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Cleanth Brooks
- The University of Alabama Press
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20 / Cleanth Brooks cleanth brooks (1906–94), born in Kentucky and reared in tennessee by devoutly methodist parents, was educated in private preparatory schools before earning degrees from vanderbilt, tulane, and exeter college, Oxford, which he attended as a rhodes scholar. He was professor of english at Louisiana state University (1932–47) and yale University (1947–75) and during the same years held a number of short-term appointments, including fellow at the Library of congress and cultural attaché for the American embassy in London. recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorates, he is best known for his contributions to the new criticism; his founding with robert Penn Warren of the Southern Review; his collaboration with Warren on influential textbooks; and his book William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963). He and his wife, edith Amy (tinkum) blanchard brooks, remained Katherine Anne Porter’s friends until her death. source: cleanth brooks, “the Woman and Artist i Knew,” Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: An Uneasy Relationship, ed. clinton machann and William bedford clark (college station: texas A&m UP, 1990), 13–24. i first met Katherine Anne Porter in 1937, at Allen tate’s.41 she was soon to be moving to new Orleans, and then to baton rouge. my wife and i really became acquainted with her in baton rouge. indeed, soon after she came, she lived in an apartment just across a narrow corridor from the apartment in which we lived. the result is that we saw her literally every day for a year or so. While i was away at the university—i was teaching at the time at the Louisiana state University— she was trading recipes with my wife or exchanging comments about radio programs or the state of the country as World War ii was obviously approaching. indeed , she and my wife soon became fast friends. miss Porter at this period was not doing very much writing—hardly any, i should say, save for letters. she was on a great domestic binge in which she was enjoying cooking, taking rides, housekeeping, exchanging recipes, reading a great deal, and so on. As one can tell from her stories, she was a great conversation- 82 / Katherine Anne Porter remembered alist, and we much enjoyed her stories about her earlier life in mexico when the great revolution in painting was going on there; about her brief encounter with the movies in chicago, where, i believe, she played some bit parts; about her life in Greenwich village, Paris, and berlin. Among other things, she talked fairly often about her early life in texas. she was not defensive about it. in fact, she indicated that she thought that she had not grown up in a wholly backward region, that there were books to read and opportunities to see some plays given by touring companies and to become acquainted with music. in short, she was never pointedly hostile toward her native state, nor did she feel that she had grown up in a kind of cultural wasteland. i grant that she usually spoke in rather general terms. i did not take notes—saw no need to take them. i was not intent on writing her biography. but i did form the impression from my talks with her, as well as from reading her stories, that this woman had not come up out of a totally deprived childhood. Her vocabulary was too good; her knowledge of the language, of people, and of social customs and manners just too detailed and intimate for it to have been any other way. biographers from outside may very well have the illusion that southerners not in comfortable circumstances had no cultural advantages. but such people, i think, do not realize the relative lack of class distinctions in the south and how many families who regarded themselves as people of good stock and good breeding had been reduced to what, according to present standards, would be regarded as underprivileged conditions. After all, the civil War left a devastating economic heritage on the south. As for my own growing up, though i was never particularly conscious of the fact, i can see now that we were reared in what i can only call something like genteel poverty. this is not the place, however, to debate how circumstantial and detailed in fact Katherine Anne’s accounts of her early life—or her later life, for that matter—were. she did like to embellish a story. i think she did it often unconsciously , and she...