The Southern mandarins : letters of Caroline Gordon to Sally Wood, 1924-1937 /

Glimpses of domestic and literary life at the Tates--poet Allen, his wife, novelist Caroline Gordon, and numerous friends and relations. Gordon (best known for 1934's Aleck Maury, Sportsman) writes dry, acidulous letters recounting her toils over the typewriter; her and Tate's endless struggle to scrape money together from publishers, foundations, and teaching jobs; their peregrinations from upstate New York to Paris to Clarksville, Tennessee (where most of the letters were written), Memphis, and beyond. Gordon's chief enthusiasms seem to have been her own work, Sally Wood, and the family dogs, more or less in that order. She is good-naturedly noncommittal about her husband, whom she divorced in 1946 (then remarried and redivorced in 1959), and abstractly affectionate toward her only child, Nancy, whom she handed over as an infant to her mother. All sorts of notable writers pass through these pages: Ford Madox Ford (who coached Gordon in the art of fiction), Hart Crane (who proved an impossible house guest), Thomas Wolfe (""drunk and dumb and extremely amiable""), John Crowe Ransom, Katherine Anne Porter, and a host of smaller figures. But there are few memorable anecdotes about them; the book's most striking remark, indeed, comes from Gordon's aunt Loulie, who says about menopause: ""I saw it was all foolishness so I just stopped it."" Gordon herself is a sharp-eyed observer of the little world around her; but she never transcends it--and her racism, in particular, can be irritating. (""Memphis is hot as hell and very dull but there is one thing--it has the most wonderful niggers. Cinina said you could just walk out in the street and hail the first one that passed and get a jewel and it's true."") Wood's editing is helpful and unobtrusive; passages have been cut, however, to spare the feelings of people mentioned. Among the more interesting footnotes to 20th-century American literary history, but a footnote still. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.