The Velvet Horn by Andrew Lytle

First published: 1957

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Lyrical melodrama

Time of work: August, 1879-April, 1880

Locale: The Peaks of Laurel, presumably in Tennessee

Principal Characters:

• Lucius Cree (or Legrand), the son of Julia Cree
• Julia Cree (nee Cropleigh), later Julia Legrand
• Joe Cree, Julia’s husband and cousin and Lucius’ father
• Jack Cropleigh, Julia’s older brother
• Beverly Cropleigh, the oldest of the Cropleighs
• Duncan Cropleigh, Julia’s youngest brother
• Aunt Amelie Cropleigh, Duncan’s widow
• Peter Legrand, Lucius’ real father
• Eddie Dunbaugh, kin to the Cropleighs
• Frankie Dunbaugh, Eddie’s wife
• Jeff Dunbaugh, the son of Eddie and Frankie
• Ada Rutter, a sharecropper’s wife
• Ada Belle Rutter, her older daughter and Lucius’ wife
• Ruthy Rutter, her younger daughter and Jeff’s wife
• Othel Rutter, her son

Analysis

In Andrew Lytle’s first book, BEDFORD FORREST AND HIS CRITTER COMPANY, General Forrest became, in Lytle’s hands, the symbol of the Mississippian South and its best illumination, next to Lytle’s “The Hind Tit,” his essay in I’LL TAKE MY STAND, the manifesto of the Southern agrarians. The passionate portrait of primal simplicity in both works is fascinating and frustrating; the same reaction meets most of Lytle’s work—certainly THE VELVET HORN—and is probably the truest measure of the novelist.

The novel, dedicated to John Crowe Ransom, joins a distinguished company of works acknowledging his influence, and it is this agrarian viewpoint which both attracts and repels in the novel. The lyrical description of the lost simplicity of the Garden summons up the old Adam in the reader, only to make the reader reject the vanished vision when he raises his eyes from the page. In this novel, as in Faulkner’s “The Bear,” the Garden is the unspoiled forest, here the Wilderness and specifically the Peaks of Laurel. It comes equipped with game, cover, and water, even with a Cooperesque secret entrance through a waterfall; but this is only the starting point of the novel, the setting for the story of the Cropleigh brothers and their sister Julia which precipitates years later the events that affect Julia’s son, Lucius, the apparent hero. The agrarian point of view is in the custody of the most impressive character, Uncle Jack Cropleigh. The tension between the agrarian base and the Reconstruction events is complicated by the poetic language in the lyrical description of the wilderness life and by the twists of the interconnected plots. This is a highly wrought novel.

Although the simplistic agrarian cosmos is shattered by the mercantilism of those who prospered in Reconstruction days and by the necessity for Lucius finally to make a living cutting virgin timber from the wilderness, the difficulty of facing up to such a resolution is shown in the length and occasional turgidity of the novel. When the action becomes static, the language becomes overwhelming, and there are several set scenes in which this sometimes happens, as in the first meeting between Ada Rutter and Jack Cropleigh, or at Captain Cree’s wake. Lytle’s solution is to underwrite such set pieces with a current of tension derived from the plot or plots.

The first meeting with Ada Rutter, for example, is tense because Uncle Jack is trying to drink the dwarf-child, Othel, under the table, to keep him from shooting Eddie Dunbaugh for watering his cattle on the Peaks of Laurel during the drought with which the novel opens in August, 1879. This would give time to dig the well which Uncle Jack has already divined; but Eddie prefers to steal the water so that he can fornicate with Ruthy, Ada’s younger daughter, who has also been seduced by Eddie’s son Jeff. Frankie, Eddie’s wife, knew what was keeping Eddie on the Peaks but did not foresee Jeff’s interference. At Frankie’s insistence, Jack divined the well. The whole incident, the major portion of the first part, “The Peaks of Laurel,” ends even more unexpectedly in the seduction of Lucius by Ada’s older daughter, Ada Belle Rutter.

Lucius had originally been called away by his mother from helping his father cut Aunt Amelie’s timber tract to drag Uncle Jack up the Peaks and thus help out Cousin Frankie, and incidentally Eddie. Worst of all, news of the event with which the novel opens, the apparently accidental death of Captain Cree under the falling white-oak tree, finally reaches Lucius at the Peaks, and he returns to his father’s funeral on the day he becomes eighteen. Such complexity of event is achieved by a number of flashbacks which carry the story back to two earlier events in the history of the Cropleighs, the family that dominates the novel. When Jack was eighteen, his mother and father were blown up in a steamboat explosion, leaving the four Cropleigh boys and little Julia under the guardianship of their cousin, Joe Cree. Some eight years later when the youngest boy, Duncan, is almost eighteen, the last hunt is held on the Big Meadow at the Peaks of Laurel before Peter Legrand turns it to plow. In those eight years, Beverly, the oldest brother, and Duncan had taken to the forest, often accompanied by Julia, leaving Jack to run the farm and put a younger brother through medical college. During the hunt, Julia and Legrand find the secret entrance to Beverly’s game sanctuary and sleep together. When the Cropleigh brothers find them, Duncan knifes Legrand, the medical brother sews him up, and the others marry Julia smartly to Joe Cree. Lucius arrives nine months later in August, 1861.

This deception haunts the events of the novel and is complicated by two further developments. During the Civil War, Duncan and Beverly kill each other in blowing up the secret entrance, and Duncan’s widow, Amelie, vows long revenge against Joe Cree, as the captain of their troop, for sending Duncan to his death. She has to wait until 1879 when Cree, in financial desperation, agrees to cut her timber tract under nearly impossible conditions. When it looks as if he may succeed, Aunt Amelie springs her trap and tells him about Lucius; Cree walks under the tree. When Lucius takes over his father’s contract, she tells him the same news—that he is really Lucius Legrand; then she hands him the deed to the timber tract to make his fortune. The deed is made out to Lucius Cree.

Although this is the barest outline of the main plot, it is obvious that it bears a remarkable similarity to the Victorian melodrama that unravels the parentage of the foundling and leaves him secure in his fortune. The resemblance comes from the family feuding involved. Of the principal characters, leaving aside faithful retainers who play a considerable role in the embellishment of this story, all but one belong to one of three families, the Cropleighs, Dunbaughs, and Rutters. The outsider is Peter Legrand, whose story is told largely in the third part, “The Passionate Husk”; it is he who marries Julia and finances Lucius in the timber business. The Dunbaughs are related to the Cropleighs and Crees (who form one family) but serve mainly to pry Lucius away into the hands of Ada Rutter, an awful and portentous character whose full evil is seen only at the end of the novel. The Rutters are, in two senses, what their name implies; sharecroppers who rut the land and women who behave as expected. In the last part of the novel, “The Night Sea Journey,” the Rutters and Dunbaughs change situations, the former taking the place of the latter at the tollgate and the Dunbaughs retiring to farm the Peaks. When Ada sees that Lucius knows his parentage, a secret she guessed long ago, she presses home her advantage. Lucius abducts Ada Belle, marries her, and returns to Uncle Jack for help. To them enter both Julia and Ada Rutter, accompanied by menacing Othel, who shoots Uncle Jack while aiming at Lucius. Although Uncle Jack tries to sum up in a dying speech some sort of meaning from the whole affair, it is not clear what the novel is really saying. The tension between Beverly’s mode as “keeper” or maintainer of the wilderness and Legrand as the “husk” of progress is resolved in the latter’s favor and apparently to the author’s displeasure.

A possible source of enlightenment is found in the rhetoric and the poetry of the speeches, of which, since the book is mostly in direct speech or unspoken thought, there is an abundance. The most obvious feature, apart from Jack’s astoundingly free associations, is the symbolism. The velvet horn, in view of Lucius’ experiences with Ada Belle and Aunt Amelie, is comprehensible, but it also refers to the unicorn Jack thinks he sees during Captain Cree’s wake.

The falling white-oak tree is not necessarily symbolically related to Lucius’ fall with Ada Belle; it seems to enclose the action of the plot, for at the end of the novel, Lucius is to live in a house built of the planks of the tree that killed his father. Other symbols dominate the sections of the novel, generally aspects of nature such as the drought with which the novel opens and the flood with which it closes.

Neither Lucius nor Julia seems to come alive, but readers are meant to sympathize with the boy and therefore possibly favor the denouement. Uncle Jack and several minor characters dominate the novel yet lose out to Legrand. It is possible that this is more a roman a these than appears on the surface and only placing it in its full agrarian context would illuminate its meaning.