The Long Night

Lytle's fictional account should be read as a companion piece to Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford). Wyatt-Brown's thesis is that honor functioned as the most important, though often too quickly overlooked, social mechanism in the Antebellum South, ensuring that every facet of society behaved within the confines of a stringent, mutually agreed upon code of conduct. Reaction--either positive or negative--to a person's behavior was thus both internal to the person and reflected by society as a whole. The degree of a person's acceptance by society was a mirror that reflected his or her own sense of self-worth, which was directly related to the degree to which he or she conformed to universally accepted societal behavioral norms. Deviating from these norms resulted in social castigation--essentially assuring overall ostracism due to loss of honor. The only two means of recourse was (1) to challenge society's appraisal, frequently in a violent manner; or (2) to leave town, or even the state ("Gone to Texas," was the general term for this, which is literally what Lytle's fictional family attempted to do in Long Night, until that planned backfired and they resorted to violence to avenge the their lost honor). Strangely, Wyatt-Brown completely ignores Lytle's Long Night in illustrating his point about how honor operated in the Old South and often lead to bloody ends, although he relies on countless other fictional works. Nonetheless, both works greatly inform each another, rendering much greater understanding of the period and the place, and the motivations of those living in them. Lytle goes far in dramatising how, at the outbreak of the War, Southerners were required to temporariy set aside personal honor for regional honor, and how one man's refusal to do so led to tragic inner turmoil and loss of self-identity.

This the the first novel by the great critic a much neglected-novelist, Andrew Lytle. The story is narrated by an older uncle to his nephew during one long night as he tells the story of his Alabama family around the period of the Civil War. Like Cold Mountain, Lytle's research and knowledge of the customs, speech, and lifestyle of his characters is perfect. Though this was his first novel, you'll see Lytle was already a master of fiction. When you're finished read "The Fathers" the Civil War novel by Lytle's friend poet, Alan Tate.