The Velvet Horn

by Andrew Lytle

1987 The Haddon Craftsmen

Genres: Fiction, Novels, American, Southern, Historical Fiction

377 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Andrew Nelson Lytle (December 26, 1902 – December 12, 1995) was an American novelist, dramatist, essayist and professor of literature. He was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and early in his life planned to be an actor and playwright. He studied acting at Yale University and performed on Broadway when he was in his 20s.
Unlike other Southern intellectuals who left the region never to return, Lytle went home after the death of a kinsman. Except for brief sojourns elsewhere, he remained in the South for the rest of his life.
(wikipedia)

Reviews

[Brandee Shafer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a reread for me; it was assigned to me in grad school by Dr. Jean Cash, whose primary interest is Southern Literature. I remembered very little of the novel prior to the reread but recalled really appreciating it, so I was excited to find it on my parents' bookshelves.

This is undoubtedly the sort of novel that people research and subsequently write about because it's almost impossibly complex. I felt like I kept up with the basic plot well enough, but there's so much more going on, here, and sometimes I needed to read a passage four times before translating it, in my mind, from Lytle's English into the English I know and understand.

At one point I read a random passage aloud to my husband. He had a dull look in his eyes by the time I finished and acknowledged that he had no idea what he'd just heard; I advised that the entire thing was about the copulation of donkeys. (I'd read it several times to myself to grasp that much.) Honestly, reading Lytle is like reading Shakespeare in that--if one doesn't have footnotes, classmates, a professor, etc.--it's confusing, frustrating, lonely! as all get out. I can only imagine that I enjoyed it the first time because of class discussion.

I will add: there's something about reading The Velvet Horn that made me feel a little high, which wasn't entirely unpleasant. There's a folklore-like quality to the novel that's hard to articulate, but one feels, reading it, as though (s)he's in the middle of a southern fairy tale. The character with the most to say is endlessly drunk and spews the sort of profundity that makes sense only when everyone in the room is high as a kite; there are rattlesnakes aplenty (and one has the sense that a snake isn't just a snake--but is it a penis or Satan or both?); and furthermore, there are beautiful and hidden forest places where people have random sex for no good reason.

I mean, if you want a challenge, take it on.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew Lytle was part of the Southern Agrarian crowd, the Fugitive Poets, out of Vanderbilt in the 1930's thru 50's, along with Robert Penn Warren.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this because he influenced Harry Crews. Meh

[Jessie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poet-prophet voice of Jack Cropleigh makes it worth the read, but Lytle can't quite get away with the coded language of a 19th-century genteel South. Faulkner's circular narrative is here and does transfix.