Van Wyck Brooks’ “New England Indian Summer”

Indian Summer – that kind of early fall, usually in late September or early October, when the leaves on trees are signaling a change is coming but the temperatures feel mostly like summer. Van Wyck Brooks used that metaphor in New England Indian Summer 1865-1915 to describe the literary culture in New England between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I. The book was published in 1940, four years after his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flowering of New England (1815-1865).

The metaphor is an apt one. On the surface, it appeared that New England and Boston still dominated literary life in the United States. But the signs of change were all around.

The giants of the Longfellow / Hawthorne generation had died or shortly would die. They were succeeded by writers like William Dean Howells (1837-1920), Henry Adams (1838-1918), and Henry James (1843-1916), all fine writers but not of the same caliber as the previous generation.

Part of the reason for the change, Brooks says, was the Civil War. With the victory of the North and the end of slavery, there simply weren’t as many compelling causes left to be inspired by and fight for. Another reason was the rise of the Industrial Revolution, which dead-ended old centers of commerce, literally transformed the landscape, and pulled people away from traditional pursuits like farming. And third, the “national impulse” was continue to move westward.

Emily Dickinson

Poetry exemplified the change in New England literary culture. Only one great New England poet emerged during this period, Brooks says, and she did largely for the very reasons that were causing the change in other literary pursuits. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) led an eccentric lifestyle for the last 26 years of her life, never emerging from her home in Amherst, Mass. Her poetry was not published until after her death.

The chapter in New England Indian Summer on Dickinson is not as long as others but it one of Brooks’ best in the book. Although published in 1940, Brooks does not give short shrift to women writers and poets. While the emphasis is on male writers, he does include rather extensive information on their female counterparts.

And of Dickinson, Brooks says this: “Where others merely glowed, she was incandescent.”

Van Wyck Brooks

This work is written in much the same style as The Flowering of New England. It’s highly readable, with an engaging voice that more resembles speech than writing. It’s a style that was already falling out of favor with academic writers in Brooks’ own day, and certainly by the time of his death in the 1960s. But he aimed at big themes and large images.

After this generation, Brooks writes, New England would “find spring again.” A new generation of writers was arising – Edwin Arlington Robinson, Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, and (especially) Robert Frost. Even Midwesterner T.S. Eliot would be shaped by Harvard before moving on to England. Indian Summer not not signify the end of literary New England. But it did signify change, and even with its new voices New England would never again dominate the national literary scene.

Related:

Van Wyck Brooks, Washington Irving, and Literature

Van Wyck Brooks, William Prescott, and History

Van Wyck Brooks and The Flowering of New England

Van Wyck Brooks: A Tale of Two Publications

Photograph of Indian Summer by Larisa Koshkina via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Van Wyck Brooks and “The Flowering of New England 1815-1865”

I was curious, so I went and looked.

Our local high school publishes its academic guide online, and I wanted to see if it listed what books were required or optional reading in the English classes. I discovered it lists required readings and teacher optional readings, and does so for regular courses, honors courses, and advanced placement courses. Each course description is “NCAA approved.”

The listings weren’t as bad as I had feared. But they also weren’t as good as I might have hoped. There was also an error. One reading in 12^th Grade Advanced Placement English was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by H.G.Wells. If Wells’ name is on the book, then Robert Louis Stevenson should sue.

English teachers shouldn’t make that kind of mistake.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The readings are heavy on social issues and contemporary angst. You find virtually everything written by Albert Camus, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and works by Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Nora Zeale Hurston, James Baldwin, Frederick Douglas, and Walter Dean Myers’ Monster. You find Fast Food Nation. And (of course) you find Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, without which no high school can function. (I like the book, and have always liked the book, but it fits a narrative in education circles, and that’s why it’s there, as required reading for freshmen. Harper Lee nearly destroyed her reputation with teachers when Go Set a Watchman was published and Atticus Finch turned out to be a racist.) Malcolm Gladwell, he of The Tipping Point, is also noted as a teacher’s option (no one’s apparently learned that the basic thesis of The Tipping Point has been disproved; but I digress).

Someone in the English department likes the ancient Greeks – Medea, Oedipus the King, The Odyssey, Antigone and other works are all over the curriculum. And several Shakespeare plays are listed, usually as required reading.

While students can select books (likely approved by the teacher) for study in their junior and senior years, there do appear to be some holes. Ralph Waldo Emerson is mentioned, but there’s no reference to Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, or any other author associated with what we think of as “our national literature.” Reading Huckleberry Finn in junior year English used to be a rite of passage. Now we get Fast Food Nation. In English class. I’m sure there’s a good justification for it. Times have changed.

To read a book like The Flowering of New England (1815-1865) by Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), seems almost like stepping into a dusty, musty museum that no one visits any more. The writers, the sense of a nation and its writers that Brooks wrote about with passion and likely love, have been pushed to the side for the bright new things of causes and fads.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

This book, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, tells the story of a remarkable time in the literary history of New England and the United States. From what looked to be rather unpromising soil, the literary arts and a literary culture seemed to erupt in a profusion of talent and achievement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Francis Parkman. William Cullen Bryant. William Prescott. Henry David Thoreau. Bronson Alcott. Louisa May Alcott. Edward Everett, the most orator in America who’s best remembered today as the man who gave the long speech at Gettysburg. Oliver Wendell Holmes. And so many more.

Ostensibly a work of literary history, The Flowering of New England reads more like a novel. It sets the atmosphere; it tells little side stories; it puts these writers in their environment, their specific location, and their context. The chapter introducing Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, first brings the reader into Salem, Massachusetts, a Salem whose glory is in its past, and then into the completely strange home where Hawthorne grew up and lived as a young man. By the time the chapter ends, we know how he came to write The House of Seven Gables and The Scarlett Letter – and neither novel is even mentioned in the chapter.

Henry David Thoreau

Brooks is clearly in love with his subject. It shows on every page. He vividly brings these authors and their friends to life.

The edition I read – the first reprint edition published in 1946, 10 years after the book was first published – has a preface, in which Brooks explains that he does indeed have documentation. He explains why and how he wrote the work the way he did, and his words are slightly defensive, as if (and perhaps because) he was already experiencing criticism. And he was, and it would grow worse. In 1944, Brooks was on the cover of Time Magazine. Imagine any literary critic or historian on the cover of Time Magazine today.

Brooks on the cover of Time

In turning our backs on the idea of a national literature, we’ve lost something not likely to be regained for a long time to come. That loss is the literary sense of ourselves, which parallels the loss of the political and social senses of ourselves.

So instead of learning what Huck Finn and Jim the runaway slave have to teach us, we settle for Fast Food Nation, Malcolm Gladwell, and the social cause de jure.

Top photograph: Acorn Street in Beacon Hill in Boston. The houses date to the 1820s.

Van Wyck Brooks, William Prescott and History

Almost 30 years ago, I bought a three-volume set of The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella by William Prescott (1796-1859) from an antique shop in our local St. Louis suburb. I had been reading in depth in Spanish and Latin American history and literature, and I came across the set while browsing through the store’s books.

The volumes were the eighth edition, published in 1841 and priced at $80. At 175 years old today, the books are still in fine condition, slightly worn but with marbled pages, fine leather binding, and acid-free paper. We should all look so good at 175 tears old.

Imagine my surprise (and delight) to find an entire chapter on this work in The Flowering of New England (1815-1865) by Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), the writer and literary critic. Brooks won the 1936 National Book Award for Non-Fiction and the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for History for this work.

What he says about the Prescott work is illuminating. A number of writers, authors, and academics in the Boston area had been focused on writing history for some time, history having replaced religion as a main literary and cultural interest. But it wasn’t until 1837, with the publication of this work by Prescott, that Boston took its place on the nation’s world’s cultural and literary map. Within the next two to three years, the critics in Europe had weighed in, and declared the work an unmitigated success. The work would continue to be published throughout the 19^th century.

Prescott was nearly blind, Brooks says, and he would often memorize draft chapters at a time, editing them in his head before having them written down. And only one or two of his friends knew he was working on his history. He would go on to write a considerable number of historical works, including The History of the Conquest of Peru and The History of the Conquest of Mexico. Bound sets of his collected works were well sold into the early 20^th century.

Van Wyck Brooks

Prescott wrote the kind of history that is decidedly not popular today among academics – a broad, sweeping narrative that told a military and political story. But in 1837, it was an innovation in historical studies. “The freshness and freedom of the descriptions,” Brooks writes, “the unity and proportion of the structure, the quiet and modest authority of the apparatus, the lustre of the language were new notes in American history-writing…”

In other words, Prescott told a thumping good story.

We do have writers today that have this kind of historical sweep. Peter Ackroyd in Britain is one, David McCullough and the late Stephen Ambrose are others. When I was at LSU, the History Department was considered one of the best in country, and it was led by T. Harry Williams, an expert on the Civil War who also happened to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Huey Long.

We don’t see as much of the “big sweep” views of history as we did in earlier years. Our understanding seems to have become more specialized and atomized – knowing more and more about less and less. Part of that is a function of the information explosion.

But having more and more information available doesn’t necessarily seem to make us more knowledgeable, understanding, or wise.

Related: Van Wyck Brooks, Washington Irving, and Literature

Top photograph: William Prescott.