372 .
PARTIS~N
REVIEW
a third of the
Cantos
is translation or paraphrase; the fabric of
Brooks' New England books is largely paraphrase or quotation
without quotation marks."
Without trying to make too much out of these broad similarities,
one can see that they do suggest once again the well-known fact that
cultural battles are always bitterest between antagonists who are
in
some ways alike. They also suggest a good deal of immaturity, in–
security, and provincialism on both sides of the fence. And in fact
the continuing virulence of the highbrow-middlebrow debate in this
country bespeaks what is in many ways a still raw civilization.
Thus it was alternately disheartening and amusing to find the
now Olympian Brooks descending into the arena again, as he did
recently in an essay in the
Times Book Review,
in order to attack
the avant-garde. My innocent response, on picking up Brooks' article
was something like this:
If
only Van Wyck Brooks, who throughout
his long career has done so much great work and has meant so much
to all of us, would say something disorderly, like the aging Whitman,
or the aging Yeats, or even the aging Howells-instead of launching
one more dull attack on the highbrows. But no-he still complains
that Pound "chucked out" Virgil and Thucydides and that Joyce
"satirized out of existence so many of the greatest writers," and so
on. Brooks' idea that at present "avant-garde circles" stretch "from
one end of the country to another," each submitting itself to the
"party line" is of course the sheerest fantasy.
It
is an example of
the tactic of those who say that the "critics." and the quarterly mag–
azines now maintain a tight reactionary grip over the cultural life
of America. The second step in this generally bogus argument is to
present the reigning middlebrowism of our time as if it were a form
of rebellion instead of what it actually is-namely, the most success–
ful form of cultural complacency in the Age of Eisenhower. Where
and what is "the parent intellectual body" with which Brooks says
the avant-garde should restore its ties? Where and what is "the main–
land of American thinking" from which the "magic island" of the
advanced intellectuals is detached? Not that these are necessarily
meaningless concepts-but what
do
they mean?
The concern of the critic at present should be exactly this alleged
middle ground of culture, this more or less mythic center of taste and
opinion-on the assumption, that is, that the duty of the critic
is
al-
