Late Modernism. Robert Genter

Jacques Barzun and W. H. Auden, Trilling served as a literary consultant for two book clubs, the Reader’s Subscription and the Mid-Century Book Society, and wrote a number of introductions for the selected works.⁸¹ Other high modernists, including many New York intellectuals, also took seriously this responsibility. Philip Rahv wrote several introductions to rereleases of works by Henry James, Franz Kafka, and Leo Tolstoy for Dial Press and the Modern Library, and William Phillips engaged in a similar project for English translations of the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Many other modernists including Allen Tate, Irving Howe, and Robert Penn Warren worked with major commercial publishers such as Henry Holt and Prentice Hall to publish collected volumes of writings by modernist writers. Likewise, Cleanth Brooks coedited four famous textbooks of literary criticism (Understanding Poetry, Understanding Fiction, Understanding Drama, and An Approach to Literature), and the success of those collections prompted countless other modernist critics to publish similar volumes, including the ubiquitous Norton Anthology collections. The most noteworthy pedagogical effort to introduce high modernism to a broad audience occurred in a series of “Round Table” discussions in the pages of Life magazine.⁸² Appropriating the idea from Fortune magazine, which had held a series of public discussions in the 1930s concerning the international economic situation, the editors of Life, under the instruction of Henry Luce himself, routinely gathered prominent intellectuals to discuss the state of American culture. The most famous was the 1948 “Life Round Table on Modern Art,” featuring “fifteen distinguished critics and connoisseurs,” including Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, Alfred Frankfurter, and H. W. Janson, all of whom attempted to translate high modernist art into an accessible vernacular. In fact, moderator Russell Davenport offered a suggestion on the problem of the “esthetic experience,” telling the confused Life reader that when confronting a piece of abstract art “he should look devotedly at the picture, rather than at himself, or at any aspect of his environment,” language borrowed directly from Clement Greenberg.⁸³

      Even more dramatically, high modernism was institutionalized in English classrooms across the country. The rise of the New Criticism was aided, as Gerald Graff has noted, by the explosion in undergraduate and graduate enrollments in the 1950s, caused in part by federal subsidies for war veterans to attend college and by a growing middle-class population whose employment prospects were linked to educational status.⁸⁴ As literary experts, New Critical practitioners gained cultural capital for their possession of a formal body of knowledge and a recondite professional vocabulary, and their success in shaping the nature of criticism was the result of the ease with which their reading practices were converted into a standardized teaching method. The codification of what John Crowe Ransom referred to as “Criticism, Inc., or Criticism, Ltd.” was aided by the publication of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938) and their Understanding Fiction (1943), two textbooks that disseminated the methods of the New Criticism into university classrooms. A number of academic journals devoted to New Critical reading practices appeared as well, including Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Sewanee Review. New Critical practitioners also took over English departments at Yale, Princeton, and Cambridge, and independent poets such as Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Allen Tate found academic positions. John Crowe Ransom even obtained financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation for his School of English, a summer program at Kenyon College to educate English instructors on New Critical practices. Indeed, the New Criticism, as a commentator in the Antioch Review explained, “achieved for literature a superior status within the hierarchy of society’s aspirations and values: the ‘difficult’ writer, the free writer, even if he is not read, has now come to be respected, and his societal role has at least a basis from which to develop toward some sort of leadership.”⁸⁵

      Many of the literary critics associated with the New York intellectuals joined with the New Critics in promoting and canonizing modernist literature.⁸⁶ While critics such as Irving Howe had little patience for the aloof aestheticism of many of the New Critics, the similarities of both groups of modernist critics outweighed their differences. For Howe, both groups were “equally assertive in affirming their minority splendor, equally ideological in styles of thought.”⁸⁷ Both groups were also interested in carving out an antibourgeois cultural stance that was unconnected to utopian politics or fellow traveling. Thus, despite a certain level of disagreement, it was “no wonder conflict melted into a gingerly friendship, plight calling to plight, ambition to ambition.” Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Rahv attended Ransom’s summer program; Irving Howe readily used New Critical methods in the classroom when he taught at Brandeis University in the 1950s; and essays by Theodor Adorno, Philip Rahv, and William Phillips appeared in Kenyon Review while articles by Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom were published in Partisan Review. More important, both groups were instrumental in promoting modernism as a literary form. Beginning with Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle (1931) and continuing through Cleanth Brooks’s Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and Irving Howe’s The Idea of the Modern (1967), these critics developed and expanded a canon of high modernist writers, a list that included T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Butler Yeats, and a host of others.

      Two modernist writers in particular, Henry James and William Faulkner, were promoted throughout the 1940s and 1950s as symbols of the American avant-garde. As Lawrence Schwartz has demonstrated, both the Fugitive critics and the New York intellectuals promoted Faulkner’s writing in the 1940s through the publication of his collected works and through a series of flattering reviews and literary studies as a way to promote their own cultural agendas.⁸⁸ Gaining monetary assistance from the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, which helped support several modernist journals in the 1940s such as Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, and Hudson Review, they refashioned Faulkner into a literary iconoclast whose blend of traditional American sentiment with an innovative European writing style echoed their own humanist commitments. Faulkner, who was suffering financially from a lack of sales in the early 1940s, worked particularly well for this collection of modernist critics because he represented both the southern renaissance promoted by the New Critics and the existential anguish favored by the New York intellectuals. Similar cultural prestige was also placed upon the work of Henry James. In his 1941 introduction to James’s collected short novels, Philip Rahv declared the novelist “among the two or three American writers” who was able “to invent and put to creative use the imaginative methods of the twentieth century.”⁸⁹ Similarly, Dwight Macdonald’s The Root Is Man (1946) celebrated James’s critical temperament; Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950) contained numerous references to the modernist writer; and Irving Howe’s Politics and the Novel (1957) included an essay on James. Several other works and collections by F. W. Dupree, F. R. Leavis, and F. O. Matthiessen also helped to solidify James’s importance to American letters. Although the more revolutionary hopes embedded within high modernism were of course never realized, the surprising success that many critics had in disseminating these cultural forms, although in a contained fashion, contributed to a decisive cultural shift. Even though many still clung to their minority status, the cultural prestige of high modernism was solidified as the years wore on. Never one to admit that his job was done, Clement Greenberg even marked with dismay the change he had helped produce: “The avant-garde writer gets ahead now, and inside established channels: he obtains university or publishing or magazine jobs, finds it relatively easy to be published himself, is asked to lecture, participate in round tables, etc., writes introductions to the classics, and can even win the status of a public figure.”⁹⁰ Unexpectedly, the culture in the United States had changed.

      The ascendancy of high modernism, however, was not a total blessing for its proponents; indeed, the energetic and successful defense of the humanities in the face of the supposed vulgarities of modern science resulted in a considerable dilution of the critical and oppositional stance of highbrow culture. Four factors in particular distorted the high modernist project. The first was the limitations associated with professionalism. Obviously the institutionalization of the New Criticism contributed to its meteoric rise, but its classroom dissemination by second-rate interpreters effaced much of the sophistication and political critique offered by its original practitioners.⁹¹ As a standardized teaching