An engaging collection of essays by an astute observer of the South. In 1935, Robert Bechtold Heilman, a native Pennsylvanian and recent Harvard Ph.D., accepted a position in the Louisiana State University English department. He came to the Bayou State bringing with him a sense of curiosity in people and places a delight in the drama of life. that was compatible with the temperament of the South's still largely rural and storytelling society. He came, moreover, to one of the most dramatic contemporary settings in the South, the Louisiana of Huey P. Long. (He was present at the Louisiana State Capitol on the day Long was assassinated.) In Baton Rouge, he found a provincial university in the capital city that was acquiring for the first time in its history a faculty of some distinction.
Heilman's enduring association with the South, both personally and professionally, is the focus of The Southern Connection, a collection of seventeen delightful and thought-provoking essays. The first section of the book consists of essays in which Heilman recalls Louisiana and LSU as he found them in the autumn of 1935. He describes the atmosphere at the University and in the surrounding town; offers vivid portraits of some of his colleagues, including Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Eric Vogelin; and meditates on the reasons an obscure university in an impoverished southern state was able to attract and nurture a faculty of outstanding talent and achievement.
Having been at LSU during the scandals of the late 1930s and the war years of the 1940s, Heilman makes a significant contribution, through his recollections, to the history of these crucial times. In the book's second section Heilman presents critical essays on a number of important southern writers and their works. There are discussions of the Agrarian movement and its connection with European culture; on Cleanth Brooks and The Well Wrought Urn; on Eudora Welty's work, especially Losing Battles; and on
Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools. Heilman also includes two essays on Robert Penn Warren's work. The first discusses All the King's Men as tragedy, and the second examines the moral complexities of World Enough and Time. Another essay in the group compares Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman with Eudora Welty's "The Death of a Traveling Salesman." Finally, Heilman offers two extended reflections on the South as a region and a culture. In "The South Falls In," he discusses the paradoxes in the southern character and in national perceptions of the South. In "The Southern Temper," he considers the southern "sense of the concrete" as it is reflected in the work of various southern writers and in the southern character in general. As a whole, The Southern Connection offers an enjoyable and illuminating assessment of the South by one of the most perceptive and sensitive critics of our time.
