Robert Penn Warren

by Robert Cheeks

“We are a pair of moles burrowing away in the same direction.” —Ivan Turgenev to Gustave Flaubert, May 26, 1868

Robert Penn Warren and William Styron were friends for at least twenty and perhaps as many as thirty years. They celebrated this shared comity at every opportunity with good food, a postprandial libation (or two), and the intellectual introspection that is expected of the literati. They wove their friendship around and through their families, binding them together in a cheerful camaraderie whose joyful memories linger to this day. Beyond the fact that these men exhibited a decided literary genius, the single most important element of their friendship was, as William Styron said, “a commonality of interest in the sense that we were both from south of the Mason-Dixon line” (Allen). Theirs was a mutual understanding that even though a generation separated them, they shared a unique Southern historical and cultural heritage that resisted the assault of modernity. This heritage defined a “way of thinking,” a unique conservatism, that lay firmly rooted in feudalism, the code of chivalry, the ideal of the gentleman, and a particular religiousness that, according to Richard Weaver, “stands close to the historic religiousness of humanity. It is briefly, a sense of the inscrutable, which leaves one convinced of the existence of supernatural intelligence and power, and leads him to the acceptance of life as a mystery” (Southern Tradition 31-32). [Read more...]