Late Modernism. Robert Genter

But more important, modernists recognized that the imperative to maintain a constant struggle against the reigning cultural landscape had become a source of exhaustion. The enthusiasm of the original “men of 1914”—T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and the like—had lapsed over the decades, according to Howe, into the futile whining of Jack Kerouac and his compatriots racing across the American continent. The playfulness of the Beat Generation was for Howe merely a façade covering a larger existential despair over its inability to imagine any reconciliation between the self and the world, exemplified by the forlorn hero at the end of Kerouac’s On the Road mournfully staring at the New Jersey landscape. “In modern America,” explained Howe, “this problem often appears as a clash between a figure of consciousness who embodies the potential of the human and a society moving in an impersonal rhythm that is hostile or, what is perhaps worse, indifferent to that potential” (28). According to Howe, the incessant nihilism within modernist literature was a sign of this exhaustion.

      Howe’s essay was merely one of many eulogies written in the 1960s about the supposed end of modernism. In his 1965 introduction to his classic work of formalist criticism Modern Poetry and the Tradition, literary critic Cleanth Brooks asked the same question as Howe: “Has the revolution in poetry which began about the time of the First World War now exhausted itself?”⁹ Both critics presented a narrative of decline, a story about the unraveling of modernism from its heyday in artistic circles in Paris and London in the 1920s to its disappearance by the 1960s. Howe saw this unraveling occurring through three historical stages. Modernism had burst onto the cultural scene in the nineteenth century as a reaction against bourgeois society, an aesthetic heroism emerging out of the remnants of the Romantic movement that challenged political, social, and religious norms through “a transcendental and orgiastic aggrandizement of matter and event in behalf of personal vitality.”¹⁰ This effort to delve into the depths of human consciousness to reveal the artifice of modern life—a theme Howe found in Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire—marked the ambitious attempt by early modernist practitioners to present a vision of man that ran counter to the gentility of late nineteenth-century society. But the experience of World War I and the collapse of the revolutionary movements in the aftermath gave rise to a chastened form of modernism found in the work of Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, and others, a modernism that began “to recoil from externality and now devotes itself … to a minute examination of its own inner dynamics: freedom, compulsion, caprice.” This retreat to an extreme form of subjectivity, guarding against any social contamination, eventually proved to be an insurmountable problem. In its final stages after World War II, modernism abandoned its heroic claims, lapsing into a state of despair because of the perceived futility of art as a means of producing social change. At this point, “there occurs an emptying-out of the self, a revulsion from the wearisomeness of both individuality and psychological gain.” Samuel Beckett, according to Howe, was the result.

      My book picks up where Howe left off, charting a similar evolution of modernist practices but focusing specifically on the moment after World War II when the famed New York intellectual claimed that modernism had lost its noble purpose. In beginning my story at that moment, I want to challenge the declension narrative that Howe and others have presented and, in so doing, make a case for an invigorated “late modernism” that encompassed a wide range of artistic expression. Howe’s essay in many ways reflected what was a widely acknowledged divide between defenders of a slightly more academic, and formalist version of high modernism and those practitioners of a supposedly irrational, perverse, and therefore immature form, which I term romantic modernism, associated with the members of the Beat Generation who had fled the university for the corrupt spaces of Times Square or the open road. Both sides accepted these caricatures. Literary critic Lionel Trilling, for instance, always stressed his distance from his former students Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who, in turn, obsessively stressed their rejection of the staid modernism of their Columbia professor. Trilling openly challenged the “group of my students who have become excited over their discovery of the old animosity which Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams bear to the iamb, and have come to feel that could they but break the iambic shackles, the whole of modern culture could find a true expression.”¹¹ For Trilling, modernism had reached an impasse; for Ginsberg, modernism had only begun to change the world. This divide between teacher and student was nothing new in the history of modernism.¹² Since its inception, modernism had been divided against itself—between symbolism and surrealism, formalism and experimentalism, imagism and futurism, Ezra Pound and F. T. Marinetti, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.¹³

      In American intellectual circles after World War II, the tradition of high modernism reached its zenith, a form of modernist practice self-consciously determined to separate art from the detritus of daily existence. Arguing that the failure of religion to provide meaningful answers to a world continuously at war had rendered individual salvation problematic, high modernists believed that aesthetics was the only refuge in a disenchanted, chaotic landscape. High modernism originated in the 1920s in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Rainer Maria Rilke and the novels of Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, and Marcel Proust but became the dominant version of modernism in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, led in particular by the literary studies of the New Critics. Originating in the criticism of T. S. Eliot, William Empson, and I. A. Richards, the New Criticism was associated with the work of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and others, who turned modernism into a literary style and a pedagogical practice. Their defense of aesthetics as an autonomous practice separate from political and personal demands was echoed by a range of other critics throughout the early Cold War including Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg, and Theodor Adorno, all of whom turned to formalist modes of reading that treated the aesthetic object as an autonomous work disconnected from the distorting hand of mass society. For these high modernists, the work of art, either through the formal relationship of the painting’s colors and designs or through the poem’s internal tensions, presented a form of experience distinct from the banalities of everyday life. These critics officially institutionalized their brand of modernism in the 1950s, promoting a particular canon of writers and artists through established academic journals, publishing houses, university classrooms, popular magazines, and art galleries. Reflecting upon the threat of totalitarianism from abroad and the militarization of American society in the early Cold War, high modernists fought a desperate campaign to safeguard art as a distinct mode of knowledge separate from industrial growth.

      Of course, modernists of all persuasions were committed to aesthetics as a form of disruption and disorientation, a process of making the familiar seem unfamiliar and the commonplace enchanted. But the institutionalization of high modernism, despite its commitment to challenging political orthodoxy and bourgeois values, was too conservative for an emerging group of artists in the 1950s who argued that the high modernist stress on aesthetics as a distinctive experience separate from everyday life had produced art that was isolated, overly intellectual, and cold and therefore irrelevant.¹⁴ A range of new modernist practitioners—from Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs to writers such as Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow to abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko—argued, like many previous groups within the European avant-garde, that any commitment to aesthetics went hand-in-hand with a commitment to rejuvenating life. As Harold Rosenberg, the New York art critic whose 1952 essay “The American Action Painters” outlined this new commitment, said, “the new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.”¹⁵ I refer to this motley group as romantic modernists because they were determined to return to what they saw as the original roots of modernism in the dissolution of Romanticism—to the writings of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche, to the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, and to the disruptive techniques of André Breton and other European surrealists—as a way to translate life into art and vice versa. These artists, as they saw themselves, were returning to the moment in the late nineteenth century when Romanticism gave birth to modernism, that is, the moment in which aesthetics began to incorporate the metaphysical claims once generated by religion. As Cleanth Brooks explained in distinguishing between high and romantic modernism, “because the critical revolution that began some fifty years ago was essentially a reaction against Romanticism … and because the countermovements of the last