MORRIS D ICKSTEIN
443
sham and pomposity. But he was more purely the intellectual, a nemesis
of middlebrows and a critic of ideology, in a style that originated with
the thirties generation. Like Mencken, he could be obtuse and unsubtle;
he could simplify for effect. But he lacked Mencken's wider interest in
the whole American gallery of rogues and fools.
The New Critics hated Mencken for his mockery of the South and
his refusal to take literature with their kind of gravity, as a special, com–
plex realm of aesthetic discourse. The radical intellectuals of the thirties,
scarcely notable for their sense of humor, followed the model of Brooks
and Bourne and the cultural radicals of
The Masses,
not the example of
Mencken. Macdonald wrote perhaps the sharpest attack on Brooks for
his defection from the highbrow camp. The
Partisall Review
critics were as
remote from the cynical
Frollt PaJ?e
world of daily journalism as any of
the professors.
When Brooks in the thirties overcame his own alienation and began
writing his pageants of American life, the younger critics angrily parted
company with him. Looking back at Brooks's career in 1954, Lionel
Trilling lamented the "abdication of his leadership of the modern move–
ment." Of his later work in cu ltural history, Trilling noted that "ideas
and the conflict of ideas play little or no part in it." Among serious crit–
ics, only Edmund Wilson continued
to
defend the elder Brooks. As if to
highlight his own somewhat old-fashioned allegiance to social history,
Wilson included no less than three reviews of his friend's
Makers and
Finders
volumes in his 1950 collection
Classics alld CO/llmercials,
pieces
more sympathetic to Brooks than his earlier harsh dissection of
The Pil–
grill/age of Hellry Jallles.
Although Wilson continued to emphasize
Brooks's shortcomings as a practical critic, he was most impressed by the
quality of the writing, by the intricately patterned mosaic of major and
minor figures, and by the keen sense of time and place that enabled
Brooks to locate American literature so firmly in the American land–
scape.
Brooks' own purpose, as he tells us in his 1953 envoi,
The Writer in
America,
was "to show the interaction of American letters and life." This
was a goal Wilson admired without sharing Brooks's nationalism and
antimodernism. Like every other cultural critic descended from Matthew
Arnold, Brooks and Wilson would have agreed with F. R. Leavis that
"one cannot seriously be interested in literature and remain purely literary
in interests."
