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Brooks' phrase) "employed by civilization." Now he is more likely
employed only by a university or a publishing house. The university
and the publishing house have accepted Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Melville,
James, Hemingway, and Faulkner-authors the avant-gardist once
touted in vain-just as conclusively as Tennyson was ever accepted.
And it appears that civilization no longer offers the insurgent in–
tellectual or artist a job, or if it does, it is not the same job, and the
particular tastes, ideas, and purposes it calls for are by no means
clear. Still, the erstwhile insurgent modernist who believes that one
phase of the avant-garde movement is dead but that the stratagem of
avant-garde activity is of permanent value in Ametica may at least
look into the past, partly with the hope of catching a glimpse of the
future.
As we have been told at length, the serious writer of the
nineteenth century was painfully on his own. Weare not surprised
to find two of the most isolated of these writers pleading for what we
should call an avant-garde movement. Thus Melville begs his contem–
poraries to "confess" immediately the greatness of Hawthorne without
waiting for the slow judgment of posterity, which, whatever it may
be, will do neither Hawthorne nor his generation any good, at least
not while they still have the power of further accomplishment. "By
confessing him," in Melville's well-known words, "you thereby confess
others; you brace the whole brotherhood. For genius, all over the
world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the
whole circle round." Yet Melville's plea had no more effect than the
similar plea in Henry Adams' letter of 1862 to his brother Charles
Francis: "What we want is a
school.
We want a national set of
young men like ourselves or better, to start new influences not only
in politics, but in literature, in law, in society, and throughout the
whole social organism of the country-a national school of our own
generation."
As
it turned out, Adams' broadly based insurgent intelli–
gentsia was even less possible than Melville's more purely literary
"brotherhood."
There was, to be sure, sporadic insurgent activity in the nine–
teenth century. The Concord transcendentalists were a genuine
avant-garde movement. There were tenuous and momentary groups
like the "young America" writers of the 1830s who contributed to the
Democratic Review.
Walt Whitman, himself in one sense a member
