THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 15, 1996 TAG: 9609170508
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LENGTH: 78 lines
CLEANTH BROOKS AND THE RISE OF MODERN CRITICISM
MARK ROYDEN WINCHELL
University Press of Virginia. 510 pp. $34.95.
Literary scholar Cleanth Brooks once told his biographer that during his adolescence, any American boy with a name like Cleanth who wore thick glasses had better be good at football or be prepared to be teased by the other boys.
Brooks might also have advised his listener that any critical biography with the words ``the Rise of Modern Criticism'' as part of its title had better be comprehensible if it is to escape being deadly dull.
Happily for Brooks, he was skillful at football as a young man. And happily for Mark Royden Winchell, his life of Brooks is interesting, accurate and informative, though not without its faults.
Born in Kentucky in 1906, Brooks was founder of the highly respected ``Southern Review'' (a literary quarterly now edited by Portsmouth's own Dave Smith), collaborator with Robert Penn Warren in writing the minor classic text Understanding Poetry (1938), a junior associate of the Southern Agrarians (whose number included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson and Warren), an influential critic of William Faulkner's fiction, and the Gray professor of Rhetoric at Yale for many years.
He is commonly known as the founder of New Criticism, a school of literary criticism that he brought into being during the 1930s.
The New Criticism involves the close reading of poetry, with the poetic text itself as the central focus. This may seem a very obvious approach - reading a poem as a poem - but for a time it was wildly at odds with the numerous schools of theory that read poetry as political statements, traces of the poet's biography, or subtly hidden expressions of the poet's sexuality.
Interestingly, as Winchell shows, things may have come full circle for the New Criticism, as the silly modern exercises in self-indulgence popularized by the deconstructionists and reader-response theorists fade in influence. Much credit for this apparent turnaround goes to Brooks himself, who stuck to his beliefs throughout a long career and an interesting life, which ended peacefully in 1994.
An interesting life? Very much so, as Winchell ably demonstrates. The author is masterful at depicting his subject's youth and schooling, and at providing miniature portraits of the major figures Brooks knew. For example, there is a depiction of Brooks in a scene outside Westminster Abbey, after T.S. Eliot's funeral in 1965, with the wraithlike figure of Ezra Pound, looking like someone from another world, lurking.
Winchell is strongest in recounting Brooks' relationship with his wife, Edith, known throughout her life by her childhood nickname, ``Tinkum,'' after a now-forgotten comic-strip character, and his contemporaries: Ransom, Tate, Warren, Richard Weaver, Willmoore Kendall, Marshall McLuhan, and others. The strictly biographical sections of Winchell's book are often riveting in their details of the great figures of 20th century American literature as they go about their everyday activities.
Interpretations of Brooks' critical theory are for the most part clear and accessible, though they are at times a bit high up in the stratosphere. (``The epistemological simplification introduced by Hobbes could accommodate a criticism of others, but not the criticism of self authored by a truly introspective wit.'') But elsewhere, Winchell's interpretations of Brooks on Faulkner's fiction are consistently comprehensible and enlightening.
Still, there are curious gaps in the narrative's level of detail. For example, just what were the ``profound differences in culture and values'' that made it impossible for Brooks' widowed mother to live with her famous son and daughter-in-law? Why did Cleanth and Tinkum, married for more than 50 years, never have children? What sort of lecturer was Brooks during his many years as a professor? What were his duties as a cultural attache in London during the mid-1960s, aside from visiting interesting people?
Despite this, it is hard to dislike Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism, as Winchell has clearly invested much judicious research and skill in its composition, and for the most part he fulfills his intent quite well: to illuminate the life and work of ``probably the most important literary critic to come to prominence during the second third of the 20th century.'' MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a native of Virginia who now lives in
Michigan, is the editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor
of Russell Kirk,'' to which Cleanth Brooks contributed. by CNB