The Fathers by Allen Tate

First published: 1938

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of plot: 1860-1861

Locale: Virginia; Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

Principal characters

• Lacy Gore Buchan, the narrator
• Major Lewis Buchan, his father
• Semmes Buchan, Lacy’s older brother, killed by George Posey
• Susan Buchan Posey, Lacy’s sister
• George Posey, Lacy’s brother-in-law
• Jane Posey, George’s sister, who is loved by Lacy and Semmes
• John Langton, George’s rival
• Yellow Jim, George’s mulatto half brother, a slave George sells to buy a horse

The Story:

Lacy Buchan, a sixty-year-old bachelor, thinks back over the year 1860, when he was fifteen and his mother died. That April, family and friends gathered at Pleasant Hill in Fairfax County, Virginia, for the funeral, the last time they were all together. Among those present were the Poseys, Lacy’s sister Susan’s in-laws. Susan’s husband, George Posey, rode his horse away from the funeral, causing much gossip.

Young Lacy recalled memories of George, his brother Semmes’s friend. During a visit two years before, George gave Lacy a gun. The next day, Lacy went to a jousting tournament and stayed with his father’s slave, Coriolanus, who talked to some slaves who had just been sold. One was called Yellow Jim; George sold him and bought a mare.

Riders in the tournament had five tries to take rings from hooks with lances. George and John Langton succeeded each time, and George was awarded the prize for his superior form. When the drunken Langton protested, George threw him to the ground. The victor shared his reward with Lacy’s sister, Susan. Langton challenged George to a duel; George shot at a target, then discarded his pistol and punched Langton. Lacy admired his new friend very much.

At the funeral, Lacy’s sister-in-law Lucy gave Lacy violets to put in his mother’s hands. As he moved from the coffin, Jane, George’s sister, took his hand. They left the room, and Lacy kissed Jane. Afterward, Lacy held a garment belonging to his mother and thought of Jane and of his mother at the same time.

After marrying Susan, George began managing the Buchans’ business affairs. Once he sold a family of slaves that Major Buchan had asked him to free, applying the money to one of the major’s debts. George was a practical man, not a principled one like Major Buchan.

During the winter of 1860-1861, the Buchans stayed in Alexandria at the home of Lacy’s cousin, John Semmes, who went to Washington. Lacy’s brother, Charles, and his sister-in-law, Lucy, moved in with the Buchan family. South Carolina seceded from the Union, and other Southern states followed. Lacy’s father was a Unionist, but his cousin John favored secession. The Buchans discussed civilly which side they would take in the war, but could not agree. Charles, who was in the United States Army, drilled with the National Rifles, from which the Unionists withdrew. George supplied the company with firearms. Charles resigned his commission with the U.S. Army because he knew Abraham Lincoln would send troops to South Carolina. George told Major Buchan that he sympathized with Unionists, but his loyalty was with Virginia; Colonel Robert E. Lee made the same decision several days later. Langton became captain of the National Rifles.

Lacy went to stay with the Poseys in Georgetown because his sister sent for him. Her husband, George, was often mysteriously away. In the Posey household were Susan and her daughter, little Jane; George’s sister Jane; and Jane and George’s mother, uncle, and aunt. Each resident lived in seclusion, and only Susan, Jane, and Lacy dined together.

Northern soldiers kept Washington, D.C., under martial law, and John Semmes was arrested for secessionist activity. When Lacy’s brother Semmes became a Confederate, Major Buchan disclaimed the young man.

One night, Lacy heard a noise and went downstairs. The slave Blind Joe (who was not really blind) took him to Yellow Jim, who explained that he ran away and came home. No one was there to send him back to his new owner, so Jim resumed his duties as butler. Jim, who was also George and Jane’s half brother, had been Jane’s caretaker, but during his three years away, she grew up and did not need him anymore. In fact, she feared him. Lacy understood her fear, having once seen Jim beat a horse who bit him—the very mare George sold him to buy.

Lacy’s brother Semmes proposed to Jane, whom Lacy loved. When Semmes asked Lacy if he loved Jane, Lacy lied. The night after Semmes proposed to Jane, he left. Lacy heard a scream, then a door slam. He ran upstairs and found Jim crouching in the hall. Susan came from the mother’s room and said that the woman died of fright. Susan and Lacy deduced that the scream had come from Jane, whom they discovered supine on her bedroom floor. They inferred that Jim raped Jane. Lacy locked him in the basement and sent Blind Joe for George.

The next day, nuns took Jane to a convent. Susan, whose hair turned white overnight, begged Jim to run away, but he refused. Semmes and George returned and took Jim out to the river; Lacy accompanied them. To avenge Jane, Semmes shot Jim; in reflex, George shot Semmes. Lacy ran ten miles back to the city. He saw that the Confederate flag was no longer flying over Arlington, and Union soldiers told him that the first fatalities of the war had occurred. Lacy, exhausted, headed toward home. By the time he got there, he was ill and delirious. After six weeks, he recovered to learn that his father knew the whole story. The major forbade him to avenge Semmes’s death and accepted some blame for the incident, feeling that he injured Semmes’s pride by denying him.

Lacy’s sister, Susan, went mad and came home. George came to get her, but she did not seem to recognize him. George donned a Confederate uniform, and he and Lacy left to find General Longstreet’s brigade.

They later learned that Union soldiers came to Pleasant Hill and told Major Buchan to get out. He did not tell them that he was a Unionist; instead, he hanged himself. The soldiers burned the house to the ground. Lacy became a Confederate soldier.

Bibliography

Benson, Melanie. “The Fetish of Surplus Value: Reconstructing the White Elite in Allen Tate, William Alexander Percy, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe.” In Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Argues that mathematical calculations play a major role in twentieth century southern literature, demonstrating how writers use numbers to determine individual worth and identity, and social and racial classifications. The chapter about Tate includes discussion of The Father.

Carpenter, Lynette. “The Battle Within: The Beleaguered Consciousness in Allen Tate’s The Fathers.” Southern Literary Journal 8, no. 2 (Spring, 1976): 3-23. Argues that Lacy Buchan is the central character in Tate’s novel, and that his confused narration is representative of the book’s theme: the ambiguity of experience and memory.

Holman, C. Hugh. “The Fathers and the Historical Imagination.” In Literary Romanticism in America, edited by William L. Andrews. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Provides a useful review of earlier criticism of The Fathers. Discusses the work as a bildungsroman that examines a family’s events through a historical viewpoint.

Law, Richard. “’Active Faith’ and Ritual in The Fathers.” American Literature 55 (October, 1983): 345-366. Posits that part of the novel’s greatness lies in its questioning its own thesis: the value of tradition and community. Asserts that it is not a tract, although it represents Agrarianism.

Montgomery, Marion. John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate: At Odds About the Ends of History and the Mystery of Nature. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003. Tate and Ransom were members of the Fugitives, a literary group organized at Vanderbilt University in the 1920’s; the two later became southern poets with different philosophies. Montgomery examines their Fugitive-Agrarian concepts of nature, history, science, industry, personhood, family, and community.

Underwood, Thomas A. Allen Tate: Orphan of the South. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Biography recounting Tate’s difficult childhood, in which his parents burdened him with the myth of the embattled South, and the later conflict between his artistic vocation and his reactionary politics. Describes how he eventually attained the self-knowledge needed to write The Fathers, in which he examined the restrictions imposed by the South’s cultural contradictions.

Young, Thomas Daniel. “Allen Tate’s Double Focus: The Past in the Present.” Mississippi Quarterly 30 (Fall, 1977): 517-525. Asserts that The Fathers shows the likelihood that the antebellum South would have destroyed itself even if the Civil War had not occurred. Quotes Tate extensively.