Robert Drake

Robert Young Drake, writer and English scholar: born Ripley, Tennessee 20 October 1930; Assistant Professor of English, University of Texas, Austin 1961-65; Associate Professor, University of Tennessee 1965-73, Professor of English 1973-99; died Milan, Tennessee 30 June 2001.

Robert Drake's voice, once heard, was not forgotten. In his mellifluous Southern accent, he never lost the chance to talk publicly about Woodville, the fictional town he had created in Tennessee, his home state. Drake was a brilliant raconteur, someone who really understood the rhythm of the English language and could convey it in succinct, aphoristic phrases that brought authenticity to his stories about life in small, rural communities before the discovery of the New South.

He was born to parents of middling means in 1930 in Ripley, Tennessee. His grandfather, a man he said avoided having a bath in case it damaged his health, had fought on the Confederate side in the American Civil War. The young Drake, overweight and shy, became a careful listener, already gathering material for his stories, which were eventually to become his finest legacy.

After a good educational grounding (in the mould of the three "R"s), he went on to a distinguished academic career at Vanderbilt and then at Yale, where he was supervised by Frederick Pottle, the Boswell scholar. Drake, the Southern boy, never felt at home in establishment America or, in his own words, he "never belonged" there. He had studied English literature, significantly in terms of his later writing, producing his MA thesis on Saki, but confessed that he had only really felt at home in the Department of English at Austin, Texas. His final post was Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, where he taught canonical texts as well, as by now, lecturing on creative writing.

Drake's first collection of short stories, Amazing Grace, appeared in 1965. But Drake stories had already been appearing and would now continue to pour out in journals and reviews. Further collections followed: The Single Heart (1971) and The Burning Bush (1975). Nineteen eighty saw the appearance of The Home Place, which has been regarded as his most evocative work about life in a small Southern community. In 1991 a colloquium on his fiction was held by the South Atlantic Language Association. The late harvest had come.

Drake's perspective on life was also affected by travel. For over 30 years he made an annual pilgrimage to Europe which always began in London and in its theatre land to which he was devoted. These travels brought him a new circle of friends, literary and artistic, that included Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell and found him dining at Elena Salvoni's, sometimes, to his amusement, in the company of a "titled dame". London was a place he could escape to from the perhaps too narrow confines of his Southern background. His days there began with a ritual swim at the YMCA, where he had a captive audience for his story-telling. When he wanted a breath of air, he left town to lunch with Ronald Blythe in an old, English country garden.

In his last decade, Drake finally achieved recognition, linking him to Southern story-tellers like Eudora Welty whom he knew and admired. Further works appeared including Survivors and Others (1987), My Sweetheart's House (1993) and What Will You Do for an Encore? (1996). Drake, always wary of being institutionalised as a writer, continued, in his last stories (brought out at the time of his death in a comprehensive "reader", For the Record, which includes an interview with him, essays on him and a checklist of his work), to tell tales embedded in local communities, peopled by spiteful old maids and small-time gossips sipping their iced mint tea.

Malcolm Jack