Southern Musings: So Red the Rose by Stark Young

Southern Musings:

So Red the Rose

by Stark Young

Mr. Young was evidently an Agrarian. Robert Penn Warren was also one as was John Crowe Ransom. I know this because I had to take Tennessee history when I was in high school and the Southern Agrarian Literary School was about all we, Tennesseeans had to grasp on to in the 20^th Century Literary Movements.

The fact was that the Agrarians were 19^th Century, nay 18^th Century, Revisionists of the worst sort---everyone should be a gentleman farmer for the health of their morals and character and the society and national health. This sort of thing totally overlooks the fact that not all of us want to depend on crops and the weather to make our living. And that depending on crops and the weather to make a gentleman’s living is not going to make that gentleman’s living, because all this farm produce has got to go to the commodity market where speculation and fraud is rampant. And if everyone is a gentleman farmer, then who is going to buy the genteelly raised produce? Don’t all the gentlemen have plenty of their own?

And even with combines and tractors, gentlemen farmers have to work in season. The weather and crops wait for no gentleman.

And I have always been convinced that all this gentlemanly farming is dependent upon the grubbing classes, yep, Slaves (women, blacks, Mexicans---tobacco farming ain’t that automated). So there you are, back on the Monticello plantation with Thomas Jefferson being all gentlemanly while His People farm and wash and cook for him, while he invents contraptions and writes long letters and essays and rides to the hounds everyday and diddles His Lady Concubines every night.

As a woman who grows some echinacea and roses and clematis every summer and has to hire some one else to cut my grass, because I am painfully, tears and hacking coughs and hives, allergic to grass and pollen and fungi, I don’t see where I fit in to this gentleman farmer theory. I’m not washing clothes, dishes, and the front porch or diddling the gentleman of leisure when he has the craving and the time.

Sorry Agrarian Guys, I am all for Progress and the Liberation of the Slaves and Women and Science. You boys will have to depend upon the Home Schooled, Indoctrinated Female Types to populate your Gentle Farms.

Mr. Stark was also a well-educated man (all that farm land still had its sharecroppers to provide the money for his education when he was growing up in the early part of the 20^th century). From his biography, I gather that he spoke several languages fluently and was well versed in French and Greek drama.

Mr. Stark was primarily a dramatist, but he decided to write a trilogy about his Southern ancestors ante and midst and post bellum (the bellum being the American Civil War). He had grown up hearing the stories (like me) of his relatives and found them amusing and interesting enough to tell to all.

So Red the Rose is the third part of his trilogy. It was published in 1934 when Mr. Stark had decided to give up the theater and concentrate on teaching and writing narratives. It is apparent that Mr. Stark was a theater dramatist. The book is mainly the parlor or dining room setting of one of two neighboring plantations on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi. As in any sitting room drama, the characters converge to participate in a communal act (dinner or the evening’s entertainment) and we, as the reader and spectator, watch the proceedings and pick up what we need to know from the conversation. We are outside the action, such as it is, and witnesses to said action.

Although Mr. Stark was a successful dramatist, the book really doesn’t become interesting or alive until he enters the action and the minds of a few characters and follows their deeds and thoughts in real time. Then the book becomes memorable.

A ne’er do well cousin and his responsible cousin leave the plantation and go on a trip to Natchez Under the Hill (a dive and sort of Tijuana) on the Mississippi River to visit with the ne’er do well’s octoroon mistress from New Orleans who has come up the river to say her good byes to him before he ships off to the Confederate Army. The scene is compelling in its immediacy and its descriptions of the drunks, con men, grifters, gamblers, and wild men who populate Natchez Under the Hill and drink themselves Under that Hill. The octoroon Mistress is a woman alive and broken hearted (and hidden in a back room of a saloon) under the love that is not wholly reciprocated by the ne’er do well. She demands his attention and love and he looks everywhere around the room but her.

Contrast this with the major love story of the book between Valette, girl orphan adopted by her parents’ best friends, and Duncan, Prince in Waiting, of the plantations. Duncan is spoken of, but never actually in the novel until the last chapter when he returns home from the Confederate army after witnessing Appomattox. Duncan occasionally writes home, but Valette moons among the rose bushes and pines among the Pines until his discharge. This novel was made into a movie in the early thirties with Margaret Sullaven as Valette and Randolph Scott as Duncan. I’d like to see how they handled that hot, long distance romance in the movie. I’m thinking that Duncan got some home leaves in that flick.

The other compelling moments occur when former Slave US troops invade and occupy one of the plantations. All those US Troopers weren’t all that happy on the plantation. They’ve developed attitudes when they have to go back.

And the most touching moments (though a former slave US Trooper does slap the mistress of the plantation, perhaps in memory of his own mistress) in the novel are the most immediate moments that concern the death of the responsible cousin in the battle of Shiloh. His ghost comes back on horseback to his sister Lucy and tells her that he thought of her as she sang one night before he left for war as he lay dying on the battlefield. And then there is his mother, who hears of the battle of Shiloh and gets the wagon and the mules and loads up a coffin and her daughter and her butler and goes to collect the body of her son (she has that motherly feeling that he is dead). The book ends with the description of her memory of the wagon trip to the bloody death field.

“Agnes (the mother) could hear again all of a sudden the groans and cries of the wounded and dying that were left in that section. She could see faintly again their shapes lying together scattered on the field. With the groans and cries coming back to her again like that, her nerves tightened and her arms stiffened, and she felt the boy at her side startle and look at her, catching her hand now in both of his….

Now she was at Shiloh; but now she heard nothing; only the silence; then inside her body, she heard her heart beating. Edward was among them somewhere but the others too were hers. She stood looking out across the darkness and the field where the dead lay, as if they were all sleeping.”

Her butler has to comb the battlefield for her son’s body and he recognizes it by the feel of the young man’s hair.

This book doesn’t romanticize the Southern cause much. Mr. Stark is much more interested in his peoples’ stories. When he chooses to enter into the immediate feeling of those stories, the book is good. The rest of the time, I felt like I was just half listening to some family stories during a long family vacation where I wished that I were somewhere else.