THE FATE OF
TH -E
AVANT-GARDE
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prepared by Howells, the protean Howells, who had his complacent
as well as his radical side. Brooks abdicated from modern culture about
1925, drawing back in horror from the genie whose bottle his early
polemics had helped to unstopper. For behold! among the great
writers who really spoke for the present and the future were Eliot,
Joyce, Proust, Gide, Hemingway, and Pound, and they all seemed to
Brooks culturally dangerous-they were, he said, undemocratic, high–
brow, coterie writers.
Ever since Brooks' abdication, one of the main debates of Ameri–
can intellectual life has been that between the middlebrow and the
highbrow (both claiming an affinity with or disowning the intellect–
ually inarticulate lowbrow as it suited their purposes). The middle–
brow claims to swim in the main stream of life and of culture and
accuses the highbrow of irrelevance, ignorance, and sterility. The high–
brow retorts that the middlebrow's "main stream of life and culture"
is more than likely only the backwaters of history, or the stagnant
waters of conventional success.
Pound and Brooks have been in many ways the typical symbols
of our modern cultural debate. From a historical point of view, they
seem oddly alike, especially in their early days. This is a fact of more
than passing interest, as was pointed out by C. G. Wallis a long
time ago. Both Pound and Brooks claim a descent from Whitman.
Both launched about 1915 a program for the radical revision of taste
and opinion. Both assume a vigorous pedagogic tone, alternately
iconoclastic and prophetic. Both plead for a concerted intelligentsia.
They are both against puritanism, Babbittry, and gentility and in
favor of the new realism. They evolve their different but comple–
mentary versions of the "usable past" and come up with a rather
narrow canon of sacred texts; with Pound it is Dante, Guido, Sappho,
Arnaut, Chaucer; with Brooks, it is Ruskin, Ste.-Beuve, William
Morris, Taine, Nietzsche. They share a strong but not too clear idea
of the high office of the Poet as a social force. They both stress the
cultural poverty of America, Pound speaking of "poets astray in the
villages" and Brooks of "the ordeal of Mark Twain." Mr. Wallis
points out that they are both examples of "the self-educated man
whose urge to moralize outstrips his taste and judgment," that
"neither of them is much good at discursive reasoning," that "both
writers have worked hard at perfecting a pastiche style; more than
