Memoirs of a New York Intellectual Manqué

Abstract

said Guerry was pursuing her “all over Tennessee” trying to get her to say something against Allen. Guerry on February 16 accepted Tate’s resignation because of a certain report he had received. It turned out that Mildred Haun, whom Tate had promoted to managing editor, had told Guerry Tate tried to seduce her. “Can you imagine my having an affair with a woman so ugly?” Tate asked Peter Taylor. “She looked like a little boy.” Her friends Lon and Fannie Cheney said she was “a strange little witch out of the mountains. . . . Her relations with men were always peculiar and elementary.” She knew about Elizabeth Hardwick, and Tate wasn’t paying her any attention. Guerry and Tate agreed to request her resignation. But Tate learned that she wasn’t the whole basis for Guerry’s decision to accept his own resignation. Tate left Sewanee in April to take an editorial job at Henry Holt and to marry Caroline again. He wrote Guerry, “you listened to the reports of students and other miscellaneous persons, but not to me; you moved, I am sorry to say, as a prosecuting attorney, not as my friend.” He didn’t tell Guerry that he and Caroline were remarrying—“to punish him.” It took Tate almost three years to land the job he wanted, and it was over in less than two years. But in that time, wrote Monroe K. Spears, the editor from 1952 to 1961, he changed the Sewanee Review’s “nature decisively, revolutionized its format, quadrupled its circulation, and brought it into the first rank of American literary quarterlies. Since that time he has . . . been generous of advice and help” (“Homage to Allen Tate”).