Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence (review)

The subtitle James Grimshaw gives his fine edition of the Brooks-Warren letters—“A Literary Correspondence”—gets it right: Brooks and Warren primarily write about literature, or, more specifically, their joint ventures in literary scholarship and textbook production. Occasionally, they refer to other matters: Brooks, in Baton Rouge in 1940, reflects on the young Robert Lowell (“far less the wild-eyed young man than I had thought he might be” [39]), Jean Stafford (“sharp as a tack, well-read”[39]), and Louisiana State University politics; Warren reports on his travels, his plans, and, in his later years, his children. But these subjects are decidedly secondary. It is as men of letters—often, more precisely, men of textbooks—that we see them here.

Their collaboration on textbooks began in the 1930s at the time Brooks and Warren, both Vanderbilt University graduates who had attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, found themselves at Huey Long’s newly energized Louisiana State University as members of the English Department and editors of the new Southern Review. As classroom teachers, they discovered that their students knew little about how to read literature; in many cases, the students knew how to approach a literary text biographically, historically, and sociologically, but they often had trouble with the poem or novel itself—its language, structure, texture, and so forth. Among the leaders of that group who became known as New Critics, Brooks and Warren undertook to remedy that inadequacy in textbooks: they first wrote An Approach to Literature (1936), then Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Modern Rhetoric (1949), and, finally, in collaboration with R. W. B. Lewis, American Literature: The Makers and the Making (1973).

In correspondence dealing with the making of these texts, we see at work the minds of two master teacher-scholars, although one can hardly claim that we always find in these letters the scintillating intellectual exchange found in the letters of certain other notable American literary friends and correspondents. One thinks of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville (and Melville’s famous proclamation, in a letter to his friend, that Hawthorne “says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes”), of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, of Henry Louis Mencken and Theodore Dreiser, or—to consider a recent collection of letters between two of Brooks’s and Warren’s near-contemporaries—of Walker Percy and Shelby Foote. As writers and thinkers, Warren and Brooks certainly belong in that company: Warren, arguably the leading, or, in any case, the most versatile, American figure of letters—poet, novelist, critic, social commentator, and more—of the mid- and late twentieth century; Brooks, author of several classic volumes of literary criticism and Warren’s literary companion for nearly two-thirds of a century (1924–89), from student days in Tennessee to their final years as southern expatriates in New England. Brooks and Warren, as they demonstrate in their published work, and in several of their letters, are certainly capable of a correspondence every bit as probing as that of Melville to Hawthorne. I wish there were more letters such as that of Warren to Brooks, written in 1983, when the author was seventy-eight, looking back:

You must . . . have known of the dimension of our . . . admiration. . . . You can’t imagine how much I owe you about poetry—on two counts. Our long collaborations always brought something new and eye-opening to me, seminal notions, for me, often couched in some seemingly incidental or casual remark. . . . The other count has to do with the confidence you gave me about my own efforts. I’m sure that you were often over-generous, but even allowing for that, it still meant something fundamental to me.

(403)

However, in most of their correspondence, they are concerned principally with taking care of business, usually the collaboration on the textbooks mentioned above. Warren might seem, at times, to treat the textbooks with a little less...