Robert Penn Warren, 1984:
- Interview text (as published in Mississippi Quarterly)
- Audio snippet 1 (poor quality, recorded in a moving car with windows down) — recalling the campus poetry craze at Vanderbilt in 1920s
- Audio snippet 2 — reading and explicating 1956 poem “Rumor Unverified”
- 1982 letter from an indulgent RPW to my mother
- Article on Warren’s birthplace for Southern magazine, 1987
- Warren obituary, Nashville Scene, September 1989
Kingsley Amis, 1986 (audio):
Andrew Lytle, 1986 (audio):
- 1 – “I’m not a critic, I’m a reader.”
- 2 – “That’s why soldiers polish their shoes. You cannot confront the last great experience with shoes like I’ve got on now…. So you confront these things ceremonially. They’ve forgotten the meaning of it, and the moment it turns into the industrial — in the First World War, you see, they dug holes in the ground and crawled in ‘em like rats, and were all killed — ignominiously…. This was an ignoble way to fight. And the generals took no risk. They were back there like boards of directors meetings. All of our proletarian world, this servile world we live in now, is just that, because you’ve lost ceremony.”
- 3 – “You can’t fall from innocence. You quicken into the condition of the wilderness of time — which is all the opposites we have to deal with. So the Fall is in history. When you cease to believe in the divine order of the universe — and history is nothing in the world but man judging man, and you can’t judge him because he dies finally, he doesn’t have the ultimate truth, he has only opinions — that lasted about 400 years. And Hitler said if you lie enough it becomes the truth. Then history went by the boards. That’s the last thing we had to hold to when you cease to believe in the divine order of the universe.”
- 4 – “What is divine in man, don’t you see — I’m saying that the creator, for whatever reason, he became an artist…. That’s what is divine in man: he wants to make things.”
- 5 – “‘Agrarian’ was a bad word — I mean an inadequate word. What we really were trying to restore was our European inheritance.”
- 6 – On FarmAid: “They went on this long train of tractors to Washington…. We were not totally dependent on the money economy.”
- 7 – “I would say ‘Be a farmer and no longer a businessman.’ … That’s what the Garden of Eden meant: It’s the difference between love and power. We had a fiction you can own land. Nobody can own land ’cause you die.”
- 8 – “Nobody is free now. We can talk here, but in fifty years we may not be able to talk here in this way freely.”
- 9 – “You’ve got to have a community of people around you, and that is almost impossible to do.”
- 10 – “I’ve got [Forrest's] spur. I think I can find it….”
J.P. Donleavy, 1991 (as published in Bloomsbury Review)
