland Plateau setting in Reconstruction times, is Jack Cropleigh, a "spiritual hermaphrodite," who, encompassing all the action in his mind, serves as "victim-redeemer" in an archetypal experience at once Christian and pagan. Lytle explicates his creative method in this nineteenth-century re enactment of the Edenic myth in a critical essay, "The Work ing Novelist and the Mythmaking Process." Lytle is not another Southern purveyor of nostalgia: he is a creative artist of great skill; and his novels should be reissued. He is a Christian novelist who writes best of what he knows best— archetypal experiences in agrarian set tings. In every piece of fiction that he writes he is, above all, an artist. PREFACE Although the fiction of Andrew Lytle has appeared at intervals since the publication of his first short story in The Virginia Quarterly Review forty years ago, and although Lytle's short stories (e.g., "The Mahogany Frame,” "Jericho, Jericho, Jericho," and "Mr. MacGregor") have appeared in vari ous anthologies, little critical attention has been given to Lytle's fiction until recent years. A large number of crit ics, Northern and Southern, have praised Lytle for his skill in rendering the illusion of life in his short stories and novels; but too many critics have spent too much time trying to correlate what Lytle, as the young Vanderbilt-trained Southern Agrarian, said in I'll Take My Stand and in Who Owns America? with what Lytle, as creative artist, says in his short stories and novels. Certainly few fiction writers can keep themselves en tirely out of what they write. Choices of characters and milieu tell us a good deal about an author. And it is appar ent to anyone who reads only a few of Lytle's stories and novels that for the Tennessean time and place are vital as pects of art. Lytle possesses to a high degree what Allen Tate refers to as "the peculiar historical consciousness of the Southern writer." Lytle shares with Robert Penn Warren viii and Eudora Welty a predilection for rendering specific en vironment in fiction. Writers like Thornton Wilder, on the other hand, consider environment unimportant in the American search for identity.1 Lytle is primarily concerned in his fiction with cre ating an illusion of the past in the present.