Two Worlds, One Story: The American South and Southern Europe in Robert Penn Warren's Fiction

Robert Penn Warren, the first poet laureate of the United States and the only writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry, is widely regarded as one of the major literary voices of the Southern Renaissance. Warren's distinguished career traditionally has been linked to his fascination with the American South, and his poetry often reveals the deep influence of his Southern heritage, while Warren often uses the American West, Vermont, Italy, France, or even Greece as the setting for his poems. His lifelong concern with the also pervades most of his non-fiction prose works. Well-known examples include John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the (1956), Who Speaks for the Negro? (1960), The Legacy of the Civil War (1961), and Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (1980). However, Warren's literary devotion to the is particularly prominent in his fiction. In fact, the provides the setting for Warren's ten novels and for his collection of short stories, The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories (1947). Warren himself has emphasized the importance of the as his main fictional concern since his early writing days, declaring that it never crossed my mind when I began writing fiction that I could write about anything except life in the South (qtd. in Watkins 28). Despite the overwhelming presence of the American in Warren's novels and short stories, we cannot neglect the fact that his fictional world contains an important number of both direct and indirect references to episodes located in other territories, both in the States and abroad. It is true that these references are sometimes used to emphasize the uniqueness of the Southern condition and the contrasts between the and elsewhere. It might even be argued that these contrasts reflect, to a certain extent, Warren's personal process of becoming aware of his Southernness. In fact, we cannot forget that Warren, who spent most of his adult life away from the (California, Minnesota, Connecticut, Vermont, England, Italy, and France), once claimed that he became a Southerner by not being there (qtd. in Watkins 383). But Warren does not limit his fictional scope to highlighting the differences between the and other territories. Indeed, we may observe the existence of a close interaction in his fiction between some fundamental Southern issues and a number of non-Southern episodes, particularly those located in Southern Europe. Most of these episodes relate to the atmosphere of violence that prevailed in this area between the mid-thirties and mid-forties, including such tragic conflicts as the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The earliest references to the Spanish Civil War in Robert Penn Warren's literary production may be found in Terror (1940), a poem in which he explores the paradox of those Americans who, after fighting in Spain against fascism, leave for Finland to fight the communist invaders: So some, whose passionate emptiness and tidal Lust swayed toward the debris of Madrid, And left New York to loll in their fierce idyll And now the North--to seek that visioned face ... They fight old friends, for their obsession knows Only the immaculate itch, not human friends or Foes. (241) This poem already discloses not only Warren's disbelief in communism as an efficient barrier against fascism but also his deep distrust of ideologies in general and, in particular, of those who cling to them to fill the emptiness of their lives through violence. However, we must wait until 1964, the publication date of Warren's eighth novel, Flood: A Romance of Our Time, to find the first references to the Spanish Civil War in his fiction. Although the main setting of this novel is Fiddlersburg, a small town in Tennessee condemned to be flooded by the building of a dam in the fifties, Warren reveals the town's past and its former inhabitants through flashbacks. …