A Southern Conceit

SEGREGATION, THE INNER CONFLICT IN THE SOUTH, by Robert Penn Warren. Random House.

The publisher’s wrapper speaks of this little book as a “sympathetic, fair, and honest report.” And so it is. Yet it is disingenuous and not disinterest. ed, and it is a conceited little book. What it says sheds no light, but its way of saying it happens to be an excellent brief example of a kind of southern literary attitude, and it is worth discussing; especially since this attitude dovetails neatly into the conceit and disingenuousness (much closer to dishonesty) of Life magazine for which the reportage was made. Penn Warren’s disingenuousness is this: he sees, he cannot help but see, that the Negro problem in the south is a psychiatric one, a matter of irrational emotions and split identity; all the usual reasons are largely rationalizations; and indeed he subtitles his book “inner conflict,” a term picked up from psychoanalysis. Yet the author persists in striking the postures and sounding the rhetoric of being in an agonizing moral dilemma, as if a problem of medicine were a problem of ethics. This is a spurious seriousness, a confusion, as Aristotle would have said, between the tragic and the mer...