Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Culture.

THE appearance now of solid biographies of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks testifies to the continuing importance of both men and calls again to mind the importance of what they thought and did. Though both grew up in the South, they were, in their temperaments, different kinds of Southerners. As Joseph Blotner demonstrates in his Robert Penn Warren (Random House, 585 pp., $35), Warren was the more expansive and tumultuous, extending himself into all areas of literature: short story, novel, poetry, criticism, biography, drama. His subjects, centrally, were history, power, and the depths of the heart.

Yet he also came together often with the more restrained and "classical" Cleanth Brooks. Vanderbilt undergraduates, Rhodes Scholars, men of letters, founders of the important Southern Review, they were often together in an attempt to define "the South": what it meant to poetry, but also to history, and what it might mean in the continuing present.

The importance of these new biographies may, indeed, lie in their providing an occasion to address a question that goes far beyond literature. That is the question of what the South and its history should mean to present-day Americans. To put it succinctly, is the South's past "usable"?

Both biographies are full of information and colorful anecdotes. In his valuable Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Culture (Virginia, 608 pp., $34.95), Mark Royden Winchell writes that Brooks "combined a kind heart and a tough mind more successfully than anyone I have ever met." This could also be said of Warren, with his personal grace and incisive intelligence. I would add that Brooks had the most impressive ability to listen that I've ever encountered. I'm sure that Warren shared this with him, since their common approach to literary criticism -- the approach known as New Criticism -- was at once simple and demanding. Its "method" was to subordinate the critic's personal ego to the poem or story he was commenting on, listen to it very carefully, and always respect the integrity of the object.

The new biographies tell us just as much, however, about the circles of colleagues among whom Brooks and Warren carved out their individual places. In assessing the Southern past, we will do well to recall the contributions -- literary, cultural, and political --of those Southern intellectuals referred to as the Fugitives and Agrarians.

What concerned the Fugitives and the Agrarians? The former movement was almost entirely literary, while the latter was largely cultural and political. There was imaginative power in both groups, especially the Fugitives.

Mostly Vanderbilt undergraduates and young English instructors, the Fugitives began meeting informally in 1915 as a sort of philosophical discussion group, and from the beginning the dominant figure was John Crowe Ransom, an English instructor. By the time Ransom and Donald Davidson came back from the war, the focus of the group had changed decisively to literature, especially with the publication in 1919 of Ransom's Poems about God. Younger men (Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren) joined the group as they arrived at Vanderbilt, and between 1922 and 1925 they published an important magazine of poetry called The Fugitive.

None of them was at the level of Eliot, Yeats, Frost, Pound, or Stevens (competition was stiff in those days), but many of their poems will last as long as poetry itself lasts. For example, here is Tate's Aeneas gazing forlornly at the Roman dome of the Capitol in Washington:

I stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall

By the Potomac, the great dome lit the water,

The city my blood had built I knew no more

While the screech-owl whistled his new delight

Consecutively dark.

That is memorable. Much influenced by Vergil, Tate liked to use adjectival constructions to achieve a slowed and lapidary quality. Ransom, a bit more to my taste, is less Latinate, and as a poet certainly in the same class. Warren and Davidson are somewhere nearby too. (The Fugitive Poets, edited by William Pratt, is the best one-volume selection of the group.)

The dates of the Fugitive group are important: 1915 - 1928. They coincide with the peak of High Modernism in all the arts. Between 1922 and 1925, and leaving out much, the following appeared: Ulysses, The Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, Frost's New Hampshire, Yeats's The Tower, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Harmonium, The Magic Mountain, The Sound and the Fury, The Counterfeiters. In Nashville, very far from New York, London, and Paris, the young men discussed these great developments and studied them.

The High Modernist Renaissance was almost as impressive in literature as the original Renaissance was. What occasioned it? For one thing, I would guess, the experience of a collapsing bourgeois order drove these writers toward a culture of Art as a substitute order; the original Renaissance had stood in something of the same relationship to the Medieval order.

The Nashville group were rebels against, Fugitives from, the genteel Southern tradition of moonlight, magnolias, and Walter Scott. They wrote difficult, learned poems, often laced with irony and expressive of alienation. Tate's famous "Ode to the Confederate Dead" is a Southern Waste Land. Such poetry, and High Modernist poetry generally, because it was difficult required careful reading. Hence the New Criticism was developed, a spin-off from Modernism.

What Brooks did for this criticism was divest it of eccentricity and make it widely available as an approach for professors, students, and educated readers generally. In 1938 he and Robert Penn Warren published Understanding Poetry, which revolutionized classroom teaching. It should be re-read and prayed over by professors and their students. It sought to displace both an earlier emphasis on history and biography and a vague "sensitive" response, and it made reading the text central. Today it fights attempts to come to a poem with pre- fabricated ideological categories. Brooks's own prose was always lucid and courteous, and it wore its erudition lightly. (One recent place to sample his mode is the posthumously published Community, Religion, and Literature [Missouri, 1995].)

Of course the Fugitives were only part of a wider Southern literary Renaissance. There is some irony in the fact that Mencken had published his famous "Sahara of the Bozart" essay in 1917, declaring the South to be a desert of the arts. Even as he wrote, the convulsion was getting under way. It included the Fugitives, of course, but also Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Andrew Lytle, Caroline Gordon, Erskine Caldwell, Stark Young, and by far the greatest of them all, the isolated genius William Faulkner. Under the editorship of Brooks and Warren, The Southern Review at Louisiana State University became perhaps the best literary quarterly ever to appear in the United States.

OBLIQUELY related to the Fugitives, but also very different, were the cultural/political Agrarians. They were hostile to capitalism and to the bourgeois world-view, and they tended to see the Civil War as arising out of cultural resistance to both. With the onset of the catastrophic Depression in 1929, the Agrarians began to resemble a political movement, even a nascent political party.

The energizers of the Southern Agrarian movement were Tate and Davidson. Two other Fugitives attached themselves less enthusiastically: Ransom and Warren. Cleanth Brooks was close to the movement, attended meetings and symposia, but did not contribute to I'll Take My Stand (1930), the principal result of the effort.

Tate and Davidson envisioned a directorate consisting of about 15 hard-core members who would formulate policy on social, economic, philosophical, and religious matters. They projected a daily newspaper, a weekly, and a quarterly. They enlisted sympathizers of many vaguely compatible viewpoints, and by 1933 there did exist a loosely organized network of more or less likeminded people. I'll Take My Stand was envisioned as a first statement preliminary to a much larger publishing and agitational effort.

Tate and Davidson were both hard-core, but very different. Davidson cherished the actual South of past and present with all its flaws and oddities. Tate, far more cosmopolitan and with connections in Paris, London, and New York, saw the South as a paradigm -- very flawed -- of a traditional society: hierarchical, agricultural, religious. By 1927 Ransom unfortunately had almost ceased to write poetry and had veered off into philosophy and religion, along with literary criticism; he had never been chauvinistically "Southern" anyway. "Red" Warren, after all from border-state and non-Confederate Kentucky, had his own perspective. Never settled was just what "South" was being defended: aristocratic Virginia or populist Mississippi; Charleston or Mobile; uplands or delta. There was even controversy within the core group over the title I'll Take My Stand. Tate and Warren both hated it, considering it provincial; they thought universal issues were at stake.

Not surprisingly, what was then called the Negro Problem caused trouble. Warren took it up in his notorious "Briar Patch" contribution, which Davidson, a hard-line segregationist, considered at best wishy-washy. Warren's essay advocated Negro equality but also social separateness, arguing that this would be best for both races. Davidson and the distinguished historian Frank Owsley, also a segregationist, wanted to reject the Warren essay. Herman Nixon, another good historian, wanted to fight for integration and later became an enthusiastic New Dealer.

Ransom was assigned to write the introduction to the volume, and to say the least it was difficult for him to boil all the different positions down into a coherent statement. He attacked industrialism as leading inevitably to Communism, a view shared only by Davidson. He thought authentic religion -- which he himself lacked -- could not survive industrialism, and that the alternative was a land-based society. (Ransom was drawn to an Old Testament God of "Thunder," and regarded the New Testament as a humanist falling-off, but did not believe in any God in the first place.) He thus tried to refine out a prescriptive idea of the South which often seems remote from the historic Southern actuality. Tate contributed a difficult essay that saw the Old South as essentially "European," but saddled with both rationalism and an unsatisfactory Protestantism.

A number of very germane questions remained up in the air. Was the Old South a usable past? If so, which Old South? The populists Davidson and Lytle looked to the yeoman past of subsistence farming. In contrast, Tate and Ransom looked to a more aristocratic and literary Old South.

Not surprisingly, the Agrarian movement, so far as practical politics was concerned, collapsed. It led to no political party of its own, and though it had some high-level sympathizers in the first Franklin Roosevelt Administration, the New Deal turned toward centralization, industrial stimulation, and large-scale federal projects -- the antithesis of the Agrarian viewpoint.

As I said earlier, the Fugitive group was literary while the Agrarian alliance was cultural and political; yet bonds did exist between them. Ransom, Tate, Davidson, and Warren were prominent in both, and both groups depended for their cohesion on a shared Southernness. For all the differences among individuals -- and some seem irreconcilable -- and whatever the conception of the South various individuals appealed to, they all agreed on the distinctiveness of the South and they all considered the South valuable as history, metaphor, or myth.

I'll Take My Stand is still in print and still lives intellectually. It does so because out of its mishmash of viewpoints, outright contradictions, and some dubious historical assumptions, it is possible to refine some themes which retain moral and even political power. Some of its emphases transcend the issue of the historical Old South: for example, family, place, and religion. We are hearing a great deal about these today. The Agrarians celebrated the "leisure" of the Old South -- to some considerable degree of course based on slavery. Today "leisure" includes the ability to walk in the park without being mugged, raped, or murdered, and that is certainly on the public mind. It also means swimming from a beach not polluted by oil spills or used as a receptacle for dumped garbage.

Other themes emerge in I'll Take My Stand, and some of these have been stressed by Eugene Genovese. The Southern tradition had a sense of human limitation and necessary imperfection. It was Old World in that sense, skeptical of utopias. It rejected the frenzy of getting and spending. One of the most foolishly neglected writers of our times, the late M. E. Bradford, an intellectual descendant of both the Fugitives and the Agrarians, put at the center of his work the idea of the "habitus," the "whole way of life," imperfect but viable, and, in his phrase, a "better guide than reason." These are all profoundly corrective ideas, coming from the idealization and refinement of the idea of the Old Confederacy.

It is my view that the Republican Party and the conservative movement should reflect on some of the meta-implications of I'll Take My Stand. The GOP at the present time is suffering grievously among the voters for its indifference -- hostility? -- to conservation and genuine environmental issues. In its habitual philistine way, the GOP is tone deaf to the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt (and James Buckley), and shows no interest in wildlife, forests, clean water, or clean beaches.

Meditated upon, I'll Take My Stand is like a many-sided but flawed gem. It provokes discussion about what a desirable capitalism would look like, but it signally fails to address a question which is fundamental to its whole enterprise. Was the Old South, the "usable past" advocated by the book, really a "traditional" society, as we tend to assume? If not, then its usefulness to conservatives must be seriously questioned.

In a challenging, not to say impish, essay in his new collection Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the Civil War (Oxford, 1996), James McPherson answers: Yes. He argues that in decisive respects the Old South was like southern and eastern Europe -- agricultural, labor intensive, religious as a matter of habit, slow-paced, and "lazy."

Part of Europe, he argues, chiefly England, France, and Germany, was capitalist and industrializing, something new in history. In that sense there were two Europes, north and south, and two dis-United States, North and South.

About this argument there are a couple of things to say. First the new "revolutionary" systems of northern Europe proved in the long run to be much more stable socially and politically than the "traditional" societies to their south and east. And about the Old South there was something untraditional, and startlingly so. For it was the only social system in the Western world that rested upon slavery, a momentous difference.

Important Southern theoreticians during the 1850s argued that this system was indeed revolutionary and new. The Negro, they argued, was inferior and naturally suited to slavery, indeed was better off under it. These theoreticians even projected a tropical slave empire embracing Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and completing the geographical arc at Key West. During the 1850s, significant military probes were launched -- with wide support not only from the planters, but from the press and ordinary people --against northern Mexico, Cuba, and Central America. A freebooter named William Walker even established a "Southern" regime in Nicaragua, with legal slavery and himself as president -- but ended up before a firing squad.

All of this, of course, was both radical and absurd. Such a slave empire would have been hopeless militarily against the industrializing nations. It would have been a cotton-and-sugar resource cow, on the model of Saudi Arabia today. The powerful nations of northern Europe would have attacked it like sharks, divided it up, made it a cotton-and-sugar satellite.

Back within the Confederacy, the Southern system was inadequate economically and therefore militarily. The narrow bet made by Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee might have paid off. They knew the South could not prevail militarily but hoped that if Northern voters were sufficiently wearied, Lincoln might lose the 1864 election to "peace Democrats." But the Confederacy that might have emerged from this scenario could not have lasted ten years; European powers would have tried to muscle in, and the American national government would again have moved southward.

As it was, however, Atlanta fell in time to win the election for Lincoln. Sherman rushed through Georgia and turned northward through the Carolinas. Grant beat Lee from Spotsylvania to Cold Harbor and Petersburg. The only thing that saved what was left of the South --and much was left -- was the timely surrender at Appomattox.

Is this, for conservatives, a usable past? In my view, in some ways it is, but in others not. Yet it is a question that should continue to be debated by conservatives, Northern and Southern alike. Is it too much to hope that two biographies of literary figures could provide the seeds for such a fruitful discussion?