Sometimes [R.P.] Blackmur fell back on a tiresome pretense common among American literary men, that of being a simple fellow from the countryside. How odd a mystification from a critic possessed by the dybbuk of Henry Adams! I could understand it only as a sign of his uneasiness at not having had a formal education, perhaps also the shame he felt about his pride of knowledge. There is a story about an encounter between Blackmur and Meyer Schapiro at some point in the thirties: Blackmur starts a conversation by rehearsing familiar nativist complaints that the New York writers are too intellectual, too ratiocinative, and Schapiro, for once a trifle impatient, breaks in: "Mr. Blackmur, when you use your mind, you don't use it up!" I confess to never having asked Meyer Schapiro about this story, out of fear it might turn out to be apocryphal.
--Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope
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