For several
weeks now, I’ve been posting about the writings of literary historian Van Wyck Brooks
(1886-1963). My wife saw me reading his
autobiography yesterday (published in 1965), and asked what I was reading
and writing so much about him. It’s a good question.
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| Van Wyck Brooks |
Brooks was
roughly of my grandparents’ generation, so there’s some interest I have in seeing
what literary events and developments affected their lives. He was close in age
to poet T.S. Eliot, a favorite poet, and in fact they spent some of the same
years at Harvard. (This is how Brooks summarized his Harvard years: “When one
added…the royalism and the classicism, the Anglo-Catholicism, the cults of
Donne and Dante, the Sanskrit, the Elizabethan dramatists and the French
Symbolist poets, one arrived at T.S. Eliot, the quintessence of Harvard.”)
Then there was
the ease of availability of his works. Over the years, I’ve collected a number
of old books, and I had quite a few of his works found at used book stores,
book sales, and estate sales. He wrote a lot about literature and authors, and
I have an abiding interest in both. I was waiting for the right time to read
them, and the time arrived.
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| Maxwell Perkins |
Brooks had a
theory about American literature that he developed throughout his works. And
that was that most of writers considered great authors essentially did their
best work in the in their early lives, and tended to “flame out” in middle age.
He had two reasons for this – one psychological, developed from the work of
Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung, and one literary.
The literary
reason was the most important – the “great” American authors tended not to
produce great work once they reached middle age because of a lack of of a
national literary tradition. In other words, there was no ongoing “literary
culture” that kept feeding authors. American literature had tended to developed
in bursts, with little if any continuity.
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| Malcolm Cowley |
So for a time Washington
Irving dominated the landscape, and then came a burst in New England (followed
by an echo), and then a national literature burst on the scene with Walt
Whitman, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. That was followed by an extended
pause – the period when Brooks and Eliot were growing up and at Harvard – until
there was another burst,
With the realists
and the modernists, with the poetry of Ezra Pound, Eliot, Robert Frost, and
others, and the novelists like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, and more.
When Brooks
first started writing his works, and particularly with The
Ordeal of Mark Twain in 1920, he was considered something of a young
Turk, with a lot of young admirers (and older critics, who objected to the idea
of suggesting that Mark Twain did not achieve what he might have). That lasted
for 10 or 15 years, when the so-called “new critics” began to tear at the idea
of a national literature or that prophets and patriots might actually write
poetry. And yes, many of these critics had lodged themselves in universities.
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| John Hall Wheelock |
Brooks did not
sit idly by. He defended himself and his ideas, both in his autobiography and
his general works. And good friends (who happened to be of like mind) defended
him as well – writers and editors and Malcolm Cowley (who helped rescue William
Faulkner from almost total obscurity) and Maxwell Perkins, the famous editor at
Scribner’s who published Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe, and many of the great
modernists of American literature. Brooks and Perkins had literally grown up
together in New Jersey and attended Harvard at the same time; a fellow Harvard
classmate, poet John Hall Wheelock, also defended Brooks and helped Cowley edit
the final installment of Brooks’ autobiography.
For all the reasons
to study Brooks and his works, most personally for me is the realization that
he had much to do with shaping American literature as taught by my teachers in
high school and professors in college. His understanding was broad and deep; he
admitted that he read seven to eight hours a day, and he wrote some 31 literary
studies and biographies that were hugely influential.
He’s mostly
ignored today. His ideas and works are not acceptable in academic circles,
which are focused on far more esoteric and microscopic understandings of
literature. Brooks pursued big ideas and big theories. His topics were large,
and he could speak with authority to all of them.
We could
probably use a Van Wyck Brooks today, but he would not be popular.
Related:
Top photograph: The Brooks home in
Westport, Connecticut, from 1921 to 1941.
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