By the time he
was 29, literary historian Van Wyck Brooks
(1886-1963) had published five books: a collection of poems written while he
and John Hall
Wheelock were at Harvard called Verses
by Two Undergraduates (1905); The
Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day America (1908); The
Malady of the Ideal: Senancour, Maurice de Guerin, and Amiel (1913); John
Addington Symonds: A Biography Study (1914); and The
World H.G. Wells (1915).
Later in 1915,
Brooks published a slender but rather provocative volume called America’s
Coming of Age. In five related essays, Brooks argued that culture “… should
bear a critical relationship to social reality,” notes his
biographer, James Hoopes. “Culture should express the ideal and exhort
society to realize it.” That’s how Brooks believed culture functioned in
Europe. In America, however, that had not happened.
Rather than a
centralizing influence, culture (including literature) occupied two distinct
positions in American society, Brooks said – high-brow and low-brow. He traced
the two positions back to the 18th century, finding high-brow
culture originating in the writings of the theologians like Jonathan
Edwards and low-brow culture coming from the writings of Benjamin Franklin.
Two cultures had not met in the middle, and each continued to occupy specific
positions.
How this
operated at the level of American literature, Brooks said, was that high-brow
culture was a kind of meaningless idealism, while low-brow culture was a kind
of meaningless realism. The two were divided, and prospects didn’t seem good
for a union any time soon.
These two
cultures could easily be seen in popular writing (Brooks cites Edgar Allen Poe as
rather “vulgar”) and contrasting with serious writers like writing like Nathaniel Hawthorne.
In Brooks’ view, Walt
Whitman came close to unifying the two, but Whitman seemed more an
exception than the rule.
Culture, of
course, has consequences, and Brooks saw the division of American culture as
having consequences. Business, for example, he associated with low-brow culture,
and academic writers with high-brow. And the two were separated by what looked
like an unbridgeable gulf.
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| Van Wyck Brooks in 1909, painted by John Butler Yeats |
The result,
Brooks said in America’s Coming of Age,
was unsettling, with American culture like some pre-Darwinian state. “America
is like a vast Sargasso Sea – a prodigious welter of unconscious life, swept by
ground-swells of half-conscious emotion,” he wrote. “All manner of living
things are drifting into it, phosphorescent, gayly colored, gathered into knots
and clotted masses, gelatinous, unformed, flimsy, tangled, rising and falling,
floating and merging…everywhere an unchecked, uncharted, unorganized vitality like
that of the first chaos.”
It’s fascinating
to read this discussion of pre-World War I America a century later during a raucous,
unsettling, and rather wild election campaign. It would be rather too easy to
define the various presidential candidates as either high-brow or low-brow. And
it would be too easy to understand American culture broadly as our
celebrity-dominated and often crude entertainment society and the rather
sterile and to most Americans meaningless activity that passes for a lot of
academic culture.
Too easy, yes,
but there are elements of truth in what Brooks identified a century ago that we
experience daily in 2016.
Related:
Top photograph: 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.
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