Arts and Letters

Cleanth Brooks's life divided neatly, one might almost say gracefully, into two major geographical and cultural sectors. Almost the first half of it was entirely southern. He was born in southwestern Kentucky in 1906, and later went to a school in southern Tennessee (of which he always spoke admiringly) located just fifty miles north of the Mississippi hometown of William Faulkner—about whom Cleanth would eventually write four imposing volumes of critical and biographical study. He entered Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1924, in time to hover on the edge of the literary group known as the Agrarians—chief among them, then and always for Cleanth Brooks, being Robert Penn Warren. After three years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, in Exeter College, Cleanth returned to join the English faculty at Louisiana State University. He remained there, in Baton Rouge, until 1947, and during those years, with Robert Penn Warren and others, he founded and edited the Southern Review, a tremendously lively and effective literary journal that championed the modernists (in its first year alone, the Review published pieces by Wallace Stevens, Katharine Anne Porter, Aldous Huxley, and Kenneth Burke). Then, in 1947, Cleanth accepted an invitation from the Yale English Department; and thereafter he lived and taught and wrote in the American northeast, in New England, in Connecticut (with the exception of two years as Cultural Attaché at the American Embassy in London), for forty-seven years, until his death in 1994.

Early in his tenure at LSU, Cleanth married a young woman from New Orleans. Her name was Edith Amy Blanchard, but she was known to everyone as Tinkum, after a once popular cartoon character called Tinkum Tidy. Tinkum Brooks, Cleanth's beloved partner for more than fifty years (if my memory doesn't fail me, Cleanth's Connecticut license plate once carried the letters TINK), was certainly one of the tidiest as she was one of the most warmly intelligent and humanly helpful persons you could hope to meet.

Cleanth Brooks's literary life divided almost as distinctly as his academic career. Until well into the 1950s, he gave himself largely to developing, practicing, and teaching the arts of poetry-reading. In 1935, again with Warren, Cleanth brought out Understanding Poetry, which became the most influential literary textbook ever composed. In the years immediately following, Cleanth published two collections of elegant and forceful critical essays: the first of them—and note the exactly worded title—being Modern Poetry and the Tradition; the second was The Well-wrought Urn. With these books, what was given the title of the New Criticism—a phrase Cleanth disliked and tried to push away from—was established; and Cleanth Brooks was taken to be the most eminent practical literary critic in the country.

When after a long period of dominance, the New Criticism came under intensifying attack—by proponents of successive waves of new critical ideas—Cleanth Brooks was invariably the chief target. This gracious and kindly man was subjected to unending opposition, even vituperation, in the upcoming literary journals. (I even remember one well-publicized attack on the habitual decency of his garb.) The most constant complaint was that Cleanth Brooks was anti-historical. This was of course entirely wrong. One might well risk the observation that no southern intellectual could by nature be antihistorical. In any case, just as the enemy noise was beginning to deafen, Cleanth Brooks brought out his massive volume called William Faulkner: the Yaknapatawpha Country (this was in 1963), in which he examined the work of Faulkner within densities of history, especially southern social and cultural history. The New England experience had, understandably, drawn Cleanth's attention back to the south and its long unfoldings.

Cleanth was indeed gracious and he was kindly, but he was anything but soft. Red Warren, who used to submit drafts of his poems to his old friend, took note, in Cleanth's responses, of the tension in him "between his natural kindliness and his love of truth." A much younger colleague, with the sharp eye of a movie-maker (he is, now, in fact, a film writer), put it like this: that Cleanth was the most courteous of men, but he certainly knew how to use his elbows. Another commentator, taking stock of Cleanth's stated intellectual opinions, pointed to the "cheerful, measured prose" in which Cleanth delineated the—for him—hopelessly bleak condition of modern man.

He also had his easy, informal, non-intellectual side. I like to think of Cleanth at that Tennessee school achieving fame as an end on the football team—perhaps cutting down an opposing halfback trying to make an end run. Among some actual images are Cleanth riding his tractor, straw hat on head, across the fields of his Connecticut property; or (to the surprise of some of us) displaying his country skills by barbecuing a lamb on the rack outside the house, for a luncheon-group of fifteen; or, with Red Warren in our living-room, and with the help of a little bourbon, gently singing "Let the Rest of the World Go By" and other fine old melodies.

Above all, as every one will tell you, there was his love of talk—real talk, good talk ("Come up and we'll have a good talk," he used to say). He loved talk partly because he loved language, and its potential beauties and rhythms (this, incidentally, being a main reason why, devout Protestant Christian though he was, he recoiled from the new and poetically-drained Book of Common Prayer). For Cleanth, real talk meant conversation, an affair among friends. And Cleanth was friendly and communal to the core and to the end.