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GORDON, Caroline

Born 6 October 1895, Merry Mount Farm, Kentucky: died April 1981

Also writes under: Caroline Tate

Daughter of James M. and Nancy Meriwether Gordon; married Allen Tate, 1924 (divorced 1959); children Nancy

Born on her mother's ancestral farm in the Kentucky tobacco region near Tennessee, the setting for much of her fiction, Caroline Gordon was tutored by her father until she was ten. She then attended his all-boys classical school. In 1916 she received a B.A. from Bethany College in West Virginia. After teaching high school until 1920, she became a journalist for the Chattanooga News. While there she met many of the Agrarians, including Allen Tate.

Gordon readily identified with the Agrarians' traditional conservative values, favoring a stable, hierarchical society based on Christianity over an urban, technological society. Gordon became deeply involved in Tate's literary world; both spent much of the late 1920s in Europe on Guggenheim Fellowships. The Tates raised their daughter Nancy at Benfolly Farm, Tennessee, entertaining many artistic visitors. Although Gordon and Tate were divorced in 1959, in 1960 they coedited a second edition of their successful and influential The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story (1950, 1960). Both this and Gordon's How to Read a Novel (1957) adapt many New Critical poetic principles to fiction.

Gordon has spent much of her life as professor and writer-in-residence at various colleges. She worked on what she characterized as her "last" novel in the years before her death in 1981, a portion of which, The Glory of Hera, appeared in book form in 1972. Gordon's short stories and novels, long out of print, were reprinted in the early 1980s.

As Ford Madox Ford's literary secretary, Gordon finished her first novel, Penhally (1931, reissued 1991), acclaimed by Ford as "the best novel that has been produced in modern America." It chronicles one hundred years of antebellum Southern culture by tracing the decline of the Penhally estate and the Llewellyn family. The ancient virtues violently conflict with the inevitability of change.

In Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934, reissued 1996), her most popular novel, an old classics teacher, modeled on Gordon's father, spends every spare moment hunting and fishing. Maury's ritualistic, almost sacramental devotion to sport allows him a dignity rarely possible in the chaos of the wasteland world which has replaced the Old South. Only the quest for love—apparent in many of Gordon's women characters, like Maury's wife Molly—provides a similar dignity.

Gordon's fiction of the late 1930s and the 1940s continued to develop her ancestral, regional material; it also reflected a growing emphasis on sophisticated knowledge in contrast to primitive innocence, while religion became a means of confronting the abyss, a terrifying image permeating her fiction.

The literary milieu at Benfolly Farm appears in several works, particularly The Strange Children (1951), Gordon's first novel after her conversion to Catholicism in 1947. It traces the search for grace in a fallen world. The central intelligence of nine-year-old Lucy Lewis records the despair and materialism of the skeptical intellectual world and the need for an order only religious belief can provide. As Lucy struggles with her own growing religious awareness, her artist-parents Stephen and Sarah perceive their own shallowness after their friend Kevin Reardon converts to Catholicism. When a compromised poet runs away with Reardon's mad wife, Reardon's disciplined belief provides a vision of the mysterious nature of grace. In the last passage, Stephen Lewis recognizes in Reardon's Catholicism a possible salvation for the cynical strange children of the modern South and of all the "desert" countries.

The salvation that is possible in The Strange Children becomes real in The Malefactors (1956). Tom Claibourne, a nonproducing poet, must reevaluate the direction of his life after he leaves his wife Vera for the ambitious and intellectual poet, Cynthia Vail. Through the influence of Catherine Pollard, a symbol of Christian charity, Claibourne discovers that he is bound nowhere unless he can return to his wife. While in her earlier work the classical Greek world subtly patterned Gordon's vision, in The Malefactors it is the archetypal world of Jungian psychology that prepares for Claibourne's religious conversion, reversing the pattern of action in Gordon's fiction from death and destruction to grace.

Gordon's worth as a novelist has been too often ignored by critics. She is more frequently identified as coeditor of The House of Fiction and as Allen Tate's former wife than as a creative artist in her own right. In addition, because her work is usually set in the South and because of her close association with the Agrarians, critics have tended to dismiss her too easily as a regionalist. Her talent for dealing with religious themes and with the themes of male/female relationships and the possibility of creativity in a wasteland world has been virtually overlooked by critics who miss the broader implications of the South in her fiction. Though Gordon is enjoyed a renewal of interest in the 1980s, her novels, particularly The Strange Children and The Malefactors, have not received the attention they deserve. She was as fine a fiction writer as Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate and should share equally in the acclaim so often accorded the Agrarians and New Critics as the generators of the Southern Renascence.