Remembering Robert Drake (1930-2001) James A. Perkins

WHEN 1WAS ALREADYwell into an earlier draft of this essay, a reconsideration of the work of Robert Drake, I got a call from Dr. D. Allan Carroll, Head of the Department of English at the Universityof Tennessee, telling me that Dr. Drake had died on Saturday, June 30,2001. At that point, I decided to combine reminiscences about Drake along with the critical discussion of his work as both a revaluation and a celebration of his achievement. The reminiscences are in the form of verbal snapshots, word pictures, sketches of particular personal moments connected with my understanding of Drake. These italicizedvignettes are interspersed in what is an only slightly more formal essay. Such snapshots are particularly appropriate within a discussion of Drake’s works since he himself included photos by his uncle, W.L. Drake (whom he fictionalized as “Uncle John”), as well as by his former students Jeanne Holloway-Ridley and Michael O’Brien, in both The Home Place and the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Amazing Grace (1990). The last twovolumes of Drake’s works also derive their titles from his uncle’s love of photography. The Picture Frame and Other Stories does not contain the eponymous JAMES A. PERKINS teaches in the Department of English and Public Relations at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.

story of Drake’s “father’s oldest brother, Uncle John,who was aMethodist preacher [and] was an avid photographer.” That story is part of section one, “the Drake Past,” in The Home Place.’ Uncle John’s request that everyone gather together in a pose before his camera “for the record” suggested the fitting title of the summary volume For the Record: A Robert Drake Reader.2 Writing a revaluation of the works of Robert Drake to appear in the pages of Modern Age is a little like preaching to the choir. The readers of this magazineshould be well aware of his work. He served as an associate editor of Modern Age, and over the years the magazine has published 20 of his stories and memoirs as well as numerous essays and reviews. Modem Age readers are probably aware that Drake never planned to be a writer. As he told ContemporaryAuthors:“[I]never expected to write fiction....Nobody could have been more surprised than I.”3 Drake graduated Phi Beta Kappa with aB.A. fromvanderbilt in 1952 and tookan M.A. at Vanderbilt in 1953before going to Yale University. There he earned an M.A. in 1954and a Ph.D. in 1955.At Vanderbilt Drake wrote a thesis on the short stories of Saki. At Yale he wrote a dissertation under Fredrick Pottle, which he said was a “gimmickyreadingof thevarious poems of Keats, and of course it’s never seen the

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light of day.”4 He began his teaching career as an instructor in English at the University of Michigan (1955-58). It was at Michigan that Drake began writing stories when his chairman W-arner G. Rice asked, “Have you at all thought of writing stories about things down South? You always tell funny stories about your family and friends.”s He continued to write stories at Michigan, encouraged by his older colleague Austin Warren who challenged him to bring in a new story every Monday.6 He moved to Northwestern University as an instructor in English (1958-1961). It was there that he made his first contact with people connected with Modern Age and Christian Century, two of the most consistent venues for his work. He then moved to the University of Texas as an assistant professor in English (1961-1965) before going to the Universityof Tennessee as an associate professor in English in 1965. He remained at the University of Tennessee where he rose to full professor and was honored with the Lindsay Young Chair in the Humanities. He retired last year. It was there that I first met him. Snapshot It is fall 1967; I am sitting in Dr. Drake’s Faulkner/Hemingway seminar. I haoe just read my first paper for the class, a ten-page paper that documents the obvious in excruciating detail. l a m barely breathing, waiting for someone to say something. Finally, Dr. Drake looksup from hiscopyofmypaperon which he has been marking typos, misspellingsandothererrorsasIread, looksdown the long table past my fellow graduate students, who are studiously avoidingany eye contact with either o f us, and says, “Sowhat?”

Dr. Drake didnotsufferfoolsgladly.Ilearned a great deal that day about reading the text carefully and about the goals and expectations of graduate school.

As I said, Drake began writing the summer after his first year at Michigan. “...I

began to try writing down memories. And obviously theywereafarcryfromfiction. In those days I didn’t even change the names. There is, and you better not tell this, but I can show you in my office right now, what must be the primal copy of Amazing Grace with all the real names used and then crossed out with the names that finally appeared. Obviously there were liberties taken with the action When I first met Drake he had already published Amazing Gracexand his study of Flannery O ’ C ~ n n e r Although .~ there was really no way for those of us who were his students to know it, he was also busy during his whole career writing reviews and essays that make the nonfiction entries in his bibliography rival the fiction entries. Snapshot It is late in the same semester in the Faulkner/ Hemingway seminar. The business o f the seminarhas been pretty well completed when Dr. Drake pulls out a copy o fGeorgia Review and reads his story, “TheTowerand the Pear Tree.” Because ofthe context ofthereading, Ithink o f Quentin Compson coming home on the train at Christmasduring his first (and only) year at Harvard, and I learn more about the use of symbols in literature in that twenty minutes than I had in all my courses up till then. More importantly,forthefirsttime in my life faced by a living, breathing author who was also my professor, [realized that it was possible to create literatureas well as tostudy it. That discouery changed my life in ways that I am still exploring.

With Drake’s work, I have long since decided that the distinction between fact and fiction does not matter. Drake often seems vague on the matter himself. What does matter are the voices and the textures in the writing. When I read a Drake story I hear his voice in my head, and it would be simple to say that he just wrote the way he talked, simple and wrong. As he said himself “On Diction” in For the Summer2002

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Record: 1 talk on more than one level. I’m talking to you. You are a friend and a formerstudent. Iprobablyamnottalkingthewaylwould to some high-up official in some line of work, maybe academicor otherwise.I’m certainly not talking in the language I would talk to customers in Drake Brothers store.I’m not talkingtoyou inthelanguagelprobablyuse to some of my friends. I think everybody makes a certain number of concessions, adjustments.1°

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Most of us are aware of these adjustments and concessions; few, if any, of us are as accurate as Drake in hearing and recording the subtle shifts in tone and timbre that mark everyday speech. After more than three decades in the classroom I am willing to assert that most of the young people1 have encountered in teaching literature are tone deaf. Drake could hear difference, and he could recreate that difference faithfully. It is a hallmark of his writing. The people of his fictional Woodville all sound as if they are from the West Grand Division of Tennessee, but they certainly do not all sound alike. In an interview published in the Mississippi Quarterly,Drake told Jeffrey Folks: “I don’t seemystories; 1hearmystories,morethan anything. Somebody told me he couldn’t imagine how my characters look, and 1 said, ‘If you’ll just listen to them, you’ll know.”’“ Patsy G. Hammontree was well aware of Drake’s listening skill, his ability to tell a tale, and his ability to get the talk down just right. She was the first critic to take serious notice of Drake in a venue other than a book review. Her “Comic Monologues: Robert Drake’s Community of Voices”12naileddown four important critical concerns in the title alone: “comic,” “monologue,”“community,”and “voices.” She placed Drake’s comic oral narratives squarely “in the tradition of American frontier humor”13and noted that “Robert Drake has made a sizeable and respectable contribution to this popular form.”14

Hammontree is the Prophet. When Drake publishedAmazing Grace in 1965,hededicated it to “Donald Davidson, Prophet; Austin Warren, Evangelist; Cleanth Brooks, Apo~tle.’’’~ In this essay1am emulating that dedication to focus attention on several important critics of Drake’s work. Snapshot l a m walkingtowardDr. Drake’s office;he is standing in the hallway with two older men. As Igetcloser, he turns toward me, flashes his on+ ffgrinandsays to them, “Iwouldlike you to meet one of our bright young graduate students.” Then he says to me, “Jim,I would like you to meet Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren.” Istill haven’trecooered fromthe generosity of that gesture.

Hammontree’s essay appeared in 1988. By that time Drake had published The SingleHeartin 1971,TheBumingBushand Other Stories in 1975, both with Aurora Press in Nashville.Neitherof them caused much of a critical stir. In the decade following the publication of Amazing Grace, Drake produced two more books for a total of three in ten years. After 1975, although he continued to write stories and place them in magazines, he did not publish another fiction collection for a dozen years. In 1980Memphis State UniversityPress published The HomeP1ace:A Memoryand a Celebration,the book Drake said he “was perhaps born to write.” Although Drake, as he stated in “A Note on the Text” in the 1998 Mercer University Press edition of The Home Place, was happy to have the book accepted, when he examined the proofs, he discovered that the press had turned the manuscript over to a “freelance editor” who had “corrected” the language of the text. And the sound of the human voice which plays such an important role in myimagination and in my work had thus been, in many

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cases, changed from what I had written, both in diction and rhythm,and now quite often sounded completely at variance with the time and the place it purported to present, indeed out of step in almost every way. And it is ~ I Gexaggeration to say I was considerably distressed by the result and could see no way by which anything of the originalcould be salvaged:it no longereven seemed my book.I6 Although Drake was cruelly disappointed with the publication of The Home Place, he said, “I didn’t cry over the spilt milk; that’s never been my way. And as my mother would have advised, I went right on with my rat killing.”I7 It was during this long period of hard work on fiction with scant reward, that Drake learned to swim at age fifty. He became adedicated and enthusiastic part of the small band of University of Tennessee faculty members who swam regularly for the exercise, the discipline, and “the camaraderie of solitude.” It was swimming that led to Drake’s friendship with Malcolm Jack, Secretary to the House of Commons Commission, and a William Beckford scholar. Jack was swimming at the old YMCA pool beneath the Saint Giles Hotel on Tottenham Court Road, in London, when he overheard Drake telling a story. He determined then and there to make an effort to meet him. Following their initial encounter, they discovered that they had mutual acquaintances including the novelist Ronald Blythe, author of Akenfield (1969). For close to twenty years, like clockwork, Drake visited England in thesummer and looked in on these two friends, among others. Jack believes that Drake found in swimming a disciplined escape. “It’s a lone activity; you don’t have to arrange anything. You do it for yourself as a form of religion.” Drake told Jack that he found swimming ‘‘liberating.”’s In the mid 1980’s the Southern Review published four Drake stories in three different issues.IgIn 1987Drake’smanuscript 238

forSurvivors and Otherswas accepted and published by Mercer University Press in Macon, Georgia. In reviewing this volume, Professor James Justus observes, “A reader would be hard put to retrieve any significant descriptive detail that would fix Woodville in the mind’s eye.” He says this in support of his contention that “it would be amistake ...to locate the uniqueness of Survivors in its sense of place.” Rather Justus argues that the residents of Woodville share “their affective lives and relationships as a community: lovers of life, gossips, longsufferers, wisdom figures, rebels, wanderers, and stay-athomes.”20Drake would remain with Mercer for the rest of his career. His move to Mercer, now under the watchful editorial eyes of Edd Rowel1 and Marc Jolley, combined with Hammontree’s essay to augur a positive change in Drake’s critical fortune. In 1990 Mercer University Press published the twenty-fifth anniversary editionofAmazingGrace,and JeffreyJ. Folks, then of Tennessee Wesleyan College, published one of the most informed interviews ever done with Drake in the Mississippi Quarterly. On November 15, 1991, Folks also chaired aspecial session of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in Atlanta entitled “Robert Drake: A Retrospective.”21Folks then edited the proceedings of the special session, and theywere accepted by Robert Phillips for a “Special Section: Robert Drake” in the spring 1992 issue of Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Culture. During roughly thesame period of time, James H. Justus, recognized for his groundbreaking volume The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren,was busy in the vineyard as well. He wrote “RaisingEbenezers: AForeword” for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Amazing Grace and the “Preface” in For the Record:A RobertDrake Reader, as well as perceptive and useful reviews of Suruivors and Othersand MySweetheart’sHouse. For their long service of appreciation for

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Drake’s work and of support in calling attention to Drake’s work, Folks and Justus are the Evangelists. Snapshot

I am at S A M L A in a hotel lobby, tired from a long trip from Pennsylvania where I live as an expatriate from the South and teach at Westminster College, facing a long registration line when I hear, “Well,welcome. It is so good to see you. What have you been up to? Have you been anywhere? Did you meet anybody? Were they nice?”

Roberttraveled everywhere. He loved to tell stories about the unusual (he would say “peculiar’?people he encountered. It was all part ofhis utterenjoymentofthegeneral foiblesof mankind. He was also always interested in my travels and in whatever scholarship or creative writing1 was doing atthe time. That was a welcome support for someone working in a small college where pubkation was generally regarded as an odd affectation.

Drake was not limited to the close environs of Woodville for his creative inspiration. His travels abroad gave him material for wonderful stories. They required voices different from those that populated the Woodville of his memory. He turned his mimic skills to the task, told the stories again and again, honed them, and worked on their timing until he could deliver them with the straight face and the studied grace of astand-up comedian. These stories mined out of Drake’s foreign travel, remained, with very few exceptions, oral performances. Like Andrew Lytle’s famous Micajah stories, theywere told and enjoyed and remembered only vaguely by those who heard them as among the funniest things they had ever heard. For example, I remember Drake telling me how be met Noel Coward in the steam bath during an Atlantic crossing on the QE2;his version of the event was a consummate scream. And I can come nowherenear reproducing his storyhere. With thesecurityof an interested publisher and a life built around the three

things he truly enjoyed-teaching, swimming, and travel-Drake produced in the decade of the nineties a great amount of work for a man who was approaching what most consider retirement age. In 1993,he published MySweetheart’sHouse: Memories, Fictions. As the title suggests, this volume did little t o clear up the confusion of fact and fiction for Drake’s readers. Justus commented on this confusion in his review in Modem Age: Even the most ordinary reader, comparing the stories from the early collections with Drake’s formal memoir, The Home Place (1980), will note an almost seamless continuity of materials scholars have always preferred to discriminate as fact and fiction. Despite the presumption of generic niceties in the subtitle, My Sweetheart’s House: Memories, Fictions actually extends this blurring process. In the table of contents ten titles are grouped under “Memories,”sixteen under “Fiction.”The formal divisions are happily arbitrary.22

The title of the book derives from an old nursery rhyme that Drake’s father said to put him to sleep. Drake had alreadywrittenastory/memoir bythat title that had appeared in The Southern Re~iew.~~IntheForeword to MySweetheart’s House: Memories, Fictions, Drake says of the world presented in the volume: “It was a seamless garment, that world they talked about, the five brothers, not unlike Robert Penn Warren’s ‘enormous spider web.’ Which vibrates throughout when only a single filament is touched. And it hung together very well, composed as it was of close family and community ties, all of course rooted in Protestant Christianity, which gave all human relationships validity and significance. It was a world that was coherent, a world that made sense.”24It was a world before air conditioning and television, a world of front porches, a world before neighbors rocking, talking and generally looking out for one another were replaced by signs that read, “This is a Neighborhood

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Watch Area.” In 1996 What Will YouDo foranEncore? appeared from Mercer University Press. In commenting on the volume in Christianity and Literature, Randy Hendricks picked up OR :he noticjn Gf Drake’s speciai useof “p1ace”suggestedearlier byJustus. “Drake’sregionalist sense is also reflected in his handling of place. Woodville is a compendium of the inner problem for the narrator, not the backdrop for quaint reminiscence of peculiar folk. Drake works with the tools of the realist, holding a mirror to the world about, but the mirror metaphor functions at another level, becoming emblematic of a problem beyond the demands of verisimilit~de.”~~ Both this statement and the Justus remark on Survivors quoted earlier suggest that for Drake “place” as a physical reality is much less important than “place” as a community. Three Snapshots

(I] We are all atSAMLA again and Robert is telling me how the publisher of The Home Place messed it up through creative editing, andhow upsethe was thatthelanguage in the book was all wrong. (2)Laterthatday, l a m talkingto MarcJolley, Robert’spublisheratMercer UniversityPress about putting out a new “correct”edition o f The Home Place.

(3) Even later that day, Robert is telling me that Marc Jolley just came out o f nowhere with the idea o f a new edition o f The Home Place. This was the firsttimelevertriedto wheeland deal with a publisher at SAMLA. It feltgood. And it was gratifying to be involved, even slightly, with a project that would make Rob ert extremely happy.

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Two events occurred in 1997 that helped to heal a rift between Drake and Vanderbilt, arising from Drake’s perception that Vanderbilt had slighted him over the years. Marice Wolfe, Head of

Special Collections a t the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University, made arrangements with Drake to acquire his papers and manuscripts for the library. On May 24, 1997, during his Forty-fifth Reunion, Drake presented a gallery talk, “The Writer as Observer, The Writer as Outsider,” in the special collections room. Drake was invited t o give the SAMLA Fiction Reading in 1997.OnNovember 14, 1997,Michael Kreyling of the Department of English at Vanderbilt University introduced Drake to the SAMLA audience. Kreyling compared Drake to Chekhov. The comparison works: “If Faulkner is the southern Dostoevsky who, ‘revealed the demonic potential of the human psyche’ in Yoknapatawpha, then Drake is asouthern Chekhov who just kept eye and ear peeled for the moment when human nature shows itself in its constant and inevitable struggle against loss.”26 Kreyling went on to establish a sound compendium of the major themes running through Drake’s fiction: “Drake’s books patiently record the simultaneous loss and survival of local community from the heyday of Drake Bros. General store in his youth to the present-daymallingcourtesy of the super Wal-Mart. He never, though, loses sight of the fact that essentiallythesame comrnunitytrades at both. LikeChekhov, he knows that change is life and hit-or-miss progress is better than stagnation in a ‘historic Williamsburg’ facsimile of the past.”27 Snapshot l a m atSAMLA in Atlanta in 1997. I’m telling RobertthatMercerUniversityPress has asked meto doa biographyofhim. “Well,”hesays, ‘Ywantyoutoknowyou’vejustmademyday. ” During the conversation, several times he says, “This is just between you and me” or “Thisis o f fthe record.”

I immediately involved Randy Hendricks, who wrote a dissertation under Robert’s di-

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rection. Robert’s reticence continued. Writing a full-blown biography proved impossible when, in response to very simple personal questions Robert said, “Well,now, I’m not going to share all my beauty secrets with you.” Eventually the project resulted in For the Record: A Robert Drake Reader.

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My coeditor, Randy Hendricks, who expanded the dissertation he wrote under Drake into Lonelier than God: Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Exile (university of Georgia Press, 2000), has written a number of solid reviews of Drake’s story collections. Also, late in the reading of proofs of For the Record, when it became clear that the computer had “lost” all the italics that are so important in establishing tone in Drake’s work, Hendricks, in yeoman fashion, went through page by page and restored the text. He also took on the responsibility of choosing which stories t o include to r e p resent the whole of Drake’s fiction. He did it well. Hendricks, the youngest champion of Drake’s work, is the Apostle. In “AGentleQuarrel with Readers: Robert Drake’sFiction,”areview-essay on The Picture Frame and Other Stories, in ChristianityandLiterature,Hendricks discusses Drake’s habit of explaining (defending) himself to his readers in the forewords of his later volumes. As Drake saw it there were two major problems. First, he was not a novelist and he refused to try to become one. Second, he did not write the sort of story that people nowadays wanted to read. I do not know how many times I heard Drake say, “I don’t write about the news from the front page; I write about the news from the human heart.” In his essay “TheWriter as Hunger Artist” he put it this way: There’snothingabout either meor mywork that is news either: I don’t write about social commotion, and I don’t write about minorities or public issues. Furthermore, I’m not championing any causes or protesting injustices. Indeed, I can’t think of anybody whose work is less topical or “timely”-or

perhaps more ‘‘limited’’-than mine. If that’s what youwant, Isaygoread thenewspaper, maybe even go to church.28

In his talkatvanderbilt, Drake repeated his oral-formulaic response to those who want him t o write a novel. “And as for my writing a novel, I tell the demurrers (not altogether in jest either) that I have a short attention span but mainly write what I haoe to, not what they think I ought .“29 Mercer published “the restored text” of The Home Place in 1998. It included generous comments or blurbs gathered about the 1980 publication from such diverse authors as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Selzer,and Tom Wolfe. Postcard It is spring 1998.My wife andlare in England for three months. Part of the time, I am gathering information to use in For the Record. Weare intemiewingRobertkfriends, the writer Ronald Blythe at his home, Bottengom’s Farm in Wormingford, Colchester,Essex, and Malcolm Jack in his office at the House of Commons. Each of them maintains that the other one is sometimes capable of getting a word in edgewise in conversation with Robert. Both of them attestto Robertk love ofceremony:Malcolm, the pomp and ritual of Parliament, and Ronnie, afternoon tea in a Tudor flower garden before rushing back to London foran evening at the theatre. Perhaps because ofthe level ofcivilityorthe survival ofsmallcommunities,Robertseems to have felt “athome” in England.

While Hendricks and I worked on For the Record, which early on we thought might be a volume of “collected stories” or of “selected stories,” Mercer delayed final publication so as to get out another volume of Drake stories before publishing a “collection.” Indeed in 2000, The Picture Frame and Other Stories was published. In reviewing the volume for Christianity and Literature, Hendricks noted; 24 1

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“The tapestry, the whole of Drake’s recorded world, may be complete now. Since what is described as a stroke-like event in the spring of 2000, when The Picture Frame was in press, Drake has k e n confiiled icj an assisted-care iaciiity in Knoxville....’130 Critics have employed a number of metaphors in their attempts to describe Drake’s work. Beginning with his review of What Will You Do for an Encore? Hendricks has used “tapestry”:“Thebody of Drake’s work forms a tapestry of key scenes in the life of Woodville and readers of previous volumes will recognize some familiar character and types.”31 Justus, in the “Preface” ofForthe Record, suggests that “Sampler”would have been a happier choice than “Reader” for the subtitle of the volume. I would like to suggest another metaphor for Drake’swork, Quilt, perhaps even Crazy Quilt. Quilt suggests a whole made up of smaller pieces. Crazy Quilt suggests that those smaller pieces may be of all sizes, shapes, textures, and colors. Hendricks in his review of The Picture Frame, says:

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essays, anecdotes, sketches, meditations, jokes, dramatic monologues, and portraits as well as examples of the short story proper-achieve their final meanings intertex?ually.3*

Drake’s vision is not primarily transcendent but cumulative and commemorative. This senseof wholeness brings us again to thegloballevelof readingDrake.Eachof his stories, even those like “Amazing Grace” that are fully realized and self-contained, function as fragments of the whole. Drake’s forms-blends of fiction and fact, narrative

Theseare thevarious pieces that make up the Crazy Quilt that is the whole of Robert Drake’swork, and these pieces are held together by the finest needlework, by Drake’s unpretentious display of his vast and catholic reading, and by allusions and comparisons drawn from the ancient Greeks to Jane Austen to Tina Turner. Finally, a quilt is often the collective work of a community and in many ways represents the community that created it. And it is community and the loss of community that Drake’s work is about. It is not a neo-agrarian rant about the decline of the rural south or the malling of America and the rise of McWal-Mart culture. It is about community, about being a part, about caring. The Crazy Quilt that is the work of Robert Drake will be important to u s in the same way that Thoreau’s Walden is important to us. As it becomes less possible to live in the solitude of nature, Walden becomes more important. As we become more global, more interchangeable, more mobile, Drake’s vision of Woodville,of our interconnectedness and our responsibility t o a community that, “does not limit human p ~ s s i b i l i t y , ”will ~~ also become more important.

1. Macon, 1980,49. 2. Randy Hendricks and James Perkins, eds. (Macon, 2001). 3. Claire D. Kinsman, ed., Drake, Robert (Young, Jr.) 1930, 17-20, First Rev. (Detroit, 1976), 202. 4. For the Record, 214. 5. Ibid., 243. 6. A.B. Crowder, ed., “Robert Drake,” Writing in the Southern Tradition: Interviews with Five Contemporary Authors (Atlanta, 1990), 135. 7. For the Record, 243. 8. Philadelphia, 1965. This has proven the most popular of all of Drake’s works. It was republished in a paperback edition (Macon, 1990). It is the title story that The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, July 6 , 2001, Metro, B4) singled out in their obituary as the work Drake was

known for. The hymn that lends the story its title was the opening hymn at Drake’s memorial service at St. John’s Cathedral in Knoxville on Wednesday, July 25, 2001. 9. Flannery O’Conner, Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective Series (Grand Rapids, 1966). 10. For the Record, 202. 11. “An Interview with Robert Drake,” Vol. 43, No. 2 (1990), 226. 12. Kennesaw Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1988), 67-78. This article is an important early study of Drake’s work. I am embarrassed and chagrined that it was inadvertently omitted from the bibliography of For the Record, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to rectify the

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error here. 13. Ibid., 67. 14. Ibid., 78. 15. Op. cif., [VI. 16. Macon, 1998, ix. 17. Ibid., x. 18. Malcolm Jack, interview by author, London: Whitehall Palace, June 11, 1998. 19. “The First Years,” Vol. 20 (1984), 928933; “Miss Effie, the Peabody, and Father Time,” Vol. 22 (1986), 651-657; “My Sweetheart’s House,” Vol. 22 (1986), 174-678; “Ella Biggs,” Vol. 24 (1988), 215-221. 20. “Robert Drake: The Writer as Listener,” Modem Age, Vol. 38 (1996), 8891. 21. In addition to Folks, the participants included Douglas Paschal1 of Montgomery Bell Academy, James A. Perkins of Westminster College, Lewis A. Lawson of the University of Maryland and Faye D. Jullian of the University of Tennessee. Drake closed the session by reading a recent story. 22. “The Ceremony of Making,”Vol. 38 (1996), 193. 23. “My Sweetheart’s House” is one of Drake’s best rambles about the relationship between fact and fiction in writing.

He chose not to reprint it. Since it is not directly on the subject of creative writing and since space was limited, I omitted it from the selection Of Drake’s essays on writing in For the Record. NOW, because it is an excellent piece and because I fear it may be lost or forgotten, I highly recommend it to serious students of writing. 24. Macon, 1993, ix. 25. “Untitled Review,” Christianity and Literature, Vol. 46 (1977), 222. 26. “Introduction for Robert Drake” (an unpublished four-page typescript), 3. 27. Ibid., 4. 28. For the Record, 284. 29. “The Writer As Observer, The Writer As Outsider,” a six-page unnumbered insert, in Acorn Chronide (Nashville, 1998), [3]. 30. “A Gentle Quarrel with Readers: Robert Drake’s Fiction,” Vol. 50 (2001), 337. 31. Opcit., 221. 32. Op.cif.,331. 33. Robert L. Phillips, Jr., “To Be One’s Self,” Modern Age, Vol. 40 (1998), 309.

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