From Cleanth Brooks to Delmore Schwartz
By Paul Lauter
The School of Letters was the most important venue in America of the 1950s for tutoring young graduate students in literary criticism. It had by 1951 moved from its college of origin, Kenyon, to Indiana University in Bloomington. Begun primarily by John Crowe Ransom, it offered six-week summer courses by notable critics like Cleanth Brooks, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, R.P. Blackmur, and William Empson, among others, as well as some poets, notably Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz. Each faculty member also presented a well-publicized and well-attended public lecture.
IU was also the home of the increasingly famous Institute for Sex Research, what would become the Kinsey Institute. I knew about its existence, of course—Leslie Fiedler, with whom I took a course, reported after a visit that “innocence is gone.” But I did not look into it at all, which was odd considering that I would write a very early exploration of the relationships between Walt Whitman’s sexuality and his poems as a Master’s thesis--large sections of which were published in the American Imago magazine.
I parachuted into the School of Letters two days after getting married and two days before my twenty-first birthday. To put it mildly, I was ill-prepared. Though my NYU undergraduate English honors seminar required a vast amount of reading of English and American literature, I found—or thought—that everyone at the School of Letters had learned far more than I. Most seemed to be “insiders,” familiar with literary culture, especially as it was manifest by poets, critics, and even faculty members. I may have gone to school in Greenwich Village and done an honors thesis on e.e. cummings, but I hadn’t a clue about Village culture, neither sexual nor intellectual. I knew nothing about salons and very little about magazines apart from those publishing cummings. My only brush with politics was to sign a petition protesting the firing from NYU of Edwin Berry Burgum ostensibly for his refusal to answer questions about his communist sympathies posed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. While I had been sitting in on one of his courses, I could not figure out how his alleged politics affected what or how he taught fiction. [Cold War History Vol. 00, No. 0, 2010, 1–24 5, Phillip Deer,‘Running with the Hounds’: Academic McCarthyism and New York University, 1952–53,; chromeextension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/10834059.pdf; accessed Aug. 8, 2024] Signing a petition to oppose his firing seemed natural and easy. Meanwhile, I was preparing to graduate, get married, and move to Indiana, so that was it. I never knew how terribly destructive of Burgum’s life the NYU inquisition proved to be.
I may have been politically innocent, but I did find in my first School of Letters course with Cleanth Brooks that I was pretty good at the close analysis of texts, essentially what he taught in Understanding Poetry and in the first four weeks of his course on “Metaphysical Poetry.” Here was the essence of the “New Criticism,” a way of looking at poems and stories as aesthetic events independent of social/ political circumstances. Mr. Brooks gave numerical grades, and mine increased well into the nineties as the course went on; my cultural inadequacies had some academic payoff. The last two weeks, then, were a revelation to me. They were taught by the leftish poet Delmore Schwartz, who wished us to write not an Explication de Texte of, say, a Donne sonnet, but a paper examining the social context out of which a long poem might emerge. I wrote on Marvell’s “The Mower Against Gardens” and thereby discovered for the first time how verse might embody class conflict. Such ideas had never so much as floated at the edges of my consciousness despite the course with Burgum. I’ll add that my undergraduate thesis advisor had been Eda Lou Walton, a poet, an anthologist, an interpreter of Native American writing, and—utterly unknown to me—an actual Communist.
The other course into which I plunged was taught by one of my intellectual heroes, William Empson. His Seven Types of Ambiguity—learned, funny, and very instructive--was perhaps my favorite book of criticism. Together with Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry it taught me what I then thought I had to know. But the course with Empson was, to me, a mystifying affair—as, indeed, was Empson himself. He maintained a beard, Mandarin style, only from the neck, his chin clean shaven. He dealt with Southern Indiana’s oppressive heat by wearing tight gray bathing trunks of some wool-like fabric and a thin but altogether impermeable long-sleeved white nylon shirt, which kept the heat in. Most of all, he existed in a cultural empyrean as remote as Venus to a now twenty-one-year-old Brooklyn Dodgers fan. Listening to him reminded me again and again how little I knew—certainly about literature, forget life. One obscure peroration pictured King Lear as seen from a stratospheric distance whose inhabitants had absorbed more poetry by the end of grammar school than I even hoped to digest from graduate study. Whatever was he talking about?
For his public lecture Empson arrived in the crowded hall obviously tipsy and dressed in what resembled pajamas. After he had been appropriately introduced and his recently-published volume The Structure of Complex Words held up for all to admire, he proceeded to explain that he was wearing not a pajama suit but an Eighth Route Army, Communist Chinese uniform. This by way of prelude to a passionate diatribe mainly directed at the United States Department of State, which had denied him the visa required to teach the previous summer, and more particularly aimed at John Foster Dulles’ aggressive anti-communist foreign policy. This was Indiana, 1953, where the U.S. Senators were William E. Jenner and Homer E. Capehart and where a woman from Indianapolis would shortly launch a campaign to ban that communist text, “Robin Hood,” from the schools. I and many of my fellow students were at once tickled and appalled. Would our school survive this scandal sure to be front-page in the conservative press?
Into this potential whirlwind stepped the new director of the School of Letters, Newton P. Stallknecht. Stalky, as he was called, was a metaphysician by trade and a Machiavellian by practice. He maintained a large troop of Siamese cats who, apart from one distinctive individual, were exiled to the garage during summer parties. And--or so it was said--he would lead life insurance salesmen into frustrating intellectual alleys until they blurted out: “Well, but we all have to die.” To which he would respond in a deep mystical voice: “how do you know?” In any event, he had spotted the one journalist, from the student daily, at the event, and quickly collaring the guy explained how damaging to the precious School would be an accurate report of Empson’s speech. Sure enough, next day a story appeared about Empson’s account of his influential work, Seven Types of Ambiguity, and its recent follow-up, The Structure of Complex Words. No one ever seemed to inquire too deeply into this glorious subterfuge.
Empson also was exhorted to read poetry at an informal School gathering later in the summer. He chose some verses of the politically hilarious “Just a Smack at Auden”:
Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
What is there to be or do?
What’s become of me or you?
Are we kind or are we true?
Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.
. . . .
Shall we send a cable, boys, accurately penned,
Knowing we are able, boys, waiting for the end,
Via the Tower of Babel, boys? Christ will not ascend.
He’s hiding in his stable, boys, waiting for the end.
Empson had alerted us that he would have to write out as much of the poem as he could remember, three or four of the ten stanzas. He read wonderfully. As the meeting broke up there was a scrum by the table on which Empson had placed his hand-written poem. I sat there amazed, never thinking about the value, culturally or otherwise, of such a manuscript.
The following summer was quite differently conflicted. Robert Lowell taught a course called “Rilke and Some French Poets.” The “French Poets” part involved, for reasons still mysterious to me, Pernette Du Guillet and Maurice Scève as well as the more usual suspects, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and probably Valéry. Lowell read French alexandrines as if they were English iambic pentameter, which sounded fine to me—until I later heard a French critic read. I wrote my paper comparing translations of “Le bateau ivre,” and even tried my translational hand at a few stanzas. I wasn’t particularly good at it—nor I came to think at writing poetry generally, which Lowell more or less confirmed in responding, or rather not really responding, to the efforts I shared with him. Conversing with him was, to me, an unsettling experience since his eyes disobediently flicked to the right or the left as if in fear that maintaining visual contact might somehow be perilous.
The real merriment of the summer was provided by Philip Rahv, who wasn’t even there. Rahv was still the active editor of Partisan Review, which remained a powerful player at that “bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet”—to use Lionel Trilling’s (or was it Irving Howe’s?) much-appropriated phrase. Partisan was arguably the most important left and anti-communist journal of its time; it had a long history of conflict, which perfectly suited Rahv as editor. Rahv liked trouble. He often made it. One story about him at the School of Letters concerned an appointment for morning coffee he had arranged with the secretary of the School, a memorable woman named Milly, small, slim, hair flowing down below her waist, and married to an often alcoholic poet, Rex Worthington. We all had coffee every morning in the lounge of the English department building, an old World War II barracks, down the middle of which an occasional student would ride a skateboard. Rahv and Milly started from her office toward the lounge, from which the usual loud rant was issuing, when he suddenly seized her under the elbows, turned them 180 degrees, and hurried forward elsewhere. “What’s happening?” Milly asked, “Why are we going?” “Dat Alfred and dat Irving,” Rahv said, in the Lower East Side voice he sometimes cultivated, “Dey talk too much.”
In any event, Rahv had accepted for publication in Partisan a story, “Pull Down Vanity,” by Leslie Fiedler, set in a summer writing workshop and containing characters too identifiable with a striking workshop secretary and an alcoholic husband, among others. There’s also a swimming quarry, suspiciously like the one we inhabited on many a brutal afternoon. The story’s central figure claims to have seven children (Fiedler did have six) but has none, in fact, and also has a failed affair with the workshop secretary. Bad enough, but Fiedler also captured the voices of other workshop participants, including this skinny New Yorker: “’Jesus Christ,’ he said in his eunuch’s voice.” Rahv accepted the story and then—at least according to Fiedler--held it for publication until he knew Fiedler would be back in Bloomington at the School of Letters. The school devolved into two warring camps: one would leave the bar or the quarry whenever the other arrived. I don’t know whether that on-going conflict explains the night Fiedler punched a hole in the wall at a party. What he was teaching, however, would in time become the material for his important book, Love and Death in the American Novel, in which he developed some themes of his notorious earlier piece “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” especially the idea of the centrality of homoerotic love to American fiction.
I am trying to understand these events of 70 years ago and my own ambiguous place in them and since. The School of Letters was truly a wonderful playground for the inhabitants of the presiding civilization: a southern gentleman, Mr. Brooks, an eccentric Brit, Empson, and the edgy scion of Brahmin American society, a Lowell—known to “speak only to Cabots,/ And the Cabots speak only to God.” Into this elegant chamber had stepped a number of voluble Jews: Alfred and Irving, Fiedler and Rahv himself, as well as Schwartz and an initiator of the School, Lionel Trilling, who had, as it were, opened up Columbia’s faculty to Hebrews. Men, of course, white and relentlessly heterosexual, who could distinguish, even acknowledge, but resolutely eschew Stalinists--also fags--when they saw them. Or not. It was, of course, a transitional moment in American culture, exemplified not only by these critics but also by hugely successful Jewish novelists like Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Malamud. Later, very much later, some women like Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen and Cynthia Ozick were allowed into that club. And in time Henry Kissinger replaced John Foster Dulles. I will return to this transformation later.
But in Bloomington those 1950s summers women, apart from Milly and on rare occasions Lowell’s spouse Elizabeth Hardwick, were little in evidence. Nor was that then a matter for notice, much less comment. I offer this observation less as a criticism—of myself no less than others—than as a way of presenting the political base from which we, in general, and I as a green intellectual started. Over the years, I think it’s fair to say, I learned. For example, when we were developing what would become a groundbreaking new anthology of American literature our potential publisher, D.C. Heath, sent to a number of consultants our admittedly huge table of contents. These advisors proposed, among many other cuts, eliminating Frances Harper, about whom they had never heard. I refused. She was among the most significant Black woman intellectuals of the 19th century—also a very clever poet. I then wrote an essay called “Is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Good Enough to Teach?” [Legacy 5 (Spring, 1988): 27-34] Maybe I had begun to absorb the meanings of Janie Crawford’s remark in Their Eyes Were Watching God: “Black women are the mules of the earth.” Years later, The Feminist Press would put together and I would help to edit the volume of Hurston writings wonderfully titled I Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive. The venues for and character of such learning, much less Black and female writers (aside from Pernette Du Guillet), was not, I think, found in Bloomington, Indiana Fifties summers.
I did, however, come away from that Indiana experience with a few perceptions perhaps worth sharing. One had to do with how mean literary conflict could get, especially when it touched on that depravity of depravities—faggotry. Consider the review, a few years later, in Time magazine [“Books: The Nasty Story,” May 11, 1962] of Fiedler’s collection that includes “Pull Down Vanity”:
Author Leslie Fiedler, previously famed as the critic who detected homosexual themes in Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick, has now carried his war against fiction behind the enemy’s lines. Effectively disguised as a short-story writer, Fiedler turns out, in Pull Down Vanity, a collection of tales of the kind favored lately by modish literary quarterlies and intellectualoid slicks. They constitute the sort of kitsch fiction—as stylized as the whodunit or science fiction—in which every thought, character and experience is as nauseating as possible.
It is fair to say that Fiedler gave as well as he got. And I do not want to minimize the brutal horrors of McCarthyite anti-communism, exemplified by NYU’s vicious treatment of Burgum. But the visceral loathing of gays persists not just among today’s MAGAs. In the Fifties it presented an impenetrable shroud. One could laugh at Empson’s communist Chinese army uniform and even cheer on his attack on Dulles. One was taught to retch or at least rage at faint traces of homosexuality.
When I chose to write about the relationship between Whitman’s odd life and his poetry, I somewhat innocently engaged this charming feature of American culture. I knew, of course, that Gay Wilson Allen was about to publish (Jan. 1, 1955) his critical biography of Whitman, The Solitary Singer; indeed, I had gone to visit him in Oradell, New Jersey, though I have no recollection of anything apart from his welcome encouragement of my project. But like him I carefully steered clear of suggesting in my thesis that Walt was an active pervert, however queer. Of course, in so doing, I was also steering clear of my own ambivalences—at least as reflected back to me by my first therapist’s ink blots. But what motivated me to put my wife and myself through part of a steaming hot summer in Washington so I could devote hours to the Whitman papers at the Library of Congress? Undoubtedly my quite unformed sexual identity. About which I learned very little at the brilliant School of Letters. It would be some years before a putatively “gay” perspective might become a source of new knowledge, as distinct from an occasion for humiliation. I remained conventionally married, conventionally anti-communist, and conventionally ignorant of the fraught dialectic deeply bonding sexuality and politics.
The dimension of that School of Letters experience I was perhaps least aware of had to do with what I have symbolized in the title of this piece: “From Cleanth Brooks to Delmore Schwartz.” And embodied, as it were, in the determined voices of Alfred and Irving, not to speak of Rahv himself. That was the process by which American literary culture, long the province of waspy gentlemen, was being opened to New York Jews like me, and some even from Nebraska. I would, I have been told, play a minor role in that process—later, perhaps, when for a few years I became a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. At the time, I simply felt myself to be an outsider, luckily having been admitted to the halls of what had never been mine—unlike Ebbets Field—namely, literary culture. One seldom knows the history of which one is a part, much less the part one plays in such a history.
But there is no question in my mind that the sense I had of entering an alien world would help provide the awareness that enabled me to lead a project called “Reconstructing American Literature,” and to become principal editor of the groundbreaking American literature anthology, the Heath, that grew out of it. It wasn’t that the School of Letters taught me what I needed to know. Mississippi Summer, 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), helping found The Feminist Press, and similar experiences did that. But I did learn in those overheated Bloomington summers to begin trusting that the conflicts into which I was being plunged provided the beginnings of knowledge and possibly a bit of wisdom.