Robert Drake and the Presence of the Past

 

There are stories, and then there are stories within stories. This is one of the latter.

In 1981, upon the publication of Robert Drake’s The Home Place, I wrote a review of it for Modern Age (Fall 1981) which I entitled “A Concelebration of Verities.” I suppose that title captured some element of the book, but as I look back now after forty years, it strikes me as awfully pretentious.  Well, I was a young college professor feeling his oats—what more needs to be said?

Anyway, Mr. Drake was favorably impressed with the review—it was indeed highly laudatory—and he wrote me a very nice thank-you note. (At the time he was teaching at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville; I was at McNeese State University in Louisiana.) For whatever reason, I did not answer his letter, a most un-Southern thing to do as I later reflected. Was I “too busy”? Hardly an excuse. And at this late date I cannot rightly remember what was behind my lack of graciousness.

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