Robert B. Heilman
His Life in Letters
edited by Edward Alexander, Richard J. Dunn, and Paul Jaussen
University of Washington,
808 pp., $60
The New Criticism of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, first gained national attention in the 1940s, though the criticism of precursors like I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot had been appearing since the ’20s. Brooks’s Modern Poetry and the Tradition came out in 1939, and Ransom published The New Criticism in 1941. Probably most influential in spreading the New Criticism to classrooms throughout the United States were the “Understanding” anthologies: Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Understanding Drama, edited by Brooks and Robert Heilman (1948).
A large part of the success of the New Criticism derived from its demonstration that literary criticism could be an academic discipline. The older emphasis on bibliographical and historical studies provided little or no guidance in distinguishing good poetry from bad other than personal taste or sensibility, qualities that could not be taught. Judgments about poetry and literature were ultimately inexplicable; you either got it or you didn’t. There was a general feeling in English departments that people from non-English-speaking countries, and Jews from anywhere, couldn’t get it. It therefore followed that aspirants for teaching positions from such groups, no matter how intelligent they might seem, were not really qualified to teach in prestigious departments of English. (It took the personal intervention of President Nicholas Murray Butler to get Lionel Trilling on the tenure track at Columbia.)
The New Criticism changed all that by demonstrating that the literary quality of poems and stories could be analyzed, discussed, and demonstrated by close reading and analysis of the text. Almost anybody willing to make the effort could come to understand how a poem or a short story worked. Poetic greatness was no longer something mysterious, capable of being grasped only by those with the right blood or proper cultural heritage. It was open to inspection, analysis, and debate. Criticism was not merely arbitrary impressionism but a discipline that could be taught.
Although its effect in the classroom was to open up the study of literature to all those willing and able to make the requisite effort, the New Criticism was condemned in the 1960s as politically reactionary. The new critical emphasis on irony, ambiguity, and paradox did, indeed, cast suspicion on poems and stories whose literary rank derived less from literary merit than from the affirmation of an unironic, easy-to-understand political message confirming the politics of those doing the ranking.
Not that the new critics were alone in this suspicion. Lionel Trilling had argued in The Liberal Imagination that the novels of writers like Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck were ranked far above their literary deserts only because their messages affirmed the progressive worldview. But at least Trilling was himself a liberal, if a contrarian one, and a New Yorker. Some of the original New Critics, on the other hand, were Southerners, and at least three of the major figures (Ransom, Warren, and Tate) were on record supporting the culture of the South against the North in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), an anthology that both criticized the industrial North along lines that would later be taken up by environmental critics usually associated with the far left, and defended segregation as part of the Southern way of life. It was all too easy to move from justified opposition to the racism expressed in I’ll Take My Stand to an unjustified attack on the New Criticism’s focus on “the text itself” as somehow implicitly racist.
Not all the new critics were Southerners, of course. Robert Heilman coedited Understanding Drama with Cleanth Brooks and wrote the first new critical studies of Shakespeare, including book-length analyses of Othello and King Lear. Heilman was of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, earned a doctorate at Harvard, and lived in Seattle from 1948 until his death at 98 in 2004. He did spend 12 years (1935-48) at Louisiana State, where he found Brooks and Warren already beginning their collaboration on the series of textbooks that included Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction.
The publication of Heilman’s letters, edited by Edward Alexander, Richard Dunn, and Paul Jaussen, with an eloquent and moving introduction by Alexander, provides an opportunity to see the outlook of a representative New Critic tested over six decades, including 23 years (1948-71) as “Executive Officer” of the English Department at the University of Washington. The volume is made all the more valuable by the inclusion of letters to Heilman from figures like Brooks, Warren, Malcolm Cowley, Kenneth Burke, and Joseph Epstein, as well as allies and adversaries at LSU and the University of Washington.
Heilman’s South was the Louisiana of Huey Long. Seven days after he arrived in Baton Rouge, Heilman and his wife walked over to the state capitol in time to see then-Senator Huey Long on a visit to the legislature and, a few minutes later, hear the shots that killed both Long and his assassin. In the North, Long was known “only as a dangerous threat to American political well-being,” while in Louisiana, his death “was followed by the surprise of seeing hundreds of mourners . . . come in from all over the state and camp on the Capitol grounds for the several days before the Long funeral,” Heilman remembered in a 1985 essay.
The development of Louisiana State into a truly distinguished institution of higher learning owed a great deal to Huey Long, Heilman came to believe, even though Long’s most obvious interest was “football and the band.” James M. Smith, the president of LSU when Heilman arrived, was “a Huey Long henchman” whose presidency ended when he was convicted of “using state funds in a grandiose stock-market venture that didn’t quite come off.” But this same Smith provided the funding for The Southern Review, which quickly became one of the most consequential literary quarterlies of the century, only to be shut down in 1942 by a reform administration whose strict accounting took no notice of literary excellence. Reflecting in 1991 on his move decades before from LSU to Washington, Heil-
man told Edward Alexander, “I found the faculty atmosphere here totally dominated by liberal dictatorialism. . . . It made me almost nostalgic for the Louisiana atmosphere of let’s-all-be-a-little-crooked-and-let-live.”
In his letters, Heilman often remarks on the liberal ambience of Seattle in general, and the University of Washington Department of English in particular. His comments rarely if ever have to do with political disagreements; he does observe that the department’s group mentality discourages any disagreement on any subject that might make any member of the group uncomfortable. Shortly after he became chairman he wrote in a 1949 letter to the philosopher Eric Voegelin, “As soon as one stands for something—like not promoting people just because they are advanced in years, good citizens, pleasant fellows, and beloved of their colleagues—one becomes a Public Enemy.” Teaching in the English department at Washington, he felt “as though I were in a completely foreign country,” he writes to Cleanth Brooks in 1949, in part because (as he had explained to Voegelin a month earlier), “Here, we dispose of all evil by having a committee meeting.” Everybody was nice, which perhaps was part of the problem: “The dept is a collection of easygoing, ordinary, extraordinarily decent people, with a lot of literary interest and little productivity,” he wrote to Robert Penn Warren in 1948.
Heilman objected not so much to political liberalism as to the use of liberal attitudinizing to make the world, or at least the department, safe for intellectual slackers, as he wrote in 1951 after becoming department chairman:
At the University of Washington Heilman did his impressive best to stand up for literary and scholarly merit without reference to politics. He urged the appointment of Malcolm Cowley to a visiting lectureship, despite Cowley’s fellow-traveling past, on the grounds that his “status as a man of letters is unquestioned.” He later defended the decision for “two hours talking to a committee of the American Legion . . . endeavoring to convince them that Mr. Cowley is neither politically nor morally dangerous,” as he put it in a 1949 letter. That same year Heilman had the support of the university president in supporting Cowley, but in 1952, in defending Kenneth Burke for a visiting appointment, a different president was one of the people he had to convince. Heilman wrote to Cleanth Brooks in November that “most of my fall has been shot in exchanging communications with our new idiot-boy president . . . on whether Kenneth Burke is a Kremlin agent and can be risked for ten weeks of talking to graduate students without subverting the whole damn state of Washington.”
Heilman aimed at a “middle way” between giving in to political pressures and going out of the way to “outrage suspicion by looking for dubious appointments.” Writing to the new president as the “Executive Officer” of the department of English, Heilman offered this rationale:
The overriding importance of literary merit was a constant theme in the arguments on behalf of Theodore Roethke that Heilman had to make over and over when the renowned poet suffered one of his periodic bouts of mental illness and could not teach. When Heilman came to Washington, in 1948, he did not quite know what to make of Roethke. He wrote to Cleanth Brooks that Roethke “is doing a bull in a china shop act around here, and I can’t make up my mind, on so slight an acquaintance, whether all this is the forgivable eccentricity of genius, or the talented man’s bid for recognition as a genius.” On further acquaintance, Heil-
man decided that Roethke was indeed a genius, and as chairman he defended Roethke against all comers. In 1959 the university’s provost, responding to questions by a state legislator about Roethke’s numerous sick leaves, passed them on to Heilman. After making the businesslike observation that Roethke’s sick leaves “amount to very little more than the sabbatical leaves that . . . would have accrued,” Heilman mounts a truly eloquent defense in his reply:
Heilman’s most difficult days as chairman came in 1970, near the end of his tenure, when he came in conflict not with state legislators or university administrators but with members of his own department over his recommendation of Robert Stepto, then a Stanford graduate student, to teach courses in American literature and African-American literature. In retrospect the recommendation seems admirably prescient; Stepto, currently professor of English, African-American studies, and American studies at Yale, has had a distinguished academic career. In 1970, however, Stepto’s appointment was opposed by the African Americans already in the department despite his already impressive credentials. One wrote to Heilman, “Your decision to recommend Mr. Stepto . . . clearly reflects a lack of respect for the Black studies program, its director, the larger black community of the university, black literature as a subject of study, and finally, black people.”
The letters to Heilman from Charles Johnson, surely the department’s best-known writer since Roethke, tell another tale. Johnson, an African-American philosopher and fiction writer, whose novel Middle Passage won the 1990 National Book Award, repeatedly praises Heilman for his meticulous, thoughtful responses to Johnson’s work, most written long after Heilman had retired not only from the chairmanship but also from teaching. In a 1988 letter Johnson wrote:
Nine years later Johnson offered similar praise and gratitude:
Reading these letters makes one eager to go back to Robert Heilman’s books and articles, but it also arouses the suspicion that it may be his letters even more than his critical works, fine as they are, that have the most lasting interest. Heilman’s generous comments about the letters of Rolfe Humphries are certainly applicable to his own:
The editors can be proud of their work in assembling this monument to the humanity, integrity, and hard-earned wisdom of one of the foremost of those New Critics whose humanistic legacy has for decades been too often either neglected or distorted.
James Seaton, professor of English at Michigan State, is the editor of George Santayana’s The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States.
