Last week, my wife and I were at the water park at Atlantis Paradise Island in Nassau, Bahamas, with Hugh Jackman.
OK, we were not exactly “with” Hugh Jackman. We were at the same place at the same time. But as you can see from the photo, I have proof that we stood close enough to Wolverine to make this story worth telling.
Traveling can be a pain. Airports, lines, delays and overpriced sandwiches can test a person’s spirit. But travel also offers the occasional celebrity sighting and, just as important, a chance to catch up on books that have waited too long on the shelf.
For this trip, I brought “A Wake for the Living” by Andrew Nelson Lytle (1902-1995), published in 1975.
I had run across Lytle several times while researching my own Tennessee ancestors and wanted to learn more about him and his writing. He was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on Dec. 26, 1902, the son of Robert Logan Lytle and Lillie Belle Nelson Lytle. He attended Sewanee Military Academy, graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1925, was accepted at Exeter College, Oxford, then returned home after his grandfather died. He later studied at the Yale School of Drama.
Lytle became one of the 12 Southern writers associated with the Southern Agrarian movement. In 1930, they published I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, a collection of essays that pushed back against industrialization, urbanization and the loss of older rural traditions. The group included some of the best-known Southern literary figures of the period, including Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), Donald Davidson (1893-1968) and Allen Tate (1899-1979).
Those writers helped shape what became known as the Southern Renaissance, the revival of Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s. They did not all think alike, and the Agrarian movement has always carried its share of controversy. But Lytle’s work gives us a powerful example of a writer trying to understand family, place, memory and inheritance.
That is what pulled me into A Wake for the Living. In the book, Lytle does something close to what I try to do with this website. He explores the branches of his family tree and tries to understand who his people were by looking closely at what they did, where they lived and what they passed down.
I was hooked by page three, where Lytle writes, “If you don’t know who you are or where you came from, you will find yourself at a disadvantage.”
That is one of those lines worth reading a few times. If I were ever going to get a tattoo, that one would at least make the final round.
In “A Wake for the Living,” Lytle writes about his family’s experiences in the decades leading up to the Civil War, then shares stories handed down to him about Tennessee during the war itself. Since many of my Tennessee ancestors served in the Confederate army, I paid special attention to his discussion of the 19th Tennessee Regiment. It is possible that my second-great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Castellaw, was among the men connected to that regiment.
Lytle’s description of the suffering during John Bell Hood’s Tennessee campaign is hard to forget. In one passage, he describes freezing roads, barefoot infantry and men so desperate that they used the hide of a fallen ox to cover their feet.
Lytle then opened the long final chapter of his life and career, becoming the South’s most gracious man of letters. On his vine-covered porch in summer and before his stone fireplace in winter, Lytle presided over a salon featuring bourbon in sterling silver cups and his own ruminations, ranging from theological musings to backwoods tall tales, from the proper use of olive oil to the decline and fall of the Episcopal Church. —Tennessee Encyclopedia
Lytle wrote many other books, several of which I have now ordered for the next time I head out looking for celebrities to stand near. His “Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company,” published in 1931, remains one of his best-known works and helped establish his reputation as a writer deeply interested in the Civil War, memory and the old South.
He also wrote novels, short stories, essays and literary criticism. His novel “The Velvet Horn,” published in 1957, is often considered his masterpiece. He taught at several universities, edited The Sewanee Review and spent the last decades of his life as one of the South’s most respected literary figures.
Lytle lived his final years in a cabin at Monteagle, Tennessee, near the University of the South. He died there in December 1995 at age 92.
I went to the Bahamas hoping for warm weather, a break from routine and a few quiet hours to read.
I came home with a Hugh Jackman sighting, a renewed appreciation for Andrew Lytle and another reminder that family history is never just about names and dates. It is about figuring out where we came from, what shaped our people and how their stories still follow us, even when we are standing in a water park in Nassau pretending we are hanging out with a movie star.
For more of my genealogy research, visit rscottwilliams.info.
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