Literary Nashville

It would be difficult to overstate the influence of the manifesto-issuing, Vanderbilt University-based writers who called themselves the Agrarians on the social and belletristic evolution of Nashville, but Patrick Allen, editor of this third in a series of literary anthologies for Hill Street Press (two preceding collections are Literary Savannah and Literary New Orleans, and Literary Washington, D.C. is forthcoming), comes perilously close. Of the 32 entries here, eight are of, by or about the writers also called the Fugitives: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Merrill Moore. Ralph McGill's essay ""Formaldehyde and Poetry"" offers an up-close but impersonal view of the youthful poets. The anthology is balanced by a host of familiar contemporary voices, including Madison Smartt Bell, V.S. Naipaul and Jay McInerney. Madison Jones frames the collection with an introductory foreword and an excerpt from his novel Nashville, 1864, which describes a 10-year-old boy left to care for home, farm and family when his father joins the Confederate army. A selection from the 1834 book Narrative, attributed to Davy Crockett, is a consummate example of the folk-tale tradition, generous with homespun humor and hyperbolic anecdotes. The chronologically arranged pieces then turn to the long intellectual ferment of the '30s, as distilled by the various Fugitives, offering gory recollections of the ante-bellum South. Langston Hughes's memories of the Jim Crow era, the touching provincial innocence of a youthful Julius Lester and a disquieting poem by Robert Hayden reveal Nashville in another light. Gradually, a picture emerges of a city that, like most urban areas, has been losing its individuality to the interstates, the national chains and tract housing. The multiplicity of literary styles and voices provides valuable contrast to such encroaching national homogenization by reminding readers of the history and evolution of Nashville. (Nov.)