For more than forty years Marion Montgomery, a second-generation Fugitive/Agrarian, has published on matters of southern interest, from Eudora Welty and Walker Percy to Flannery O’Connor, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, as well as other literary figures and topics – Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Hawthorne; however, what he writes about is not simply regional in scope.  Montgomery’s ideas and philosophies are international and as important as any likely to be encountered.

On Matters Southern is a collection of sixteen essays selected and edited by Michael M. Jordan, associate professor and department chairman of Hillsdale College, but these are not stodgy old essays dusted off and designed to cap off a renown scholarly/literary career, but are finely thought out ideas that read with graceful ease.  However, some of Montgomery’s ideas are highly intellectual and need a second passing, but as Jordan states, this is “a good introduction” and “brings to light some of [his] best writing on southern themes and men of letters.”

The first sections, “The Author at Work and at Home” and “On Place and Region,” read like a first-person novel with the plot of every day life woven throughout as Montgomery reminisces about southern life in general, describing the people, the land, and the daily activities that accompany routines. In fact, the strongest and most interesting essays deal with Montgomery’s reflections on life in Crawford, Georgia, the small quiet town outside of Athenswhere he is a long-time resident.  Hardly a person can read these essays and not believe Montgomery is talking about their hometown, albeit in the north, south, or anywhere in the world.  In his younger days, Montgomery was a volunteer fireman who threw down his typewriter momentarily when Crawford suffered a huge explosion and fire:

Two years ago we fought fire together all one morning after an explosion wrecked half the town.  They didn’t seem to hold it either against me or for me that I am a writer, letting me wrestle the hose with the best of them, expecting me to take my night patrol shift to save the remnants from the curious or the scavengers who migrated to the scene, drawn by the spectacle of such large destruction of our small orderly town.

Among the essays on Madison Jones, M. E. Bradford, and Walker Percy, the book concludes with a 1975 letter to Montgomery’s son, his namesake, as he spends his senior year of high school as an exchange student in Berlin, Germany.  In its poignancy, Montgomery departs some fatherly knowledge for his son with his love resonating throughout as he very tenderly he discusses tending to one’s garden:

So we talked the garden’s promise. The watermelon vines had grown so fast they’d dragged most of the little melon’s off, and the corns ears were threatening to run out the shuck ends. . . Don’t put your foot in your mouth without good cause.  And above all, remember that I and a host of those you know and do not as yet know send you and yours our love and encouragement.  That is to say, our words respectfully offered.

This befitting conclusion is representative of Montgomery, not being preachy, yet, seemingly wishing that all know that they are loved, and offering advice and thoughts from an intellectual mind with common sense on many matters of importance.