Marion Montgomery (1925-2011) was a novelist and poet but is remembered for his literary and cultural criticism. An Anglo-Catholic, he shared the same background and outlook as his Catholic friend, peer, and fellow Georgian, the writer Flannery O’Connor, so much so, that he too described himself as a “hillbilly Thomist.” His cultural criticism draws on Thomism and Southern Agrarianism and stresses the importance of metaphysical realism, localism, and tradition. His literary criticism includes perceptive studies on writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy.
In this interview, Prof. Michael M. Jordan discusses Montgomery’s work and some of his best books.
Michael M. Jordan is Professor Emeritus of English at Hillsdale College and earned his PhD in English under the direction of Marion Montgomery at the University of Georgia. He lectured on the work of various Southern authors: the Southern Agrarians, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, M. E. Bradford, Richard Weaver, and Walker Percy. He also has written essays and reviews for various journals of scholarship and opinion, including Chronicles, Touchstone, The Southern Partisan, Modern Age, The Intercollegiate Review, The South Carolina Review, The Southern Humanities Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and The University Bookman. In 2005, he selected and edited a collection of Montgomery’s essays: On Matters Southern: Essays About Literature and Culture, 1964-2000.
- On Matters Southern: Essays About Literature and Culture, 1964-2000
by Marion Montgomery - Possum, and Other Receipts for the Recovery of "Southern" Being
by Marion Mongomery - Liberal Arts and Community: The Feeding of the Larger Body
by Marion Mongomery - Romantic Confusions of the Good: Beauty as Truth, Truth as Beauty
by Marion Mongomery - With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party: in Company with Flannery O'Connor, T.S. Eliot, and Others
by Marion Mongomery
What would you add to the preceding biographical profile of Marion Montgomery?
Marion Montgomery's work is inspired by Thomism and by Agrarianism. It is also inspired by what he called the vision and the insights of the “prophetic poet.” Marion was a poet and a novelist. He said that the prophetic poet calls us back to forgotten truths: things that we once knew but have forgotten because, since the Renaissance and the gradual development of modernism, there has been a shrinking of the mind’s access to reality. We have been cut off from tradition and from transcendence.
He adds to the principles of Thomism and the Southern Agrarian’s attention to the local scene the insights of the poet, drawing upon analogy, imagination, intuition, and the fiction writer’s careful attention to detail.
"However, when Montgomery speaks of the South, he is referring not just to the geographical and historical South, but to an older, premodern way of living. Industrialization, urbanisation, specialisation, and commercialism are features of modernity that really do separate us from creation and the ground of our local realities."
What is your fondest recollection of Marion Montgomery?
My fondest recollections are of the many times I visited him at his home in Crawford. He taught at the University of Georgia in Athens but lived in a small village seventeen miles away. Marion and his wife, Dorothy (or Dot as we all called her), were very generous and hospitable. They frequently invited students and friends to visit them and enjoy their hospitality. As a student, and later when I was married with children, I visited and stayed with Marion and Dot many times.
Marion’s personal generosity and hospitality are not something you pick up from his books. However, when he died, The Christendom Review (4:1, 2011) published a tribute to him: “Remembering Marion Montgomery.” Time and again, people attested to how generous and hospitable Marion and Dot were. A friend and colleague of mine said that visiting the Montgomerys was something like perfection. It really was.
What he accomplished in his books is wonderful and great, but what he and Dot did personally is also quite remarkable.
"Montgomery tells the young Southerner that he needs to sort through his inheritance, take in all that is good and worthy, and dismiss all that is bad."
Montgomery was a novelist and poet. How do his works compare to other notable Southern authors of the period, such as Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, and Wendell Berry?
Asked about the connection of her work to that of William Faulkner (the greatest twentieth-century Southern writer), Flannery O'Connor said: “No one wants his mule stranded on the track when the Dixie Limited comes roaring down.” This was her way of saying that she did not want to compare her work to that of the great William Faulkner. That said, Marion's first novel, The Wandering of Desire (1962), is very Faulknerian in its theme, style, and manner of addressing the reader. He knew Faulkner’s work, and his first novel has some similarities with those of Faulkner.
His second novel, Darrell, was published in 1964. It evinces his familiarity with the work of Flannery O'Connor. There is whimsy, a little of the grotesque, and some of the disturbing violence that you find in her work.
His third novel, Fugitive, published in 1974, is a fascinating experimental novel. Its themes clearly show the influence of the Fugitive Poets and the Southern Agrarians. Fugitive’s stories and vignettes are rendered in the local idiom and might remind some readers of Wendell Berry’s work.
Do any of his novels, poems, or short stories distil the central themes of his cultural criticism?
They do, though this does not come up in the same way. They address his concerns about the family, assaults on the family, and the challenges of living in a world that has separated itself from tradition and transcendence. All three of his novels deal with the changes over time from the Old South to the New South. His cultural criticism focuses on the same thing: changes that have occurred since the Renaissance and the Reformation that eventually produced modernism (and later, postmodernism), shrinking our world, and, through materialism and secularism, truncating our awareness of reality.
Interestingly, Montgomery wrote his novels and most of his poetry in the 60s and early 70s. Thereafter, he increasingly wrote cultural criticism, producing altogether twenty-two critical works. He either decided or discerned that his calling was to write cultural criticism. However, his gifts as poet and writer of fiction render his cultural criticism remarkedly vivid and vital. He is attentive to the local, the particular, the concrete. While presenting some philosophical abstractions and definitions, he incarnates them by getting into the fabric, the texture, the warp and woof of the world. That is a real virtue.
"More than anyone I have ever known, Marion always brought everything—economics, literature, philosophy, popular culture, science, education—back to the cause of causes, the Creator of being."
You have already mentioned how Montgomery can be classified as a Southern Agrarian. For those who are not familiar with this movement, could you describe what makes one a Southern Agrarian?
Marion Montgomery was keenly familiar with the Southern Agrarians and their manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, an anthology published in 1930 by twelve Southerners, most of whom were connected with Vanderbilt University. They were taking a stand for the South and the agrarian tradition against industrialism, urbanism, secularism and a host of other isms that are associated with industrialization.
However, when Montgomery speaks of the South, he is referring not just to the geographical and historical South, but to an older, premodern way of living. Industrialization, urbanisation, specialisation, and commercialism are features of modernity that really do separate us from creation and the ground of our local realities.
Montgomery frequently quotes Stark Young, one of the Southern Agrarians, who wrote, “We defend certain qualities not because they belong to the South, but because the South belongs to them.” What Young is really saying is that certain values of Christendom or Western Civilization had been manifested or incarnated in the American South, a region that held onto these values longer than the North. The South manifested a recognition of the importance of one’s time and place, tradition, ceremony, and hierarchy, among other things.
Maion would claim St. Thomas Aquinas or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as an honorary Southerner. This is because the South belongs (or used to belong) to the larger community called Christendom, with its practices and beliefs that, increasingly, are diminished, challenged, or dismissed in our time.
Why is it worth reading Montgomery for Catholics in particular?
He was an Anglo-Catholic, not a Roman Catholic. However, his chief guide was St. Thomas Aquinas. In his works, he frequently cites St. Thomas's basic principles, attitudes, and vision. He also draws readily upon the neo-Thomists: Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, Joseph Pieper, and others. He absorbed their thoughts on art, politics, and economics. This made him essentially Catholic in his vision. He emphasises the universality of the Catholic tradition.
Montgomery would have said that seeing and knowing the world through the eyes and mind of St. Thomas and the Neo-Thomists both introduces us to minds greater than our own and enables us to see an integrated world not undone by the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment. He calls us back to that older world, with St. Thomas as his chief guide. He is very Catholic.
More than anyone I have ever known, Marion always brought everything—economics, literature, philosophy, popular culture, science, education—back to the cause of causes, the Creator of being. He filtered everything through a basic address to the Creator and our status as creatures.
1.
Montgomery’s works are packed with references to philosophers and writers. Is it fair to say that, unless you are well-read, you might struggle to follow his works of cultural criticism? If so, are any of his works more accessible to less advanced readers?
His work is difficult because it is philosophical and wide-ranging. He knew a great deal, far more than most of us. Moreover, some of his works are not only difficult but quite lengthy. His trilogy, The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age (is about 1500 pages long (vol. 1, 2, 3). I am not the first to call attention to the difficulty of his work.
The collection of his essays that I edited—On Matters Southern—is short (205 pages), has the Thomistic overview as its background, and should be accessible to most educated readers. One of my reasons for publishing those sixteen essays was to give readers an introduction to his work. It is easier than his longer and more formidable philosophical studies.
Which essays from the anthology merit particular note?
For Montgomery’s take on the Southern Agrarians, I would recommend “Bells for John Stewart's Burden,” his long and devastating review of a shallow and prejudicial book that was dismissive of the Southern Agrarians. In it, Montgomery comes to their defence, displaying his familiarity with the Fugitive Poets, the Southern Agrarians, and the New Critics. The principal figures— John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson—were part of all three literary movements.
I am partial to “Walker Percy and the Christian Scandal.” Late in life, Montgomery took an increasing interest in the work of Walker Percy and wrote two books on him. One is Eudora Welty and Walker Percy: The Concept of Home in Their Lives and Literature (2004). The other is With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party, in Company with Flannery O’Connor, T. S. Eliot, and Others (2009).
In “Walker Percy and the Christian Scandal,” Montgomery focuses on Percy's first novel The Moviegoer, but he opens the essay with both Percy’s and O'Connor's comment on liberal sentimentality. In Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) Father Smith says, “Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.” In her introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann (1961), Flannery O'Connor had said the same thing: "In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."
For Montgomery, the Christian Scandal consists in Christianity's claim that each human person has value, whereas liberal sentimentality justifies and promotes abortion and euthanasia.
This essay focuses mostly on The Moviegoer’s protagonist, Binx Bolling. He is on a search for identity. In a comic moment at the beginning of the novel, he mentions all the plastic cards in his wallet: his credit cards, identity cards, and library cards. They have his name on them, but sardonically he realises that they do not establish who he is. Trying to find out who he is and how he fits into this world, he goes to the movies looking for role models. He attempts to certify himself, to anchor himself in time and place, and to discover his identity by going to the movies. However, as Montgomery points out in this fascinating essay, the novel implicitly shows that we accomplish this, not by going to the movies, but by going to Mass. The Mass is the drama that certifies the self in time and place. Encountering the Word made flesh certifies our time and our place by sanctifying us.
In a passage near the end of The Moviegoer, Binx describes an African American who comes out of Church on Ash Wednesday:
“His forehead is an ambiguous sienna color and pied: it is impossible to be sure that he received ashes. When he gets in his Mercury, he does not leave immediately but sits looking down at something on the seat beside him. A sample case? An insurance manual? I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?
It is impossible to say.”
Binx is wondering if one can know God and be certified by him through the Word made flesh, through Christ, who dwells among us and is received in the Mass. He is uncertain of what to make of this. However, the novel is signalling how the drama of the Mass can stop us from being lost in the cosmos.
To make this connection even more clear, Montgomery cites a paragraph from Percy’s short essay “The Holiness of the Ordinary”:
“While no serious novelist knows for sure where his writing comes from, I have the strongest feeling that, whatever else the benefits of the Catholic faith, it is of a particularly felicitous use to the novelist. Indeed, if one had to design a religion for novelists, I can think of no better. What distinguishes Judeo-Christianity in general from other world religions is its emphasis on the value of the individual person, its view of man as a creature in trouble, seeking to get out of it, and accordingly on the move. Add to this anthropology the special marks of the Catholic Church: the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, which, whatever else they do, confer the highest significance upon the ordinary things of this world, bread, wine, water, touch, breath, words, talking, listening—and what do you have? You have a man in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery; a pilgrim whose life is a searching and a finding.”
In this essay, Montgomery masterfully weaves together the trajectory of The Moviegoer by connecting story and theme with the drama of the Mass and what Binx may have in his future.
One of the essays in On Matters Southern is “Books, Books, Books: Difficult Choices in Time of Intellectual Stress,” where Montgomery recommends important books in the Western tradition and some that are pertinent for readers from the American South. I was surprised by how the bulk of the entries in the “Works General” category were by mid-twentieth century philosophers or intellectuals (T.S. Eliot, Gilson, Marcel, Maritain, Pieper, Rommen, Strauss, Voegelin). Why do you value this essay?
Montgomery was asked to put together two lists of books that would help orient a young Southerner at the turn of the millennium. He assumes that the reader is familiar with the great writings of the Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian traditions and aims to provide books to orient those in the modern academy, which is an intellectual desert. One list is for the Southerner and consists of Southern authors. The longer list delves into the thought of Eliot, Strauss, Voegelin, and some of the neo-Thomists. They see so much more than the rest of us and will help orient the student in his time and his place. Interestingly, Montgomery seems to believe that it is neither poetry nor fiction but critical studies that orient the person in a time of intellectual chaos.
2.
In Possum, and Other Receipts for the Recovery of "Southern" Being, Montgomery contrasts two kinds of possum. The one is the marsupial indigenous to the American South. It represents the value of being grounded, humble, and tied to one’s surroundings. The other is the Latin word for “I can” (possum) and represents the proud pretension to unconstrained autonomy. Have you selected this book because it condenses Montgomery’s localism?
It does condense his localism, but it does so by discussing that localism more broadly in terms of “Southern” being, namely, the older way of life. I am fascinated with the two little parables with which he opens this recipe for cooking a possum. The first possum should help you to realise that, when you start out, you need to begin with things as they are and not as you want to them to be. First, you must catch the possum—that is, the local that surrounds you. This is one of Montgomery’s ways of calling our attention to the Thomistic principle that our knowledge starts with the objects of the senses. We need to start with what is immediately around us.
The second parable comes from the Latin word possum: ‘I can’ or ‘I am able to.’ This possum might remind us of Adam and Eve. In the Garden of Eden, they want to be autonomous and go their own way. We need the complement to “I am able’: ‘I am enabled.’ This is Montgomery's way of saying that we live in a world of fallen creatures and original sin. We need grace. It enables us to get out of the difficulty we are in.
The essay is about both localism and the larger world.
"His address to the student is 'Do Not Be an Intellectual Orphan.'"
3.
Your third recommended book is Liberal Arts and Community: The Feeding of the Larger Body. Why have you chosen this book over The Truth of Things, Montgomery’s other major book on the liberal arts and the academy?
I selected that book because, first, it is about 140 pages shorter than the other volume and so is easier to read. However, I chose it mainly because it is a series of three lectures delivered to one audience at one event, the Younts Lectures at Erskine College in South Carolina. It has unity as well as brevity, whereas The Truth of Things is a collection of essays, on sundry subjects, written over a thirty-five-year period.
The first lecture is addressed to students. Montgomery tells them that they should not become intellectual orphans who do not know their ancestors and their heritage. He invites them to know who they are by acquainting themselves with Plato and Aristotle, with Hawthorne and Emerson, and with a host of writers in between. time. When he speaks about the past and the present, he searches for the continuity and connection between the two. The past, the present, and the future should have some connection with one another but, he says, we live in a world that cancels, dismisses, and marginalises our cultural inheritance. Though this has gotten worse since Montgomery’s death, it was evident back in the nineties. His address to the student is “Do Not Be an Intellectual Orphan.”
The second address is to the university or college professor. He tells them that they are stewards of our Judaeo-Christian and Greco-Roman inheritance and should be conveying this inheritance—not ideology, theory, or fads of popular culture—to their charges.
Then he addresses the community—the townspeople as well as the students, the deans, and the college administrators—telling them that they need to recognise the connection between the ‘community’ and ‘communication.’ One purpose of the study of the liberal arts is to purify the dialect of the tribe: to make our words good characters and good signs of reality. As Montgomery says in the Preface to Liberal Arts and Community, “The Truth of things, which must be our concern always, is revealed through words rightly used and rightly taken. That revelation is the art of all liberal arts.” Properly undertaken, the liberal arts introduce us to great books. However, to access the great books, we need to use words rightly and take them rightly.
Elsewhere, Montgomery, quoting Ezra Pound, says that “to use the wrong word is to bear false witness.” Most of us use the wrong word out of sloth and inattention. Nonetheless, we thereby bear false witness. Montgomery points out that if we want community, we need to communicate, and to communicate, we need to be careful stewards of our language.
As Flannery O'Connor says, “the moral basis of Poetry is the accurate naming of the things of God.” That is what Montgomery is interested in. Properly undertaken, the liberal arts help us to accurately name the things of God. That in turn helps us to have community. As the subtitle of Liberal Arts and Community specifies, the liberal arts should be feeding the community.
In this book, Montgomery also states that the cyclops—the TV—holds the modern family hostage. Updating this remark, we could say that screens and social media hold us hostage. They prevent us from becoming grounded in the real world and our immediate surroundings. They frequently distract us from the transcendence and tradition that come to us through reading great books written by minds greater than our own.
So, in this book, he is offering both his diagnosis of what is wrong with the modern university and his recipe for restoring it to health.
Correct-there is both a diagnosis and a remedy. We have already rehearsed a big part of the problem. The modern world has divorced itself from tradition and transcendence. Marion frequently quoted Allen Tate, who said that the new or modern provincial is a cosmopolitan in terms of space. He can go anywhere around the globe. However, he is a provincial in time. He has cut himself off from the past and its continuity into the present. Many modern universities have jettisoned the Judaeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman traditions. The secular academy’s materialistic mindset will not address transcendent realities and spiritual truths. This secularism leads, ultimately, to nihilism and to political monstrosities such as ideological regimes. For Montgomery, we need to address this and overcome it by paying careful attention to our tradition and cultivating an openness to creation and to moral and spiritual truths addressed in theological studies. If you want the student to address the serious, you need theology.
4.
The fourth book, Romantic Confusions of the Good: Beauty as Truth, Truth as Beauty, was occasioned by a lecture Montgomery was invited to give at a 1990 conference on “The Future of Thomism.” It argues that modern culture and literature have lost their way by rejecting Thomistic realism and following nominalism and subjectivism instead. What do you value in this book?
In this book and others, Montgomery uses St. Thomas's insights to demonstrate that language, even though it sometimes breaks in our hands, is a dependable and reliable instrument for getting at the realities of the world. However, our age has separated matter and spirit; reason and faith. Montgomery aims to demonstrate how Saint Thomas's insights establish a companionable relationship between the rational mind of the philosopher and the poet’s intuition and imagination.
Romantic Confusions is a Thomistic critique of Romanticism. Its central theme is the integration of experience and knowledge. Montgomery endeavours to establish a valid intellectual grounding for both the poet’s and the philosopher’s knowledge. The poet interprets perceptions intuitively and from the heart and then presents these insights in images and metaphors. The philosopher derives truth from the discursive analysis of what we perceive. In our day, these two kinds of knowledge have been utterly divorced from one another. Moreover, the validity of each has been questioned.
Montgomery argues that each mode of knowledge is valid and, through Thomism, can be reconciled with the other. He brings together faith and reason, the ratio and the intellectus. By bringing them together, we have a better purchase on the real world.
That in brief is the thesis and argument of Romantic Confusions of the Good. The work fleshes this out by examining the difficulty the Romantic poets had in grounding their abundant intuition, imagination, and feeling in faith and philosophical principles.
The Romantic age constitutes a powerful rejection of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on rationality. These two ages illustrate the separation of reason and sentiment. The Enlightenment emphasises science, education, rationality but rejects feeling. In the following century, the Romantic era rejects the Enlightenment and embraces the intuitive. Montgomery wants to bring back together what these two ages separated.
"For him, the ultimate check on the validity of tradition would be Thomism and the general or universal Christian witness that comes down to us through the ages."
5.
The last of the recommended books, With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party, takes its title from one of Percy’s musings on the Southern Christian writer: “He feels like Lancelot in search of the Holy Grail who finds himself at the end of his quest at a Tupperware party.” What is this book about?
Walker Percy says that the Christian novelist who has profoundly serious concerns is like Lancelot in quest of the Holy Grail. He is trying to get at the most important and essential aspects of the Christian life, but finds himself in a world where God, sin, grace, redemption, and baptism do not make any sense or are treated so flippantly as to have no real purchase. Hence, whenever the Christian novelist tries to address these serious concerns, he resembles Lancelot on a serious religious quest but arriving instead at a Tupperware party, the shopping mall, or the movies. That is the problem Christian novelists face.
In this regard, Flannery O'Connor said that since the modern world deems religious matters meaningless and insignificant, she tried to shock her readers into recognition of their validity. That is the reason behind the violence and the grotesque in her work.
Montgomery wants other lights to shed light on the subject. As the subtitle of this book indicates, he has invited Flannery O'Connor, T.S. Eliot, and others along, bringing them into the conversation--displaying comparisons and contrasts that illuminate wide and far.
In discussing Walker Percy’s life, Montgomery notes that he was a scientist: a pathologist and an MD. Science was initially a lodestar for him. When he contracted tuberculosis, he began to read the existentialists. As a result, existentialism became another lodestar for Percy and influenced his understanding of the world. Stoicism was also part of his Southern inheritance.
Over time, Montgomery notes, these rivals to faith (Stoicism, existentialism, and science) gradually diminish and one finds in Percy’s last writings a much more confident address to the Catholic’s belief in a sacramental world sustained by God’s love. This confident embrace of Catholicism is apparent in three works he wrote towards the end of his life: The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), “The Holiness of the Ordinary” (1989), and “Why Are you a Catholic?” (1990).
One question has crossed my mind during this discussion. Montgomery and other conservative thinkers emphasise the importance of tradition. So do Catholic thinkers in general. However, often traditions have not only many valuable points of value, but also dark points. That is true of the South, as with any other local tradition. Obviously, the Southern Agrarians stress the perennially valuable points, but how does Montgomery offer standards for identifying, assessing, critiquing, and overcoming the problematic points of the Southern tradition? Alasdair Macintyre, a Thomist who is similar to Montgomery in certain regards, emphasises the importance of dialectical engagement in our rational inquiry into truth. This allows us to discover weak points, limitations, and even errors in one's own tradition. How does Montgomery approach this problem?
This is something I had meant to bring up. At the end of “Books, Books, Books,” Montgomery tells the young Southerner that he needs to sort through his inheritance, take in all that is good and worthy, and dismiss all that is bad.
In several of his works, he comments on After Strange Gods, a series of lectures that T.S. Eliot gave at the University of Virginia in the 1930s. Commenting on the Southern Agrarians, Eliot acknowledges that their mining of their tradition and attempt to perpetuate it is a good and worthy undertaking. However, he also points out that tradition must be checked by orthodoxy. There needs to be a winnowing of tradition and some checks on it. For Eliot, this is what orthodoxy does. However, in After Strange Gods he does not clearly distinguish what he means by orthodoxy. Montgomery agrees with Eliot, except that by orthodoxy he means Thomism. I am not sure whether dialectical is the right word, but Montgomery would advocate the ability of the rational mind working discriminately to discern the truth of things. For him, the ultimate check on the validity of tradition would be Thomism and the general or universal Christian witness that comes down to us through the ages.
